A semiotic study of excerpts from poems (MarhaGhilan, Qafilat al-Diyaf, and Ruya fi 1956) by BadrShakir al-Sayyab

This article explores an aspect of contemporary studies in Arabic language and literature, specifically semiotic studies in Arabic poetry. It includes an analysis of excerpts from selected poems by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, namely Marḥā Ghīlān, Qāfilat al-Ḍayāʿ (The Caravan of Loss), and Ruʾyā fī ʿĀm 1956 (A Vision in 1956). The study applies semiotic analysis to these poems, highlighting the significance of this approach in the field of Arabic language and literature. Semiotic analysis is considered a fundamental component in modern and contemporary literary studies, particularly in poetry, which has enriched the Arab literary heritage with profound poetic interpretations.

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the life and poetry of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964) and ascertain his place in modern Arabic literature. By visits to the scenes of al-Sayyad's life, by personal interview and correspondence with people who knew him, by access to his unpublished poetry and to official documents relating to his education, government position and medical treatment, the author supplemented the knowledge obtained from the poet's published works and from other materials. The picture of the poet emerging from this study is that of one deeply hurt by life. Since boyhood, the death of his mother and the desertion of his father leave him in constant search for love and security. The realization in adolescence that he is ugly, the failure of his love affairs in high school and college, and his sensitivity to social oppression make him join the Communist Party. His poetry meanwhile is romantic and rebellious. Be introduces free verse and helps to create a new movement in Arabic poetry. His struggle against his government causes him to lose his job and enter prison many times. After a short self-exile, he returns home having renounced communism and continues, after his marriage, to oppose his government and criticize Arab society in realist poems achieving literary fame. He welcomes the revolution against the monarchy but later attacks the republican regime for its communist leanings. He uses myths of death and resurrection in his poetry to express his disillusionment and his hopes for Iraq and the Arab nation. He then becomes afflicted with paralysis and spends the last three years of his life being treated at home and abroad, and writing of his pathetic experience with approaching death. His poetry represents the malaise of the Arab world and ushers a new era in Arabic poetry.

Arabic language is a global language and has become one of the most important languages for all language learners around the world. A fundamental component of sound Arabic language acquisition is Arabic poetry which is innately intricate. Hence, deficiency in interactive computer programs specially designed for learning Arabic poetry, has generated apathy that Arabic poetry is superfluous, consequently ensuing impotence to the graduates of Arabic Language and Literature Studies. The existing scenario illustrates the preference and reliance on interactive programs and gadgets among the educators and students. E-Diwan enables the accessibility of teaching and learning Arabic poetry through a mobile device and a mobile interface (Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile) with a designated Arabic poetry electronic portfolio website. E-Diwan keeps the students glued to the screen and are dazzled by the atheistic beauty of Arabic poetry subsequently augmenting them with a corpus of Arabic literary lexis. By a click of a button, the app displays a spectrum analysis of the poems; definition, grammatical and rhetorical properties, a brief biography of the poet, and translation of the poems in English and Malay. It is also equipped with the ability to audio present the above information using a recorded voice of an Arabic native speaker. Built-in are videos designed to simultaneously improve the information outcome and performance skills of the user. E-Diwan’s comprehensive nature facilitates individual learning, which cultivates Life Long Learning. E-Diwan fits as a lecture companion tool for all educators teaching Arabic poetry and Arabic language learners.

Onomatopoeia has always been a functional poetic device which enjoys a high sound significance in the poetry of many languages. In modern English and Arabic poetry alike, it proves to be vital and useful at different levels: musical, thematic and at the level of meaning. Still, the cultural difference looms large over the ways it is employed by the poets of each. The present paper investigates the employment of onomatopoeia in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964) who are chosen due to the importance they enjoy in modern English and Arabic poetry and the richness of their poems in onomatopoeias. The conclusions reached at are in a sense related to cultural differences which govern the use of onomatopoeia for specific aims rather than for others.

Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq, by Terri DeYoung. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. x + 264 pages. Notes to p. 314. Bibl. to p. 325. Index to p. 333. $24.95. Reviewed by Wail Hassan That much Arabic literature of the l9th and 20th centuries is written in direct response to European civilization hardly needs proof-from Rifa'a alTahtawi's Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Paris (1834) to the anti-colonial of occasion by Ahmad Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri and others, to the fiction of Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, Yahya Haqqi, Suhayl Idris, and Tayeb Salih. Terri DeYoung's study of the major Iraqi poet, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab demonstrates the extent to which anti-colonial struggle informs the practice of scores of poets, even the formation of the various movements in modern Arabic poetry-those that revived the classical aesthetic, those that rebelled against it (poets associated with the Diwan and Apollo groups and other Arab romantics), and those modernists who have revolutionized the timehonored conventions of prosody. DeYoung not only situates Sayyab's poetry in the colonial context to which it properly belongs, but also rereads and reassesses, from comparative and post-colonial perspectives, the poetic tradition in which Sayyab occupies a central place. This important book is the most thorough analysis of Sayyab's poetry in English; that alone would be a valuable contribution to the study of Arabic literature in the West. Yet the book is also the first sustained attempt to bring the insights of postcolonial studies in Anglo-American universities to bear upon the development of modern Arabic poetry. The book is exemplary for the range of comparative analysis necessary to understand a poet like Sayyab: an avid reader and translator of European poetry, and an English major whose intimate knowledge of Milton, Wordsworth and Eliot-in addition to Homer, Dante, Lamartine, and others-played a major part in shaping his own poetry. While earlier critics have usually limited themselves to pointing out the presumably straightforward of Wordsworth on Sayyab's romantic phase and T.S. Eliot on his modernist poetry-a tendency that characterizes critical evaluation of other Arab poets tooDeYoung goes beyond such ultimately reductive readings which have tended to presuppose (and have, therefore, only succeeded in demonstrating) unproblematic imitation of European canonical poets. Instead, DeYoung inquires into the nature of influence and its anxieties not only for belated poets (in Harold Bloom's terms), but more importantly for anti-colonial poets for whom the antecedent European models represent the culture and values of the colonizers they actively resist. In Sayyab and other Arab and Third World writers, influence often manifests itself in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls double-voiced or dialogic intertextuality, which undermines the authority of the original models (European master narratives, forms and values), rather than being simple (or simple-minded) imitations thereof. …

The countryside and the city are considered among the most frequently tackled themes in British and Arabic poetry. They are viewed as two inseparable aspects of man’s life in the modern age. Many poets write about them because they appreciate the rural since it is still where man finds tranquillity, spontaneity and outlet from all urban life pressures. On the contrary, the city is presented as a place of stress, chaos, loss and instability. In the present paper, the main concern is to discuss selected poems by Stephen Spender (1909-1995) and Badr Shakr al-Sayyab (1926-1964) in terms of three intrinsic elements of space theorized by Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, along with Raymond Williams, to critically examine both Spender’s and al-Sayyab’s rendering of a variety of poetic devices to portray the countryside represented by the village with all its images, and the urban landscape defined by the city which is depicted in terms of corruption, pollution and isolation. It also aims to elucidate the essential components of space, applying modern poetry to the presentation of the countryside and the city to explicate how they are both oriented in Spender’s and al-Sayyab’s selected poems. One of the noteworthy conclusions is that both of them employ spatial practices and representational to portray the rural and urban images of life as conceived by the reader.

Sophie Sieta has filled an important gap in scholarship surrounding both theories of the avant-garde and material textual studies with her first monograph, Provisional Avant-Gardes (2019). From ‘Dada to Digital’, Sieta navigates a ‘diachronic’ investigation of the relationship between avant-garde literary communities and the print formats in which they have often published their work. In doing so, she expands the historical range within which considerations of the avant-garde and little magazines are usually framed (the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines ends in the 1960s) and intersects both areas of study with the digital turn. Sieta thus offers a fascinating and dynamic discussion of the relationship between expressive, formal innovation and the material text, which illuminates this issue’s theme of ‘ambience’. Rigorously engaging with the entanglement and the permeability of boundaries between text, form, and self-definition, this study places increasingly ripe and timely elements of ambient literature towards the forefront of modern and contemporary literary studies’ concerns.

English education stakeholders need ways of envisioning and advocating for transformative approaches to literacy teaching. In this inquiry, we consider the dynamic field of literary studies – one of the scholarly fields most directly linked to English education. We conducted a content analysis of 404 articles recently published in literary studies journals. These articles make up approximately 10% of all the articles published in literary journals (in the English language) worldwide in 2018. In reporting key patterns of contemporary literary studies, we argue that this field is an underutilised resource for envisioning, advocating for, and defending expansive and critical forms of secondary English education.

The Visual-Poem is considered one of the most daring experimental poetry that has penetrated the borders of traditional Arabic poetry. The visual-poem is based on integration of linguistic poetic aspects and non-linguistic visual aspects. Therefore, the visual-poem is considered a hybrid literary genre that is based on integration of several arts, which makes the reader raise questions regarding its essence and identity, and whether it is poetry or artistic drawing or painting. The objective of the study is to confirm that the visual-poem is a special trans-generic literary type, which is an independent phenomenon that cannot be classified under any other literary genre. The study also seeks to highlight the aspect of penetration of the visual-poem to everything that is traditional and definite, starting with the various names that have been given to it, and ending with its various forms that appeared in classical poetry and modern Arabic poetry. To achieve its goals, the study adopts the methodology of analytical comparisons between classical Arabic texts, modern Arabic texts and European modern texts written in English and French. The fundamental landmarks of the visual poem are the same landmarks that are specific to poetry in general. The visual poem does not marginalize the language, the poetic rhythm or music but turns its language into a drawing and makes its music something visible that stems from words that are seen scattered on a white page. In addition, it keeps the components on which the poems are based such as: ambiguity, association, and other elements but it adopts them, not only in the language, but in everything that we see, too. The main conclusion of the study is that the visual poem is not a poetic school that has its own followers, concepts, and characteristics, but a poetic phenomenon that is too broad to be limited by a school or a specific tradition.

Re-examining English and/in the Geography of (World) Literature

Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" stands as a transformative work in feminist literature, challenging entrenched gender norms and reshaping the landscape of contemporary storytelling. This paper delves into Carter's narrative prowess, exploring how her reimagining of traditional myths serves as a potent critique of patriarchal structures. Employing a qualitative research approach, this study utilizes a comprehensive literature review to analyse Carter's contributions to feminist discourse and the critical reception of her seminal work. Drawing on postmodern literary theories, particularly Roland Barthes's theory of myths, the paper examines Carter's deconstructive approach to storytelling and its implications for feminist literary criticism. Through meticulous analysis of Carter's narrative techniques, thematic preoccupations, and engagement with feminist discourse, this study offers fresh insights into the enduring relevance of "The Bloody Chamber" in contemporary literary studies. Ultimately, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of Carter's literary interventions and their broader implications for gender representation and cultural discourse.

Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn Heather Love (bio) There is perhaps no term that carries more value in the humanities than “rich.” In literary studies especially, richness is an undisputed—if largely uninterrogated—good; it signifies qualities associated with the complexity and polyvalence of texts and with the warmth and depth of experience. There is, to be sure, no necessary connection between the intricacy of texts and the intricacy of human feeling and cognition. Nor is there a necessary connection between the capacity to interpret such texts and the ability to respond justly and empathetically to the ethical dilemmas represented in them. Even so, this is a busy intersection. The link between the richness of human experience and processes of textual interpretation can be understood, on the one hand, through the origin of philosophical hermeneutics in practices of divination and, on the other, through the significance of the communicative situation in defining hermeneutics. The text, in its singularity, is both an access to otherness and a message or call to attention. A belief in the aesthetic and ethical force of literature is evident in the work of midcentury critics like Cleanth Brooks (“The poet . . . must return to us the unity of experience itself as man knows it in his own experience”) and Lionel Trilling (“literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty”).1 It also appears in the work of Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for whom literature signals the inexhaustibility of human potential.2 It appears as well in recent arguments against theory and on behalf of New Formalism (“literature could pose the largest issues of social and personal destiny in a vividly human context”) and in the recent turn to ethics, which, as Dorothy J. Hale writes, “has been accompanied by a new celebration of literature.”3 If the encounter with a divine and inscrutable message was progressively secularized in the twentieth century, the opacity and ineffability of the text and the ethical demand to attend to it remain central to practices of literary interpretation today. [End Page 371] Given the subsumption of many aspects of religion into the concept of culture after the Enlightenment, it is not surprising that these sacred aspects of hermeneutics should survive into the era of secular modernity. What is more surprising is that its humanist aspects have such a continued presence in supposedly anti- or posthumanist literary studies. The rise of interpretive practices borrowed from Marxism and psychoanalysis, structuralism and poststructuralism, and semiotics and deconstruction has displaced the individual and consciousness from the center of inquiry, shifting attention to structures of language, desire, or economic capital. At the same time, political forms of criticism such as feminism, postcolonial studies, African-American studies, diaspora studies, and queer studies have critiqued humanism by pointing to its founding exclusions. Common to the rise of these theoretical and political fields is a disavowal of earlier critical movements—particularly the New Criticism—that are understood to embody the shortcomings of humanist philosophy. In critiques of the canon, the text, organicism, the nation, culture, and tradition—as well as the very concept of the human—the anchors of humanistic criticism have come under sustained and powerful attack in the past several decades. Still, despite widespread rumors of the death of humanism, key humanist values remain alive and well in literary studies. What to make of this persistence of humanist values in the context of a disciplinary milieu that often sees them as outmoded? It might be explained as a typical contradiction between intellectual conviction and lived practice—there are no doubt de facto humanists among posthumanists, just as there are Marxist heroes of consumption.4 More persuasive accounts of the persistence of humanism in contemporary literary studies can be found in histories of the discipline. While critics like Gerald Graff and John Guillory focus on the stabilizing role of universities, departments, and syllabi, Ian Hunter turns his attention to the role of teaching.5 In his essay “The History of Theory,” Hunter traces the persistence of humanist ethics in literary studies, suggesting that both “the New Criticism and the literary theory that displaced...

<i>Thomas Leitch,</i> Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From <i>Gone with the Wind</i> to <i>The Passion of Christ</i><i>Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From <i>Gone with the Wind</i> to <i>The Passion of Christ</i></i>. Thomas Leitch . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+354.

This research is aimed to find the language exegetics in Zamakhsyari's attempt to interpret Al-Quran. He also expertise in the Arabic language, rhetoric, literature, and Islamic studies. He is also well-known as a Mu'tazilah scholar. This study tries to find the language aspects related to Zamakhsyari's explanation of religious discourse. According to Ibn Khaliikan, Zamakhsyari is a scholar in Arabic grammatical, language, poetry, and literature. He speaks standard Arabic fluently. Quran is the guidance for humankind, and it is inimitability. It also contains beautifulness in language and style. Hundreds of Mu'tazilah scholars had written interpretation of Al-Quran. However, one noticeable interpretation book that could provide a comprehensive explanation is an interpretation book written by Zamakhsyari known as al-Kashshaf. This study focuses on explaining Zamakhsyari's linguistic thought in interpreting the Quran.

The figure of Dariya Vikonska (Karolina Ivanna Fedorovych-Malytska, 1893–1945) is little known and is one of the least studied in contemporary literary and art studies. Today, her forgotten research and literary heritage is coming back into Ukrainian cultural society. The artist can fully and deeply experience the fullness of human existence and transfer these experiences to the canvas, express it in music, or put it in the “clothes of the word” – in literature. National tradition and the sense of national belonging are very important for the artist. Hence, the vision of creativity as a process is deeply national. This national orientation of the artist is directly related to creativity as a national phenomenon rooted not in the borrowed and universally dismantled ideas and images but in the space of the national psyche. Dariya Vikonska was constantly interested in the psychology of creativity of the artist (writer, painter, composer). Her epistolary inheritance, as well as her literary studies and art studies, create a special ideological system of the vision of mental processes associated with creativity. This interest in the psychology of creativity requires the vision of art and literature as a national phenomenon inextricably linked with the mental features of the creative process seen as directly connected with the national ethnopsychology. Dariya Vikonska’s ideological, cultural, historical, and aesthetic ideas about literature, literary work, and art were surprisingly innovative, extremely relevant, and expressed the most recent ideas of the development of Ukrainian culture in the context of European culture.