Arabic Literature, or The Ancient in the Modern

“It would appear,” wrote Syrian poet Adunis in his Introduction to Arab Poetics, “that the return to the ancient has been more eagerly pursued whenever the internal conflict has intensified, or the danger from outside has grown more acute.” At present, with war machines, political crises, social media, and doubts about the future among Arab publics, such an observation seems truer than ever. But the wisdom of Adunis’s comment teaches us that people of every age, not just ours, have faced the crisis of the moment by probing the value of the past. This holds at the level of international politics all the way down to human individuality. And in any case, what is “ancient” in a given epoch was once “modern” in its time. Witness for example the medieval Arabic querelle des anciens et des modernes that pitted the antique “natural” style of pre-Islamic poetry against the cutting-edge “contrived” style of the Abbasids. Modernity, in some ways at least, is in the eye of the beholder. How and why have Arabic authors sought perspective in the past, in any period of literary history? What are “modernity” and “antiquity” in the context of Arabic literature? How and why have Arabic authors, both “ancient” and “modern,” received, recovered, recast, or even rejected their writerly forebears? These questions and more make our panel a unique setting to explore Arabic literary history, that is, Arabic literature’s movement across time and place. Possible papers may address the hows and whys of such movement: of imitation, translation, commentary, reception, intertextuality, parody, pastiche, allusion, quotation, genre history, and more. We invite panelists to think of how such literary mechanics served those who employed them: above all, returning to Adunis, the idea that “poetic modernity (ḥadātha) goes beyond poetry in the narrow sense, and is indicative of a general cultural crisis, which is in some sense a crisis of identity.”

This seminar is sponsored by Arabic Critical Poetics: Book Supplements to Journal of Arabic Literature.