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Modernism and After: Modern Arabic Literary Theory from Literary Criticism to Cultural Critique

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Modernism and After: Modern Arabic Literary Theory from Literary Criticism to Cultural Critique 1 Modernism and After: Modern Arabic Literary Theory from Literary Criticism to Cultural Critique Khaldoun Al-Shamaa Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies 2006 ProQuest Number: 10672985 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10672985 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 2 DECLARATION I Confirm that the work presented in the thesis is mine alone. Khaldoun Al-Shamaa 3 ABSTRACT This thesis aims to provide the interested reader with a critical account of far-reaching changes in modem Arabic literary theory, approximately since the 1970s, in the light of an ascending paradigm in motion , and of the tendency by subsequent critics and commentators to view litefary criticism in terms of self-a elaborating category morphing into cultural critique. The first part focuses on interdisciplinary problems confronting Arab critics in their attempt “to modernize but not to westernize”, and also provides a comparative treatment of the terms, concepts and definitions used in the context of an ever-growing Arabic literary canon, along with consideration of how these relate to European modernist thought and of the controversies surrounding them among Arab critics. The second part explores some distinguishable morphological markers whose deployment involves a more or less radical distinction between, on the one hand, renovationist assumptions of cultural change as an uninterrupted process of historical continuity, and, on the other, innovationist assumptions based on discontinuity. The first of these modernizing models, involving revivalist ideas from the age of al-Nahdah, laid the foundation for a double dependency : on the past, serving to compensate, through remembering and reviving, for lack of creativity; and on the European-American West, serving to compensate, through intellectual and technical adaptation and borrowing, for the failure to invent and innovate. However, it is the second, counter-revivalist model that has assumed pride of place through the work of various poets, theorists and critics considered here. By the end of the eighties a self-generating, self-referential modernist theory had become the dominant critique. The third part proffers the case for a new paradigm. Drawing on the arguments and views of numerous scholars, the emphasis here is that “difference” establishes a distinctive mode of autonomy vis-a-vis Western Eurocentric theory. 4 A criticism that is not a criticism of criticism cannot be taken seriously. Adunls (Kalam al-bidaydt (“Textual Beginnings”), Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1989, p. 210) By the late twentieth century, modernity lost much of its Europeanness, not least because it has become necessary to speak of modernities rather than any one particular mode of modernity. Gerald Delanty (Modernity and Postmodernity , London: Sage Publications, 2000, p. 154) 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication 7 Acknowledgement 8 Notes on Methodology and Terminology 9 PART ONE: Literary Theory as a Model: A Structural Configuration 13 I. Modern Arabic Literary Theory: The Matrix Concept 14 II. Modernism: An Articulated Definition 26 1. On the Infelicity of Misreading Trendism for Modernism 32 2. On the Interchangeability of Modernity and Modernism 41 3. On Three Major Variables of Cultural Response to the Employment of Modern Literary Terminology 51 4. On Modernism and the Methodological Deadlock of Incommensurability 58 5. On Re-centring as a Pertinent Universalistic Alternative to the De-centring of Eurocentrist/Ethnocentrist Modernism 67 6. On Some Categories of Periodization: Origins, Beginning, Register 76 7. On Defining Modernity/Modernism in Terms of what it is Not 92 III. Modernism: Closing the Synthetic Circle 113 IV. Modernism: Literary Theory’s Frames of Reference 160 6 PART TWO: Paradigm-Shifting: A Functional Articulation 183 I. Categories of Change: The Tool-Makers, the Renovators and the Innovators 184 II. Theory in Function: A Logician’s Landscape 195 III. Two Transformational Concepts: “Cultural Nosology” and “Interdisciplinarity” 200 IV. De-structuring Literary Theory: “Winks” Made to Speak to Epistemology 212 PART THREE: The Case for a New Paradigm: A Corollary Exposition 236 Coda: Theory and Difference: Auguste Comte / Taha Husain / Adunls 293 BIBLIOGRAPHY 295 7 For Olivia, Suzanah, Lena Acknowledgement My deepest thanks go to my long-standing friend and supervisor Professor Kamal Abu DIb (Chair of Arabic, University of London), without whom this thesis would never have been possible. My thanks go also to the late Professor Stephan Korner, who enlightened me as to the implications of the concept of “incommensurability” in a literary context. A number of colleagues have assisted in discussing critical points relevant to the present text, notably my friend Dr Badreddine Arodaky of Le Monde Arabe Institute in Paris. Finally, my debt to all the authors whose works are listed in the Bibliography is very evident. 9 Notes on Methodology and Terminology 1. The present inquiry, carried out in the spirit of a root and branch critique and its implicit terms of reference, is not so much a history of modem Arabic literary theory as a critical essay in interpretation. The presentation of its material, and the case derived from it, comprise an attempt to provide a self-explanatory example of the mind and thinking of a cluster of writers and critics who have exhibited a new slant on modern theory in its capacity as cultural critique. Rather than compress such an unwieldy subject into a bare outline of trends and movements, I have sought to examine and shed light on arguments embedding an emergent concept of modernism that possesses both generic and historically specific existence, displaying as it does a dynamic “innovative” state of mind; one informed by a variety of timeframes whereby the past can no longer be conceived in its own terms, but rather in terms of the predominance of the present. 2. The interpretation offered here is proposed - to use al-Tawhldi’s vibrant expression — as kalarn ‘aid kalam , that is, discourse about discourse, theory about theory. Central to this perspective is a recognition that reality is mediated through language and is therefore discursive. Such a problematized area of inquiry takes, moreover, a further tack: one that both initiates the exercise and provides it with its tacit assumptions. It is precisely in this sense that adab , an extra- literary category, informs a possible theory of “innovation” as distinct from “renovation” modernism. This issue is the focus of the present inquiry, in conjunction with the all-embracing notion of interdisciplinarity. Indeed, cultural identity, which permeates the problematic of modernity, can only be understood in terms of 10 interdisciplinarity, this latter being a shorthand means of relocating identity by setting it within the larger context of theory. As such, cultural theory is relational and incomplete; not grounded in some essentialized past but rather permanently constructed and reconstructed within the paradigm of the present. 3. What characterizes a theory of “criticism of criticism” is the ubiquity of an all-encompassing critical activity that seeks to examine the act of writing itself, so subsuming not literary criticism and theory alone, but also genre-making processes (as revealed by viewing the various forms of writing in general and of fiction and poetry in particular) viewed as reflexive performances of critique in their own right. Such a critique will seek to conduct a sustained interrogation of established conventions and canons, placing them beneath the rubric of “secular engagement”: a theoretical space permitting a cogent and unrestricted examination of theory, literary criticism and literature. 4. The constituents of theoiy, questioned here from within a paradigm in motion that is ready and waiting to emerge, do not proceed as a succession of discrete components but rather overlap and blur into one another; and, as such, the limits of the modernist period under examination are extremely difficult to determine and isolate. From the narrowest viewpoint, however, the 1970s may be taken as a roughly defined starting point; and, within this context, the present study follows specific directions taken since the appearance of Adunls’s iconoclastic inquiry into the statics and dynamics of Arabic culture, on the part of critics and commentators who have begun to view literary criticism in the light of a new paradigmatic category 11 morphing, persistently, into an accomplished mode of cultural critique. 5. While this study is informed by Arabic and Western critical concepts and approaches, the emphasis is on the texts placed under scrutiny, these latter giving rise to a compendium of context-sensitive concepts, analytic insights and strategies that work, collectively, to supply the critical tools for use in interpretation. Only the negational terminology central to a sustained interrogation of the basic assumptions of
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