Israel Oriental Studies, vol. 11, Studies in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetics.

• Author: Brann, Ross

The learned studies on medieval Arabic poetics comprising this challenging volume are presented by the editor as emanating from the period following publication of G. J. H. van Gelder's Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982). That work among others is said to have stimulated the contributors into rethinking a number of significant questions about the nature of the poetic enterprise as understood by Arabic literary intellectuals during the eighth to thirteenth centuries. To be sure, van Gelder's study, along with other works, can thankfully be said to have catalyzed new thinking about Arabic poetics and helped lay to rest a stultified "atomistic" approach to medieval Arabic poetry. What new approaches to the study of medieval Arabic poetics have emerged now that scholars have abandoned an ossified conceptualization of the making of medieval Arabic poetry?

The nine contributions to his book have been conveniently divided into two groups: "Elements of Medieval Poetics" and "Prosody and Structure of Poetic Texts." Despite the volume's subtitle only the essay by Jacqueline Genot-Bismuth on the complex prosodic system developed by the Italian Hebrew belles-lettrist Immanuel of Rome (c. 1261-c. 1332) actually examines medieval Hebrew as distinct from medieval Arabic prosody and poetics. And yet Genot-Bismuth identifies unmistakable echoes of Arabic prosody even in the Hebrew verse forms of thirteenth century Italy. David Gil's illuminating and highly original piece, "The Muwashshah: Artistic Convention or Cognitive Universal," deals comparatively with Arabic and Hebrew sources of strophic poetry. Gil offers an inventive scheme for redefining the metrical patterns in (strophic) poetry as the product of cognitive and universal rather than artistic and culturally specific musical norms. The remaining articles are mainly devoted to the study of technical terminology developed by various Arab critics for discussing the relationship between the parts of a poetic text and to exploration of issues frequently raised in medieval Arabic poetics: for instance, the binary opposition and reciprocal relationship between ma??na and lafz; and poetic imitation and the nature and limits of literary influence as opposed to outright plagiarism.

Several of the most interesting papers are primarily concerned with what Andras Hamori, one of the contributors, terms "practical poetics" (p. 14)...