RECOMMENDATION OF SHIRZAD ALIPOUR

I have never met, much less taught, Shirzad Alipour, but I have been corresponding with him ever since October 2018, when he first wrote to me by email after hearing some of the lectures on literature that I have taped for the Teaching Company. In the ensuing months I have fielded many of his queries about literature ranging from the English Renaissance to the modern era, and I have never known any other student more keenly devoted to the study of literature or more eager to learn everything he can about English poetry and fiction.

In his very first email he asked if I might help him apply for graduate work in literature somewhere in North America, and I have done so because I find him richly deserving of further education. Part of his appeal to me is his identity as a Kurd, because the Kurds are a people of extraordinary bravery and decency who have never been granted a nation of their own and have been treated abominably by other nations--including most recently my own. But it is chiefly for his work as a student of literature that I recommend him. As an Iranian Kurd of about 30, he has already earned a Masters Degree from the Department of English at Kharazmy University in Tehran and now teaches English--chiefly the language-- at the Kalaam English School in West Azarbayjan, Iran.

As evidence of his capacity for advanced study of literature, he presents his masters thesis: a formalist reading of linguistic complexity in two novels by Henry James: Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. To be perfectly blunt, this masters thesis is anything but masterly; it is at best the work of a journeyman--if not an apprentice--with shaky command of his key terms and the structure of his argument.

Quite aside from such malapropisms as "trailed a blaze," Shirzad gets certain basic facts wrong. It's not true, for instance, that Flaubert and Turgenev were James's "protegées," that Finnegans Wake begins and ends with the word "time," or that Portrait of a Lady ends with Strether's answer to a question. Shirzad also fails to distinguish clearly between an interrogative question and a purely rhetorical one, between James himself and his characters, or between James's third person / single viewpoint narration and Joyce's interior monologue. (I have just now sent him a message explaining the difference.) And in seeking to explain how the style of The Ambassadors differs from that of Portrait, he largely ignores or at least minimizes the fact that the styles of both novels are richly figurative as well as linguistically complex--rather than one or the other. But he plausibly argues that The Ambassadors makes greater use of syntactical interpolations-- as a way of deferring hermeneutic closure. And at one point he quite correctly identifies James's use of chiastic structure.

Why then do I recommend him for your program? First of all, I believe that he was badly served by both his supervisor and his reader, who should have given him much more careful guidance than he has evidently received. Secondly and more importantly, this thesis--for all its flaws--demonstrates nothing less than extraordinary intellectual ambition. How many other students who had learned English as a second language would ever dream of doing what he has done? Would set out not only to analyze in linguistic terms the style of Henry James, but also to compare the style of an earlier novel with the style of a later one--a style of exceptional complexity because of its "asymptotic" structure?

On one hand, then, this is a sprawling essay patched together with so many quotations that the thread of its main argument sometimes gets lost, and the links between its chief components--Russian Formalism (Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky) and the fiction of Henry James--are tenuous. On the other hand, the thesis clearly springs from extensive reading of linguistic theory, literary criticism, and modern fiction; along with the novels of James, Shirzad also read novels by Zola, Wilde, Heminway, Nabokov, and Maugham.

His new project swerves dramatically from Russian Formalism and Henry James. If you accept him for your Masters program, he plans to compare Missing Soluch, a novel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (probably Iran's greatest living novelist) with Gabrielle Roy's La Rivière sans repos (translated as The Windflower). Different as they are, each of these novels features as its protagonist a single mother struggling with poverty and the privations of rural life--in worlds totally removed from anything to be found in the fiction of James. But given Professor Julia Emberley's special interest in feminism, indigenous storytelling, and Arab-American diasporic literature, I believe she could ably supervise a project involving novels that respectively foreground a rural Iranian mother and a Canadian Inuit mother.

I am well aware that you may have to bend your rules in order to accept this applicant. For purely practical reasons, Shirzad will be unable to take the English Proficiency Exam by the deadline date for submitting his application. But having carefully read his 90-page thesis on the style of two novels by Henry James, I can certify that he is unquestionably proficient in English--if not always flawless.

The other problem is less easily solved. His second language--his native tongue--is Persian/Farsi, which is not officially covered by your faculty, though Professor Emberley's interest in Islamic texts suggests that she may be at least familiar with it. In any case, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's Missing Soluch is available in English.

A further problem is that Shirzad cannot yet read French (though he is now studying it), which means that he has so far read Gabrielle Roy's novel only in English translation. But he is so eager to learn that I believe he will soon be able to read it in French.

Essentially, then, I am asking you to place a bet on a student I have never met or formally supervised. All I can say is that I have never known any other student more insatiably eager to learn all he can about literature. For that reason alone, I warmly recommend him.