NOTES2 Literally: the word fa.lrefers to a camel stallion, especially preserved for breeding,
not used for other purposes. Its virility is one side of this special attention, but
genetic nobility is another; metaphorically: fu.nlahindicates prowess and
excellence; the performance of stallions, champions, and paragons.
3 See for instance ‘Abdullah al-Ghadhdhmml, Al-Naqd al-thaqmfl (Beirut:
Al-Markaz al-Thaqmfl, 2001), pp. 190–99, 270–74.
4 For a discussion of these, see Suzanne P. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak:
Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 1993).
5 Cited in Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form(Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1971), p. 62.
6 Cited in Jonathan Culler, “On the Negativity of Modern Poetry: Friedrich,
Baudelaire, and the Critical Tradition,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play
of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, eds Sanford Budick and Wolfgang
Iser (New York: Columbia University, 1989), p. 198.
7Mu.ammad Bennls, Al-A‘mml al-shi‘riyyah, 2 vols (Poetic Works) (Casablanca:
Dmr Tnbqml, 2002), vol. 1, p. 9.
8 Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Classical
Arabic Naslb(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 111.
9 He writes:
It was reading Baudelaire, which changed my understanding of Abn
Nuwms and revealed his particular poetical quality and modernity, and
Mallarmé’s work, which explained to me the mysteries of AbnTammmm’s
poetic language and the modern dimension in it. My reading of
Rimbaud, Nerval and Breton led me to discover the poetry of the mystic
writers in all its uniqueness and splendor, and the new French criticism
gave me an indication of the newness of al-Jurjani’s critical vision.
Adnnls [cAllAhmad Sacld]. Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans., Catherine Cobham
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990; Arabic text, 1971; English trans.,
1985), p. 81.
10 Mu.ammad Bennls, Al-A‘mml al-shi‘riyyah, vol. 1, pp. 15–16.
11 Selected trans., and Intro M. M. Enani, An Anthology of the New Arabic Poetry in
Egypt(Cairo: GEBO, 2001), p. 53.
12 Ma.mnd Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut, 1982, trans. Ibrahim
Muhawi from the Arabic (Berkeley, CA: University of California press, 1995), p. 65.
13 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
1991), p. 37.
14 Ibid.
15 Cited in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine(reprint, New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press. 1981), p. 269.
16 Mary Louise Pratt, Toward Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse(Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 86, 204–05.
17 Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction(Oxford:
Polity, 1990), pp. 16–17.
18 Michel Foucault writes:
In fact, the systematic erasure of all given unities enables us first of
all to restore to the statement the specifity of its occurrence, and to
show that discontinuity is one of those great accidents that create