Allison Kanner-Botan
I am a literary scholar of early Eurasia, specializing in medieval Arabic and Persian literature. My interdisciplinary research extends across the fields of the history of sexuality, mad and disability studies, Islamic thought, medieval studies, and anti-colonial theory. My current book project explores the influence of medical ideas about love on 9th-17th century Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish narratives. The study will attend to Persianate romantic epics as a site for (re)considering the relationship between desire and ethics. I am also currently working on projects on the translation of the love-story of Layla and Majnun in Victorian England and animality in comparative Eurasian cultures.
Address: Chicago, Illinois
Address: Chicago, Illinois
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Articles by Allison Kanner-Botan
of Layla and Majnun. I analyse Majnun’s relations with animals in the accounts of Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 967) and Nezāmi (d. 1209). I argue that the blurring of the human-animal boundary inherent to Majnun’s own becoming wild becomes a productive site for reimagining social relations beyond normative kinship structures in successive iterations. I then employ the rewriting of Majnun’s relations with animals as an example for considering the stakes of reading premodern Islamic literary texts (adab) as fictional. Drawing from scholarship that theorises adab—a term that may be rendered as ‘educational literature’ and that emphasises the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and embodied behaviour encoded through reading—I maintain that these works’ fictionality can speak back to current approaches to fiction in literary studies that focus on textualist analysis at the expense of affective response.
Book Reviews by Allison Kanner-Botan
of Layla and Majnun. I analyse Majnun’s relations with animals in the accounts of Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 967) and Nezāmi (d. 1209). I argue that the blurring of the human-animal boundary inherent to Majnun’s own becoming wild becomes a productive site for reimagining social relations beyond normative kinship structures in successive iterations. I then employ the rewriting of Majnun’s relations with animals as an example for considering the stakes of reading premodern Islamic literary texts (adab) as fictional. Drawing from scholarship that theorises adab—a term that may be rendered as ‘educational literature’ and that emphasises the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and embodied behaviour encoded through reading—I maintain that these works’ fictionality can speak back to current approaches to fiction in literary studies that focus on textualist analysis at the expense of affective response.