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

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Harb shows how the philosophers went through a trajectory similar to that of poetic criticism in that they began with defining poetry through a true-false scale, as evident in Fārābī’s writings, who, in turn, laid the foundations for Ibn Sīnā to define poetry through takhyīl, and consequently, its ability to incite the soul with wonder (76).

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.By creatively re-reading ancient Egyptian texts through the lens of the classical Arabic poetic tradition Dr.

After presenting an account of the nature of classical Arabic literary theory, its various approaches to literary assessment, its topics and historical development, the Introduction highlights that the main aspects of literary expression Arabic criticism was concerned with lay in rhetorical figures (badīʿ), simile (tashbīh), figurative speech (majāz), metaphor (istiʿāra), metonymy (kināya), and sentence construction (naẓm). The rise of the old school of criticism, mainly through badīʿ criticism, invoked comparisons between the two types of poetry, theorizing the beauty of poetry in terms of truthfulness and naturalness or falsehood and artifice (30-42).This experience is the emotional pleasure that results from the cognitive process of the discovery of meanings that are strange, unexpected, and require mental effort to apprehend.

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. The series Studies in Arabic Literature, Supplements to the Journal of Arabic Litrature, founded in 1971, is concerned with all kinds of literary expression in Arabic, including the oral and vernacular traditions, of both the modern and the classical periods. Stephen Quirke is professor of Egyptology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. 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. The literature of the modern, post-classical, period is no less sophisticated, being a vibrant and flourishing expression of the continued Arabic tradition.

In other words, it departed from the limitations of Arabic expression confined to the traditional religious frame, and moved into a broader horizon of expression that sought to replace this with internationalization and ←18 | 19→cultural pollination. The sophistication of Arabic theorizations of aesthetics, which this book exposes, and the universality of their principles makes it important for the study of literary theory in general and literatures beyond Arabic, including modern Western literatures. Harb, currently a professor of Arabic Literature at Princeton University, received her doctorate from New York University in 2013. As the title suggests, Harb’s main concern is with the poeticity of language: what makes something poetic?