This article demonstrates how the self-reference to personal stories-infiltrates some, if not most, of the poems by two renowned modernist poets and literary critics: the American/ Englishman T. S. Eliot and the Syrian/Lebanese ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd, popularly known as Adūnīs or Adonis. The article compares the two poets' depictions of the personal and the impersonal in poetry, and it reaffirms the great influence that Eliot's poetry has on Adūnīs and other Arab modernist poets. While Eliot's criticism discourages any biographical reading of his poetry, Adūnīs holds a different view by openly acknowledging the inclusion or existence of the personal in his poetry. Adūnīs' poetry, in particular, stresses the link between texts and historical figures in the realm of literature.
This article features a translation of “Ghurfat al-qiyās” (2007, The Ladies’ Fitting Room), a short story by the emerging Emirati female writer ʿĀʾisha al-Kaʿbī (1973-). The Introduction provides some brief comments on the content of the story in order to show how, while foregrounding the portrayal of some women’s obsession with their looks, the narrative reflects some of the socio-cultural issues that concern women and gender in contemporary Emirati and Arabian Gulf societies. The story is very minimalistic in the exploration of its subject-matters, but it is this narrative technique that makes its content—especially the sub-text, or the un-said aspects of the story—much more intriguing than its form.
This article revisits the role of women in the Andalusian literature and culture of the period between the 8 th through the 15 th centuries C.E. Drawing on some Western sexual-textual political models of analysis, the article reexamines the literary methods and devices employed by selected Andalusian women poets to demonstrate their intellectual equality with men. Moreover, by providing a sexual-textual political reading of some of the women's poems and/or the anecdotes (akhbār) about them, the article demonstrates how these women exerted their social and political agency in a male-dominated society. The article seeks to bolster an argument that the frequent mention of the preponderance of women poets-their names and the anecdotes about themsuggests the existence of a female literary sub-culture in al-Andalus that was more vibrant than has been documented in the male-authored classical Arabic texts.
Arguing that the poetic quest is an instance of the modernist movement at crossroads, this article compares poetic quests as represented in the works of T. S. Eliot and ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd, pen-named Adūnīs (Adonis). The article (re-)examines Eliot’s most famous poem The Waste Land and some of Adūnīs’s short poems alongside their respective prose works on literary criticism. I demonstrate how Eliot’s and Adūnīs’s poetic quests are an instance not only of the modernist movement at crossroads, but also of liminality where the modernist poet presents fluctuating images of himself: the poet as a knight that can change the world and, at the same time, as the little man who is blown in the wind. Hence Eliot’s and Adūnīs’s poetic texts are full of paradoxes and are peopled by those that bear within themselves opposites and are capable of everything and nothing. The modernist poet is Eliot’s Tiresias and Adunis’s al-Buhlūl. I illustrate how this instance of liminality is represented in their treatment of the theme of tradition.
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