Arabic Literary Theory

Abstract

The Arabic language has a rich history of literary criticism and theory, starting from the 8th century ce up to the 21st century. This literary criticism and theory engages with a poetic tradition that dates back to pre-Islamic times. The inquiry into literary quality was motivated by an interest in evaluating poetry, a general concern with eloquent speech, whether in verse or prose, and by the desire to articulate the beauty of the Quran. The transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics into Arabic also spurred interest in the poetic, particularly in Arabic philosophy. The study of eloquence crystallized into a standardized science by the 13th century ce, with branches focusing on (1) the role of syntax in literary beauty (the science of meanings); (2) simile, metaphor, and metonymy (the science of elucidation); and (3) rhetorical figures (the science of rhetorical figures). The aesthetic developed in the early criticism of the 9th and 10th centuries was concerned with articulating the merits of an idealized classical style of pre-Islamic poetry, from which the “modern” poets of the early Abbasid period diverged. This classically oriented aesthetic was dominated by a concern with the truthfulness and naturalness of poetry, typical of the style of the “ancients,” on the one hand, and the limits of unrealistic imagery and affected artificiality, which characterized the more ornate modern Abbasid style, on the other. This binary outlook shifted after the 10th century, however, to an aesthetic of wonder. A theory of aesthetic experience began to develop, therefore, which was based on the ability of poetic language to evoke wonder in the recipient. As a result, wonder-enhancing characteristics such as strangeness, the unexpected, and the rare became essential components of aesthetic judgment. Moreover, the ability of language to make meaning manifest in ways that allow for an experience of discovery and hence wonder, became the foundation of aesthetic inquiry in post-10th century Arabic literary theory.

(De-)Linking Arabic-Islamic Poetics in Contemporary Literary Theory: Reclaiming Enunciation

“…Geopolitically, they belong to a network of traditions that predates the geopolitical reconfiguration of the world starting from the date Spanish ships set sail across the North Atlantic to the western hemisphere. Spanning fourteen centuries at least from the eighth to the twenty-first century (Harb 2020a), Arabic literary theory, in its literary, rhetorical, grammatical, exegetical, aesthetic, theological, and philosophical kernels, has almost no place in anthologies of literary theory as briefly survey in the previous section. The intellectual compartmentalization of the study of Arabic poetics in western academy dissolves its epistemic unity across multiple sites of disciplinary conventions-history, Arabic literature, Middle Eastern studies, near Eastern studies and seldom philosophy.…”

“…It equally fulfills the decolonial accent on "gnoseological and aesthetic reconstitution" to counteract the hegemonic colonial matrix of power that sets western epistemology and aesthetics as a universal measure to assess and appraise scholarly contribution (Mignolo 2021, 532-533). A family of intermingling traditions is identified as feeding the body of "literary theory" in Arabic which subsumes the following: poetry criticism; the study of eloquence and elucidation bayān; Qur'anic criticism and statement composition iʿjāz and naẓm; science of eloquence or Arabic rhetoric ʿilm al-balāgha; the philosophical tradition derived from the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics; and a system of aesthetics that formalized bayān as a distinctive science (Harb 2020a). What sets these strands apart from most of the available account is that she does not follow the nomenclature of medieval Latin sciences, focusing on wholly indigenous Arabic-Islamic fields of scholarly activity.…”

“…Harb's significant achievement lies in the centralization of an aesthetic theory of wonder in the Arabic-Islamic tradition. It is the aesthetic reconstitution, like Harb's (2020a), in conjunction with epistemic reconstitution that should determine the nomenclature of the entire field whether it should be called Arabic, Islamic, Islamicate, Arabo-Islamic or Arabic-Islamic. The debates raging in northern academia on this matter demonstrates a wide rift that is left to the politics of dissemination to decide-such as: Druart (2003), Bäck (2008, Gutas (2018, 19-71), Kaukua (2020, 20-21).…”

“…Arabic language is at the heart of Arabic literary theory, yet Islamic philosophizing on poetics and aesthetics continued in Persian from as early as late fifth/eleventh century of which Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Rādūyānī's Tarjumān al-balāgha has played an eminent role (Gould 2016, 339-371). Between the medieval/premodern, classical/postclassical, and new/old (Bauer 2007;Kaukua 2020;Harb 2020a), a decolonial Arabic-Islamic poetics would prioritize discussions on the terms of conversation that factor in the epistemic equity that should be sought, the geopolitical constitution of knowledge production and dissemination and the hindrances that stand against holding these dialogues.…”

“…This preliminary investigation is divided into three major sections: the 'colonial' in 'theory,' the decolonial challenge to literary theory, and reclaiming enunciation in the study of Arabic-Islamic poetics. Given the sheer breadth of attempting to detail the colonial in 'theory,' this paper advances a decolonial critique of the western epistemics undergirding 'theory' in the established postcolonial, theoretical stance on the entwinement of theory, history, and eurocentrism as per Robert Young (2004), then proceeds with a close examination of the handful accounts of Arab-Islamic literary theories in anthologies and readers of literary theory (Hamarneh 1994;Habib 2011;Harb 2020aHarb , 2020b, while outlining a decolonial trajectory for unthinking the colonial in (de)linking Arabic-Islamic poetics within theory.…”