Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0006
R. Creswell
This chapter focuses on Adonis's Diwan al-shi'r al-'arabi [Anthology of Arabic Poetry], a three-volume florilegium published between 1964 and 1968 whose origins are in the dossiers of pre-Islamic poetry first published in Shi'r. The Diwan was the most consequential revision of the classical heritage undertaken by Adonis. It is a massive critical project that hews strictly to the original impetus of Shi'r, a movement based on the paired goals of literary autonomy and deprovincialization. How do these goals affect Adonis's decisions as an editor of the corpus of classical poetry? As a collection of citations from the turath, the Anthology is a work of internal translation in which source and target texts are exactly the same, though provided with a new context. The chapter suggests that while Adonis's countercanon seeks to restore those voices silenced by orthodoxy, his own choices, tailored to the needs of the present, impose their own exclusions and repressions.
{"title":"The Countercanon","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on Adonis's Diwan al-shi'r al-'arabi [Anthology of Arabic Poetry], a three-volume florilegium published between 1964 and 1968 whose origins are in the dossiers of pre-Islamic poetry first published in Shi'r. The Diwan was the most consequential revision of the classical heritage undertaken by Adonis. It is a massive critical project that hews strictly to the original impetus of Shi'r, a movement based on the paired goals of literary autonomy and deprovincialization. How do these goals affect Adonis's decisions as an editor of the corpus of classical poetry? As a collection of citations from the turath, the Anthology is a work of internal translation in which source and target texts are exactly the same, though provided with a new context. The chapter suggests that while Adonis's countercanon seeks to restore those voices silenced by orthodoxy, his own choices, tailored to the needs of the present, impose their own exclusions and repressions.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"59 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":"125059774","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/9780691182186.003.0003
R. Creswell
This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.
{"title":"The Genealogy of Arabic Modernism","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"24 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":"127049464","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/9780691182186.003.0008
R. Creswell
This epilogue attempts to answer the following question: Was Adonis's journey from nationalism to Islamism, passing by way of Nasserism, socialism, and extreme leftism, a matter of organic and systematic progress (which one might explicate) in his intellectual convictions, his political positions, and his ideological outlook? Or was it merely a matter of his adapting to historical occasions as they arose—a matter of conforming to the strongest cultural and political winds of the moment? It does so by presenting a short but detailed narrative about Adonis's writings on the Iranian and Syrian revolutions. The intent in relating this history is to bring the story of Arabic modernism as close as possible up to the present as well as to investigate its afterlives, its ability to adapt itself to new conjunctions.
{"title":"Tehran 1979—Damascus 2011","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This epilogue attempts to answer the following question: Was Adonis's journey from nationalism to Islamism, passing by way of Nasserism, socialism, and extreme leftism, a matter of organic and systematic progress (which one might explicate) in his intellectual convictions, his political positions, and his ideological outlook? Or was it merely a matter of his adapting to historical occasions as they arose—a matter of conforming to the strongest cultural and political winds of the moment? It does so by presenting a short but detailed narrative about Adonis's writings on the Iranian and Syrian revolutions. The intent in relating this history is to bring the story of Arabic modernism as close as possible up to the present as well as to investigate its afterlives, its ability to adapt itself to new conjunctions.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"214 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":"124217924","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/9780691182186.003.0001
R. Creswell
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book explores the Arab modernist movement, the most significant literary grouping in the Arab world since World War II. It produced a body of work remarkable for its aesthetic ambition and rhetorical coherence. Like many artistic groups of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Arab modernists, gathered around a magazine that acted as the nerve center of their movement: Shi'r [Poetry], a quarterly dedicated to poetry and poetry criticism, founded in 1957 by Yusuf al-Khal. The Shi'r poets' conceptualization of “modernity” or “modernism”—the Arabic word, al-hadatha, can be used for both English terms—was immensely influential.
{"title":"Modernism in Translation","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book explores the Arab modernist movement, the most significant literary grouping in the Arab world since World War II. It produced a body of work remarkable for its aesthetic ambition and rhetorical coherence. Like many artistic groups of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Arab modernists, gathered around a magazine that acted as the nerve center of their movement: Shi'r [Poetry], a quarterly dedicated to poetry and poetry criticism, founded in 1957 by Yusuf al-Khal. The Shi'r poets' conceptualization of “modernity” or “modernism”—the Arabic word, al-hadatha, can be used for both English terms—was immensely influential.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"106 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":"115828628","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}