اللغة بين الرؤية الحديثة والرؤية النيوكلاسيكية / Language and Vision: Modern and Neoclassical

Claude Audebert

Program

ALIF

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/521823

All Authors

أودبير, كلود; Audebert, Claude

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics

Publication Date

1984

doi

https://www.doi.org/10.2307/521823

Abstract

[A reader who has a certain practice of literary texts can tell with a minimal margin of error to which period they belong, even if confronted with a text whose author is unknown to him. Many elements enter in his evaluation. One of the most important in our view, is the writer's use of language both from the point of view of grammaticality and expressivity, and this, independently of his individual style. In other words it is claimed here that "écriture" is determined by the collective use of language at a given time. This is by no means a new idea but, commonly assumed, it is rarely proven through the study of actual texts. What seems important to show is where and how modifications, and shifts occur. Two texts have been compared here in order to show one aspect of possible change in "ecriture" within a span of forty years of time. Both deal with the death of a relative: Taha Husayn, in Al-Ayyam (1928) narrates the death of his young sister; Magid Tobia in Kull al-Rijal Kull al-Nissa' from the collection of short stories Khams Jara'id Lam Tuqra' (1970) presents the narrator coming home to find his mother dead and about to be buried. A great deal could be said about which aspect of the subject is emphasized by the writer and which links it with a literary historical moment. The approach chosen here however is syntactical and deals more specifically with logical relations between the facts which compose the stuff of the narrative as expressed by coordination, subordination or the lack of them, as well as by the expression of time and the main lines of the logical organization of both narratives. This study is an attempt which should be extended if we wish to shed light on the transformations that Arabic undergoes nowadays in order to create and convey a new literary vision.]

First Page

55

Last Page

70

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