OPEN SOURCE: Cultural Capital - Hamid Dabashi & Andre Aciman

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagob Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He's a celebrated cultural critic, one who can lend an unabashedly enthusiastic, cosmopolitan view of the Arab revolt. Dabashi is also here to talk Iran, going beyond the geopolitical puzzles of his recent book "Iran, the Green Movement, and the USA" in order to let us in on the "vivid dream of democracy" maintained through these years of Mullocracy in Iran's poetry, its cinema, and its art.

Andre Aciman is best known these days as Proust devotee -- "devotee" perhaps an understatement -- but he's not well known enough, we'd say, for the blocked romance of "Eight White Nights," the interior record of an "asymptotic" love affair. Aciman sets himself where he belongs, in the classical tradition of imaginative writers about our inward and invisible lives. He also has some mud to sling on the state of modern prose, and -- much to our chagrin -- on Henry James. Never a dull moment at Aciman's midtown office at the City University of New York, where he teaches writing.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagob Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He's a celebrated cultural critic, one who can lend an unabashedly enthusiastic, cosmopolitan view of the Arab revolt. Dabashi is also here to talk Iran, going beyond the geopolitical puzzles of his recent book "Iran, the Green Movement, and the USA" in order to let us in on the "vivid dream of democracy" maintained through these years of Mullocracy in Iran's poetry, its cinema, and its art.

Andre Aciman is best known these days as Proust devotee -- "devotee" perhaps an understatement -- but he's not well known enough, we'd say, for the blocked romance of "Eight White Nights," the interior record of an "asymptotic" love affair. Aciman sets himself where he belongs, in the classical tradition of imaginative writers about our inward and invisible lives. He also has some mud to sling on the state of modern prose, and -- much to our chagrin -- on Henry James. Never a dull moment at Aciman's midtown office at the City University of New York, where he teaches writing.