Arabic Literature and the Problem of Periodization: Untiming the Modern
Arabic Literature and the Problem of Periodization: Untiming the Modern
- Terri DeYoungTerri DeYoungUniversity of Washington
Summary
Literary works in Arabic emerged out of a fragmented antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean in the 6th century ad. For Arab scholars, their literature had few ties to the past. It represented a new departure. This was reinforced by the rise of a new religion, Islam, which gave a firm spiritual and social backing to the efforts of poets and other writers to use the Arabic language as their sole medium of expression until the early Modern period.
At that point, as increasingly intrusive and even violent encounters between the West and the Islamic world occurred, the soft power of literature—in the service of a narrative of Western superiority—was deployed in sketching out the relative role of progress in the respective traditions. Post-Enlightenment Western literature was portrayed as following a certain temporal trajectory: Neoclassical, Romantic, and Modern. This restrictive set of categories (or, in even more old-fashioned language, “literary periods”) played a role in undergirding colonial thinking.
Arabic seemed to be an ideal proving ground for an examination of whether or not periodization could be a viable practice outside of colonial, racist ideology. As in Europe, the writing of modern history in Arabic had been deployed to develop a concept of identity and the articulation of a modern national consciousness. Modern Arab scholars attempted to apply period schemes to their literary tradition, culminating in the positivist and internationalizing decades of the mid-20th century, where the main benefit of periodization—its ability to create a convincing and easily grasped picture of a hitherto unknown literary tradition—was displayed. Its main drawbacks—the distortion of what had actually occurred and the introduction of simplifications detrimental to the appreciation of Arabic literature—were not yet clear. Some modern Arab literary critics even added a teleological element, whereby they seemed to endorse the notion that Arabic had to go through a Neoclassical period and a Romantic period in order to arrive at a “Modern” period, where Arabic literature would at last be capable of confronting Western literature on common ground.
The triumph of this periodization on the Western model, however, was a disturbance in the application of a far older paradigm used in Arabic, which was contemporaneous with the rise of the critical impulse in the literature itself and tells us more about its practitioners than any outside set of values can about Arab attitudes to the social function of poetry, the legitimacy of figurative language, and values deemed proper to a literary work. This paradigm is centered on the notion of modernity (ḥadātha), which in Arabic, can lack a clear chronological reference.
Keywords
Subjects
- West Asian Literatures, including Middle East
- 19th Century (1800-1900)