Preface

Summary

From the mid-1980s, my scholarship has concentrated on a series of topics serving a comprehensive research plan. My aim from the beginning has been to explore the internal dynamics of Arabic literature since the nineteenth century, the interrelations and interactions between its various sectors, and its connections with its cultural heritage and with other non-literary systems, as well as its interplay with foreign cultures. Based upon the general achievements of the field of historical literary poetics, in several studies I have outlined a theoretical framework that would make possible the analysis of the diverse texts that make up modern Arabic literature as a coherent system. For the purpose of a systematic investigation of the development of literary phenomena both synchronically and diachronically, this theoretical framework could not be closed, narrow, or static, but had of necessity to be open, broad, dynamic, flexible, and adaptable. And this much can be seen from the changes and updates to this framework that have I presented throughout my theoretical studies. One of the advantages of such a framework is that it allows for a greater economy in analysis, in that it replaces large numbers of categories of a classificatory nature with a small number of parameters that can be viewed as governing rules. This feature can be considered a step toward accomplishing what has always been believed to be the goal of any scientific endeavor: the detection of those relatively few rules that govern the great diversity and complexity of phenomena both observable and non-observable. Such an endeavor is important for the study of any literature, but is certainly of the utmost importance for the study of a vast literature created and consumed among a population of as many as 467 million people.

Using this theoretical framework, I have investigated and continue to investigate the relations between center and periphery in Arabic literature as a series of oppositions that actually make it possible to hypothesize more than one center, although in most historical cases the centers are stratified in such a way that only one center succeeds in any specific time in dominating the whole. Each text is placed, at each given period of time, at a particular point in the system, which is its synchronic value. Diachronic value, on the other hand, is assigned to it by its paradigmatic position in the succession of synchronic systems, which acquire retrospective significance. Consequently, the diachronic correlativity of a given text is to be considered alongside its synchronic orientation toward other texts.