Date

IRAN

Outflanking Washington

Failure to correctly apprehend Iranian ambitions

31-May-2012 (3 comments)
There is an interest that both Iran and the United States hold in common: staving off military action, whether by the U.S. or Israel. From there, however, U.S. and Iranian motivations diverge; understanding this divergence is key to understanding why the talks thus far have failed. Iranian officials publicly dismiss but likely privately worry about the consequences of war, while U.S. officials often seem more worried about the consequences of military action>>>

FARSI

«درست گفت» و «درست نوشت»

چند ملاحظه دستوری در زبان فارسی

31-May-2012
زبان فارسی در طول قرن‌ها شکل گرفته و تحول یافته است. ولی این تحولات در چهارچوب قواعدی صورت می‌گیرد که از آن‌ها تحت عنوان «دستور زبان» یاد می‌کنیم. دستور زبان نیز (در مورد زبان‌های طبیعی) از گویش مردمانی که به آن زبان سخن می‌گویند استخراج می‌شود و قراردادی نیست. به طریق اولی، نمی‌توان زبان طبیعی را با امر و نهی ساخت یا تغییر داد>>>

BOOK

Persian "Capital"

Hassan Mortazavi’s new translation of Marx’s classic work

31-May-2012 (7 comments)
This paper examines the new features of Hassan Mortazavi’s new translation of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 and the responses which it has received inside Iran. I argue that what led to this translation was both a dissatisfaction with the failure of the Iranian left during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and an interest on the part of a new generation of Iranian youth in philosophically based, non-dogmatic and constructive alternatives>>>

NOVEL

Things We Left Unsaid

Excerpt from Chapter 9

31-May-2012 (2 comments)
Zoya Pirzad is a renowned Iranian-Armenian writer and novelist. She has written two novels and three collections of short stories, all of which have enjoyed international success. Things We Left Unsaid has been awarded multiple prizes, including the prestigious Houshang Golshiri award for Best Novel of the Year and her most recent collection of stories, The Bitter Taste of Persimmon, won the prize for Best Foreign Book of 2009 in France. She grew up in Abadan, where this novel is set, and now lives in Tehran>>>

IDEAS

Conceptualizing Gender (6)

Karen Horney’s Womb Envy

31-May-2012 (one comment)
Freud’s description of women as genitally defective and morally inferior to men, his concept of “penis envy” and his Oedipus complex that gave the highest position to the father, have been criticized by countless feminist writers. They have maintained that theories and methodologies of the psychoanalytic systems are patriarchal, misogynistic and anti-feminist. In Freud’s time, these ideas were also meticulously criticized for the first time by German psychiatrist / psychoanalyst Karen Horney and Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein>>>

DIVERSITY

I am the change that I want to see

Toronto Conference on Social Transformation

31-May-2012 (one comment)
An impressive range of activists and scholars, artists and well-wishers had turned the venue into a Mecca to explore various nuances of change and its preludes from 18 to 21 May 2012. The discourses of the inaugural conference of the Society for Studies in Persian Culture and History ran the gamut. They ranged from health and literature to human rights and media. The conveners, performers and panelists included homeopathic doctors, poets, specialist in Islamic studies, television producers and rappers>>>