of genres and practices. Victor Úklovskij argues on the other hand for change
as an inevitable process.
Each art form travels down the inevitable road from birth to death;
from seeing and sensory perception, when the detail in the object is
savored and relished, to mere recognition, when the object or form
becomes a dull epigone which our senses register mechanically, a
piece of merchandise not visible even to the buyer.
(Ibid. 252)This emphasis on relevance and contemporaneity does not necessarily
preclude the perceptibility of specific forms or devices that are able to attract
attention, or participate in the formation of a cultural consciousness. Both art
forms and socio-cultural change interact in creating a consciousness. While
the individual genius is not “simply the geometrical point of intersection
operative outside him,” as Victor Úklovskij stipulates in his definition of the
artist as an “agent of impersonal forces” (Ibid. 253), there is enough evidence
to support Ejxenbaum’s paraphrase of Engels’ emphasis on the voice of his-
tory. He argues: “... creation is an act of historical self-awareness, of locating
oneself in the stream of history” (Ibid. 254). Genres get established and
approved within a horizon of expectations, for as Mary Louise Pratt argues in
view of reader-response and discourse theories, poetry, and literature at large
are “context dependent,” and literary production “depends enormously on
unspoken, culturally-shared knowledge of the rules, conventions, and expec-
tations that are in play when language is used in that context.”^16 Genres and
their subdivisions are “systems of appropriateness conditions,” or sets of
generic rules, conditions, and expectations that may involve conformity and
deviance, and coding and decoding, she adds in view of Elizabeth Traugott’s
discussion of generative semantics (Ibid.). This accountability sums up socio-
cultural aesthetics as genres operating on expectations while they are the
byproduct of cultural necessity. In broad terms, Anne Cranny-Francis defines
genre as a “sociohistorical as well as a formal entity. Transformations in genre
must be considered in relation to social changes.”^17 In Arabic cultural
dialogue, genres undergo change, deviation, and challenge like any other
communicative activity. Issues of tradition and modernity, and their further
growths or setbacks, assume complexity due to appropriateness of conditions,
which also inform the intellectual consciousness as they get informed by
intellectual debate and production processes and imperatives. Their trajecto-
ries are neither uniform nor smooth, and postmodern poets in the line of
Adnnls (cAllAhmad Sacld), like the Moroccan Mu.ammad Bennls, may come
up with a vision that downplays the early Nah,ah mediations between the
binding strictures of the ancients and the adaptability to the spirit of the age.
With both Derrida and Foucault in mind,^18 Mu.ammad Bennls titles an early
commentary on his grounding in tradition and modernity Kitmbat al-Ma.w
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION