Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780691185149-004
{"title":"Chapter 2. The Genealogy of Arabic Modernism","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780691185149-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691185149-004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"292 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123178154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780691185149-001
{"title":"Acknowledgments","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780691185149-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691185149-001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131645709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780691185149-012
{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780691185149-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691185149-012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125689330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780691185149-fm
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780691185149-fm","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691185149-fm","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133059564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0005
R. Creswell
This chapter considers the origins of Arabic prose poem which, as understood by the Beiruti modernists, seemed to arise from an act of auscultation, or attention to interior rhythms. But how do these rhythms synchronize with the dynamism of modernity? How does the private music of the prose poem accord with what Adonis calls “the rhythm of our new life, a rhythm that renews itself in every instant”? Does the qasidat al-nathr originate abroad, or does it well up from the self? Although the Shi'r poets often translated foreign authors such as Robinson Jeffers and Saint-John Perse as though they belonged to a hoary native tradition, the Arab modernists' most common way of harmonizing these sources is to suppose a subject, namely “man,” who serves as a figure of mediation, translating from one side of this caesura to the other.
{"title":"The Origins of the Arabic Prose Poem","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the origins of Arabic prose poem which, as understood by the Beiruti modernists, seemed to arise from an act of auscultation, or attention to interior rhythms. But how do these rhythms synchronize with the dynamism of modernity? How does the private music of the prose poem accord with what Adonis calls “the rhythm of our new life, a rhythm that renews itself in every instant”? Does the qasidat al-nathr originate abroad, or does it well up from the self? Although the Shi'r poets often translated foreign authors such as Robinson Jeffers and Saint-John Perse as though they belonged to a hoary native tradition, the Arab modernists' most common way of harmonizing these sources is to suppose a subject, namely “man,” who serves as a figure of mediation, translating from one side of this caesura to the other.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125103248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0002
R. Creswell
This chapter emphasizes the importance of Beirut in conditioning the historical and intellectual emergence of the modernist poetry movement, not only because of the city's suddenly central and yet anomalous place in the intellectual life of the Arab world, but also for its nodal position in the global history of modernism during the early Cold War. It focuses on the antagonistic nature of intellectual exchanges during the period, particularly as seen in literary magazines and journals of opinion. If, as Robert Scholes and others have argued for the European case, “modernism begins in the magazines,” then the same is profoundly true of the Arabic movement. Intellectual life in Beirut was not so much a playground as a battleground, and this war of position extended beyond the borders of Lebanon. The debates between local intellectuals—nationalist, Marxist, and liberal—reflect the global agon between the main ideological camps of the early Cold War.
{"title":"Lebanon and Late Modernism","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter emphasizes the importance of Beirut in conditioning the historical and intellectual emergence of the modernist poetry movement, not only because of the city's suddenly central and yet anomalous place in the intellectual life of the Arab world, but also for its nodal position in the global history of modernism during the early Cold War. It focuses on the antagonistic nature of intellectual exchanges during the period, particularly as seen in literary magazines and journals of opinion. If, as Robert Scholes and others have argued for the European case, “modernism begins in the magazines,” then the same is profoundly true of the Arabic movement. Intellectual life in Beirut was not so much a playground as a battleground, and this war of position extended beyond the borders of Lebanon. The debates between local intellectuals—nationalist, Marxist, and liberal—reflect the global agon between the main ideological camps of the early Cold War.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131234319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0004
R. Creswell
Among all the figures produced by the Arab modernists, it is Mihyar, the gloomy, many-sided hero of Adonis's Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, 1961], who most powerfully represents the Shi'r poets' conception of man. This chapter tries to explain how collective defeat and the subsequent renunciation of political activity left its mark on a poetics that is avowedly “nonpartisan,” abstract, and universal. It argues that Mihyar's “turn” is not to be conceived of as a turn inward but rather as a series of turns away—first of all, from the commitment to nationalism. It further suggests that the figure of apostrophe or the Arabic iltifat, both words meaning “a turn away,” is the central trope in Adonis's canonical collection.
{"title":"Figuration and Disfiguration in The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Among all the figures produced by the Arab modernists, it is Mihyar, the gloomy, many-sided hero of Adonis's Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, 1961], who most powerfully represents the Shi'r poets' conception of man. This chapter tries to explain how collective defeat and the subsequent renunciation of political activity left its mark on a poetics that is avowedly “nonpartisan,” abstract, and universal. It argues that Mihyar's “turn” is not to be conceived of as a turn inward but rather as a series of turns away—first of all, from the commitment to nationalism. It further suggests that the figure of apostrophe or the Arabic iltifat, both words meaning “a turn away,” is the central trope in Adonis's canonical collection.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133329172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0007
R. Creswell
This chapter discusses how marthiya is central not only to Adonis's revision of the classical corpus but also to his own poetry, which is full of a particular kind of elegy—those for fellow poets. It is by way of the elegy and its variations that Adonis negotiates his turn away from politics and seeks to establish a modernist countercanon, a series of imaginary filiations that provide him with a compensatory, nonpolitical authority. Even while bidding farewell, the elegist makes a claim upon his precursor, seeking to annex some of the previous poet's power. The elegy is in this sense another mode of translation, in which the poet asserts his right to a particular literary inheritance and projects its survival under unpropitious circumstances. Adonis's marathi are markedly distinct from the neoclassical and the collective elegy, his innovations spring from a refusal of their tropes and techniques.
{"title":"“He Sang New Sorrow”","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how marthiya is central not only to Adonis's revision of the classical corpus but also to his own poetry, which is full of a particular kind of elegy—those for fellow poets. It is by way of the elegy and its variations that Adonis negotiates his turn away from politics and seeks to establish a modernist countercanon, a series of imaginary filiations that provide him with a compensatory, nonpolitical authority. Even while bidding farewell, the elegist makes a claim upon his precursor, seeking to annex some of the previous poet's power. The elegy is in this sense another mode of translation, in which the poet asserts his right to a particular literary inheritance and projects its survival under unpropitious circumstances. Adonis's marathi are markedly distinct from the neoclassical and the collective elegy, his innovations spring from a refusal of their tropes and techniques.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117324464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}