Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-dtkg6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-15T01:23:35.420Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Contemporary Arab Writers and the Literary Heritage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Issa J. Boullata
Issa J. Boullata
Affiliation:
McGill University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The cultural heritage of any one nation constitutes its collective experience and memory. Passed down from generation to generation, it contains a multitude of institutions, beliefs, and values that continue to act on the minds of people and affect their behavior. As an expression of the national identity, it is usually very wary of sudden change and prefers undisturbed continuity, its legitimate aims being self-preservation and the very existence of the nation as a group. It has its own checks and balances to allow any dose of change when the need for such arises. By an intricate historical process, it develops its own principles of inclusion and exclusion so that any change accepted or any change rejected will not affect its capacity for continued life and growth, but will rather enhance it.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 1983 , pp. 111 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Eliot, T. S.. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood (Methuen, 1960), pp. 47–59;Google Scholar translated into Arabic by Khouri, Mounah, Al-Shi⊂r Bayn Nuqqād Thalātha (Beirut, 1965), pp. 74–87.Google Scholar

2 Zaman al-Shi⊂r (Beirut: Dār al-⊂Awda, 1972), p. 53.Google Scholar

3 ⊂Alī, Aḥmad Sa⊂īd, al-Thābit wa⊃l Mutaḥawwil, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-⊂Awda, 1974–1978).Google Scholar

4 See my article, “Adonis: Revolt in Modern Arabic Poetics,” Edebiyât, 2, I (1977), 1–13.Google Scholar

5 Jamāl, al-Ghayṭānā, Al-Zaynī Barakat (Damascus: Ministry of Culture and National Guidance Publications, 1974).Google Scholar

6 See Ceza, K. Draz, “In Quest of New Narrative Forms: Irony in the Works of Four Egyptian Writers,” Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. XII (1981), pp. 137–159, presented originally as a paper in the 1979 MESA meeting at Salt Lake City, Utah.Google Scholar

7 Cf. the recent novel of Günter, Grass, Das Treffen im Telgte (1978),Google Scholar translated by Manheim, Ralph as The Meeting in Telgte (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), which is not merely a novel about divided Germany in 1647 during the Thirty Years War, but a parody of divided Germany in 1947.Google Scholar

8 Ostle, R. C., “Maḥmūd al-Mas⊂adī and Tunisia's ‘Lost Generation’,” Journal of Arabic Literature, 8 (1977), 162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Written between 1939 and 1940, Al-Sudd was first published in 1955. A second printing was published by al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya li-l-Nashr in 1974.

10 Maḥmūd, al-Mas⊂adī, … Ta⊃ṣīlan li-Kiyān (Tunis: ⊂Abd al-Karīrm B. ⊂Abd Allāh Publications, 1979), pp. 62–84.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., pp. 77–80.

12 Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

13 Bloom, Harold, A Map of Misreading (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

14 Haydar, Adnan, “What Is Modern about Modern Arabic Poetry?” Al-⊂Arabiyya, 14, 1–2 (1981), 51.Google Scholar