Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization)

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He shows with a wealth of individual examples that the commonalities between ancient Egyptian and Arabic might be much stronger than has previously been acknowledged. Lastly, in Chapter 5 Harb offers yet another contribution to the study of Arabic literary criticism, incorporating the poeticity of naẓm (lit.

Thus, modernism includes a time-motion that moves towards the future through the present while often using the past as a stepping stone towards the future. He impressively explores the intersection between the visual and verbal layers and sheds new light in re-evaluating the 'visual literariness' of ancient Egyptian writing.As a phenomenon of civilization, Arab modernism does not differ from other similar cultural phenomena in other civilizations. The Introduction presents the argument that aesthetic judgment in classical Arabic literary theory came to depend on the ability of poetry or eloquent speech to produce an experience of wonder in the listener. Harb also downplays balāghah’s rhetorical concerns, limiting it only to the function of poetics despite balāghah being defined in terms of persuasion, as knowing the corresponding states of speech to their appropriate contexts (xiii, 255). Rather, it is an assumption I argue lies behind the various explanations they give for poetic beauty.

Alternatively (and much less ambitiously) I hope to provide a handy guide for those scholars of the history of literary criticism who are already, for some reason, looking for Arabic ideas.I will be asking my colleagues in Arabic studies to provide criticism and addition, and so at the time of posting (late March 2013) the list should be considered a draft (as of August 2015 I am making additions in the comments section below). This book thus opens up new approaches to study the different literatures of the world through a better understanding of the way different peoples express themselves: a critical factor in the era of globalization. I was interested in literary theory from when I was an undergraduate studying Comparative Literature. It also looks at the people involved in the editing and at how the editorial board affected the magazine’s general literary and cultural orientation. This chapter also discusses the language of translation and the preferred translator, since the language used in these translations played a significant role in understanding the cultural message the magazine was trying to disseminate.

I note that Majallat Shi‘r announces the birth of a new concept of poetry that indicates penetration of the common prevailing tribal concept and depends on continuous discovery through poetry about the truth of the human condition. The literature of the modern, post-classical, period is no less sophisticated, being a vibrant and flourishing expression of the continued Arabic tradition.

AB - A groundbreaking study of the relationship between ancient Egyptian literary devices and their Arabic counterparts.

While the theological discussions of the inimitably of the Quran which argue that the Quran’s miraculous nature is tied to the eloquence of its composition precede Jurjānī, Harb’s focus on Jurjānī and his successors allows her to show the convergence of wonder as an aesthetic theory from multiple vantages, since compositional eloquence also arises from deducing unapparent, and at times unexpected, meanings about the context of speech additional to its original meaning based on the syntactical structure, the discovery of which instills wonder (217-33). Now the time is surely ripe for Hany Rashwan's bold postcolonial challenge--that applying the Arabic concept of wordplay (jinās) to ancient Egyptian texts can yield literary and linguistic insights which have thus far eluded his fellow Egyptologists. Chapter 4 deals with the remaining figures of bayan: figurative language ( majāz), metaphor ( istiʿārah), and metonymy ( kināyah). When I started graduate school in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, I discovered this whole world of literary theory that was written in Arabic starting from the 8 th and 9 th centuries CE onward.I also discovered that its sophistication has been greatly underestimated in modern scholarship, even by scholars I greatly respect and admire. Remarkably, he uses the Arabic literary and rhetorical traditions, centering on Balāgha and Jinās, to reveal many overlooked dimensions related to the ancient mechanism of literary production.