literary sensibility like Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the writer focuses on four
applications, namely, (1) Theodor Gaster’s Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in
the Ancient Middle East(1977), with its emphasis on seasonal patterns and the
cyclical movement from Emptying to Filling, equivalent to Death and
Regeneration in Frazer’s model; (2) Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage
(1908; trans. 1960); (3) Marcel Mauss’ The Gift: Forms and Functions of
Exchange in Archaic Societies(1925; trans. 1967); and (4) Classical scholarship
on the poetic and structural role of preludes in Greco-Latin traditions. These
applications bring into focus issues of imitation and innovation without
lapsing into the wornout scholarship of authenticity and imitation. Although
drawing attention to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacyand Eric Havelock’s
The Muse Learns to Write, the writer’s reference means to preempt questions
regarding the viability of the historical and the anecdotal.
In a succinct reading of classical Greco-Latin scholarship, and with a
cautious comparative application to the pre-Islamic and Islamic panegyric ode,
Suzanne P. Stetkevych makes use of Conte’s claims for the epic in Western lit-
erature. Conte argues that the epical mode “allows a community to consolidate
its historical experiences, conferring a sense on them, until they become an
exemplary system that is recognized as the community’s new cultural sense or
scripture.”^6 She develops her argument through a close reading of a number of
odes, as follows: (1) al-Nmbighah al-Dhubymnl’s “Are You Leaving Mayyah’s
People,” as an example of pre-Islamic royal ode, cuckolding the Lakhmid king
of al->lrah, al-Nu’mmn Ibn al-Mundhir (r. 580–602 CE), and another by the
same poet as an example of apology, “O, abode of Mayyah”; (2) Ka‘b Ibn
Zuhayr’s mantle ode, addressed to the Prophet, as an example of conversion
and submission; (3) al-Akhyal’s celebratory ode “The Tribe Has Departed”
addressed to the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al–Malik Ibn Marwmn (r. 685–705);
(4) Another ode of supplication by the same poet; (5) Odes by the ‘Abbmsid
Abnal-‘Atmhiyah (748–825–6 CE) and AbnTammmm with their genderic
equations and significations of achievement and victory; (6) Three odes by
al-Mutanabbl; and (7) Odes from the Arab West, al-Andalus.
While arguing for the panegyric ode as functionally “a ceremony of hom-
age and as a lingua francafor political negotiation,” she develops a rigorous
argument against the ghosts of many scholars who either have studied the
ode in purely formalistic terms or have ignored its politics. In her view,
the pre-Islamic ode “was established as the authoritative poetic paradigm for
the Arabo-Islamic poetic tradition” (Ibid. 81). To account for this canoniza-
tion, Stetkevych develops a reading of poetry and poetics that makes good use
of cultural anthropology and classical scholarship. The effort is not propelled
by a desire to accumulate readings or evidence, for the writer resorts to theory
to develop a perspective that has been gaining ground in scholarly appreciation
and acceptance.
Since her first contributions, she has found in van Gennep’s rite of passage
a viable method to apply to tripartite poetic structure as manifested in the
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS