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

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And while the rational meanings of poetry can produce wonder, Jurjānī’s watershed notion of takhyīl, which Harb translates as ‘make-believe,’ truly shows why poetry is tied to wonder.

The Arabic poetic tradition is not well-known, and despite its echoes in Persian (and the echoes of Persian in Europe—think Hegel), and its better known (and better transmitted into Europe) counterpart tradition of logic and Hellenic philosophy (think Averroes), it is often not even known to exist.

Harb, currently a professor of Arabic Literature at Princeton University, received her doctorate from New York University in 2013. Here, Harb pays considerable attention to the mechanics of comparison and what makes its discovery pleasurable and wondrous. Traditionally, this literature has been viewed through a philologist’s lens and has often been represented as ‘materialistic’ in the sense that its poetry lacked imagination. This chapter deals with the project of translating foreign texts and publishing ←17 | 18→them regularly in Majallat Shi‘r.

An excellent 25-page introduction to al-Jurjani's theory of eloquence is to be found in Helmut RittThis post is an iterative and discursive bibliography, intended to provide non-specialists with an introduction and orientation to over a millenium of sustained engagement with poetry by an intellectual culture that tended towards theory and had a predeliction for language-centered enquiry.

Fayza Haikal, the American University in Cairo {"}Hany Rashwan takes a significant step beyond existing scholarly traditions, revealing typological similarities between ancient Egyptian and Arabic poetics. Then, over the course of five chapters, Harb details the disparate conversations of medieval thinkers on 1) poetic criticism and rhetorical devices ( badīʿ); 2) poetics in the Arab peripatetic tradition; 3) theories of elucidation ( bayān); and 4) theological discussions of the composition ( naẓm) of the Quran, each of which characterizes literary beauty through a cognitively related experience of wonder. 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.Make-believe meanings “[trick] the listener into accepting false premises as true” in the imagery they produce, relating unexpected meanings between two or more things in strange and unfamiliar ways (53). This chapter supports Harb’s claim of an underlying aesthetic of wonder by showing that Arabic Aristotelean philosophers held the same conception in their reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, suggesting common cultural attitudes of poetic beauty. 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. With its comprehensive overview of the Arabic poetry, translated poetry, and critical articles published in Majallat Shi‘r, this book defines the dimensions of the literary direction the magazine adopted and the identity of the sources from which it drew the foundations of its modernism and creative facets.