An annotated bibliography of essays from the Theories and Methodologies section of the January 2024 issue of PMLA, published by Cambridge University Press here.

For its final issue of 2011, the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) convened a roundtable of scholars of Arabic literature to respond to the following prompt: “How has ‘theory’ affected the field of Arabic literature in the United States and vice versa?” However, “theory” is not Arabic—it was not originally formulated in the Arabic language nor is it concerned with problematics relevant to Arabic literary and cultural production. Yet, in the North American academy in 2011, there were few alternatives. Because scholars in the United States and Europe had long showed a prejudice against intellectual production from the Arab world, the traffic of ideas between Western theory and Arabic texts had long been, and continued to be, almost entirely one-directional.

The eight essays that appear in the Theories and Methodologies section of this issue of PMLA seek to reverse the direction of this exchange. Each essay examines a core concept derived from the premodern compendium of Arabic thought—associated with the disciplines of aesthetics, jurisprudence, philosophy, rhetoric, theology, and more—and activates it as a node of theoretical contemplation. More than merely explaining a set of Arabic terms for an anglophone readership, the essays take their focal concepts as occasions to engage in the praxis of theory making: thinking with, and not only about, each concept in question, pursuing it down notional avenues that may lead in unanticipated and even polemical directions, and allowing it to reconfigure previously held presumptions about the way things are or should be, in literature and beyond.

Adapted from Anna Ziajka Stanton,
“Introduction to ‘An Arabic Theoretical Lexicon’,”
PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 9–15.

El Shakry, Hoda. “Adab: Literary Form and Social Praxis.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 110–119.

The interweaving of spiritual and intellectual edification has been central to the Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition of adab across its historical development. Before its codification as “literature” at the end of the nineteenth century, adab encompassed a broad range of genres and textual practices—from poetry and prose to anthologies and encyclopedias to critical studies about adab. In bridging questions of literary form, disposition, and function, the transhistorical lens of adab provides a valuable corrective to the influence of the secularization thesis on narrative studies. By “secularization,” El Shakry refers to the historicization of modernity in relation to the European Enlightenment, a perspective that views models of scientific techno-rationality as antithetical to religious epistemes. In contrast, adab engages a diverse range of textual and extradiscursive traditions that introduce more expansive notions of literary writing, reading, and interpretation.

Harb, Lara. “Ta‘ajjub: A Rationalist Aesthetic.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 136–143.

The inquiry into the nature of beauty as it developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy under the term aesthetics theorized the beautiful as a judgment of taste and the senses in contradistinction to cognition and reason. Indeed, the term aesthetics was first introduced as a counterpart to thought and logic—the aesthetic object produces a feeling in the perceiver that leads one to deem it beautiful. In classical Arabic culture, aesthetic judgment also depended on an emotional experience that beauty produces in the perceiver. However, the theorization of this experience in Arabic was instead rooted in reason and logic. Through an understanding of taʿajjub (“wonder”), the classical Arabic conception of poetic beauty gave rise to a rationalist theory of aesthetics by the eleventh century. Taʿajjub represents an alternative way of conceptualizing beauty, one that attributes aesthetic experience to cognition, and the rationalist approach through which taʿajjub was theorized lends it a degree of universality that makes it especially portable beyond Arabic.

Junge, Christian. “Ṭarab: Sonic Affect.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 144–152.

Ṭarab is a classical Arabic concept for an often-intense affect related to music, singing, and poetry. It comprises aesthetic emotions ranging from sorrow to joy and may result in states of rapture, ecstasy, and trance; it transgresses the boundaries between sacred and profane spaces and instigates controversial debates on its moral-juridical legitimacy and somatic-mystical knowledge. In this essay, Junge maps classical concepts and modern practices of ṭarab by discussing their aesthetic, somatic, interactive, and political dimensions. He relates ṭarab to literary texts and cultural fields usually not associated with ṭarab, such as Arabic prose and language and the so-called Arab Spring. He argues that ṭarab is a versatile aesthetic concept of sonic affect related to music, literature, language, and culture, one that revolves around sound and musicality in its widest sense and deconstructs assumed hierarchies of bodily senses, artistic media, and creative practices.

Key, Alexander. “Ḥaqīqah: Truth, Reality, and Accuracy.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 128–135.

Reality is a hard truth, and the word for this reality in Arabic is ḥaqīqah. In the Arabic and Islamic archive is a cache of lyric poetry driven by tensions and ironies and laden with imaginary and imaginative images. This poetry is a prestige genre that far outweighs all other forms in this archive, but the majority of criticism over its last millennium has skewed toward cold reason and logic. In this essay, Key looks for the reality that poets, critics, and philosophers found through poems, and for the truth they claimed lay outside poetry. He argues that ḥaqīqah started off as a word for the people in the community who deserve protection, developed into a word for the ideas that deserve to be held as true, and then came to anchor language and reference: ḥaqīqah is literal language and the literal is defined by precedent, what people have said.

Miller, Jeannie. “Inṣāf: Authorial Justice.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 153–162.

Arabic intellectual al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868) outlined a concept of authorial justice centered on an author’s ethical obligations to an absent figure, the khaṣm (“opponent”). The opponent served as a formal mechanism for checking an unsupported thesis. In an emerging book culture, the impartiality of intellectual content was felt to be newly vulnerable, protected only by the author’s sense of justice. Specific authorial obligations emerged from this vulnerability: when advancing a thesis, the author must include all possible objections; when there are internal contradictions in the author’s system, the author must reveal these and confront them. The greatest abuse of authorship would be to gloss over problems in the hope that readers would be swept along with the rhetoric. Here, a new character makes its appearance—al-qāriʾ (“the reader”)—who takes the place of the absent opponent. This imagined future reader hounds the author throughout the writing process, calling for an acknowledgment of every inaccuracy and contradiction. Miller reframes this discourse of worry as a performative demonstration of al-Jāḥiẓ’s own authorial justice and proposes the term inṣāf to designate this concept.

Rashwan, Hany. “Muqāranah: The Art of Comparison in Premodern Arabo-Islamic Poetics.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 172–183.

The postcolonial shift has brought to light the insufficiency of exclusively Eurocentric methodologies when approaching literary cultures beyond Europe. This essay examines the practice of comparison in medieval Arabic literary criticism and reflects on its significance in the context of comparative literature as a discipline today. It begins by delving into the term muqāranah (“comparison”) and then considers two instances of comparative practices of premodern Arabo-Islamic writers. The first focuses on multilingualism within the premodern Islamicate context and how the evolution of multilingualism reveals aspects of the premodern Islamicate comparative mentality. The second example demonstrates how medieval scholars employed diverse forms of comparison, guiding their readers through a dynamic interplay among various literary genres and writers. Overall, Rashwan sheds new light on how medieval literary critics employed comparison when analyzing the aesthetics of poetry, literary prose, hadith, and the Qurʾan.

Sacks, Jeffrey. “Lafẓ: Language Praxis.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 120–127.

In this article, Sacks thinks about lafẓ in relation to language and the poetic, in relation to matter and the social, in relation to the sort of act it occasions, and in relation to being and world. Lafẓ is a certain sort of doing in relation to the mouth, and the projecting of matter across a threshold. Lafẓ is therefore a material practice, an act given in the expulsion of matter through an opening or across a passage. So lafẓ speaks to us of a particular sort of doing with the tongue—it is a language praxis—in excess of the temporal mode of a self-determined subject of language, or a being that would be itself and that would do the sort of act that language occasions and is. In the sort of doing occasioned in lafẓ, the time of language is the time of its utterance, ṣawt (“voice” or “sound”) would be akin to the matter pressed forth and upon the shore of the sea.

Tageldin, Shaden M. “Tarjamah: Negative Translation.” PMLA 139, no. 1 (2024): 163–171.

During the nineteenth century, Arabic supposedly forgot one term for translation—naql—and remembered another: tarjamah. This recollection was partial, remembering only one face of tarjamah—“translation” or “interpretation”—and slowly forgetting the other: “biography” or “recounted life.” Tarjamah, however, is foreign to Arabic. It derives from the Aramaic word targum, denoting an Aramaic translation and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Targum derives from the Akkadian root verb r-g-m, “to read aloud,” which harks back to the Ugaritic root verb r-g-m, denoting “to say, tell, announce, communicate, inform; to answer; to recite.” A word of foreign origin turned naturalized citizen of Arabic, enfolding the hidden transcript of “biography” told in the third person, and haunted by the figure of the translator-interpreter, tarjamah lays bare the unnaturalness of assumed categories and identities. Tarjamah stages the relationships of language to itself, of one language to another, and of translation to original as a life knowable only in its negation, a life that enfolds death, a life understood as continuity-in-death. As such, tarjamah is negative translation, insisting on the nonidentity of words, meanings, and the persons and peoples who invoke them.

PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Since 1884, PMLA has published members’ essays judged to be of interest to scholars and teachers of language and literature. Four issues each year—released in January, March, May, and October—present essays on language and literature. The program for the association’s annual convention is printed in a September issue.