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Title How the Qaṣ@da Sees: Vision, Poetic Knowledge, and the Transformative Capacity of Poetry from al-Andalus to the Maghreb
Full text https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37n3g17d
Date 2024
Author(s) Safi, Lubna
Contributor(s) Larkin, Margaret
Abstract This project considers the ways poets and critics conceived poetry as functioning visually. In twelfth-century al-Andalus, Arabic rhetorical criticism conceptualized poetry as having the power to transform feeling and cause action primarily because it evoked images and made one see. They called this poetic capacity, takhy@l (image-evocation). In twentieth-century Morocco, poet and critic Mohammed Bennis approached the visual dimension of the poem to experiment with the possibilities of a new kind of writing that, in overturning the established modes of seeing in the poem, would bring forth a new vision (ru'ya) of the world. I propose that poetic visuality at both moments operates in the slippage between literal, physical vision and a metaphorical, imagined one. Engaging literary critical, optical, and poetic sources, How the Qaṣ'da Sees unravels poetic seeing as a specific experience of sociality within the praise poem (qaṣ'dat al-madh). The main contention here is that considering how the praise poem works visually nuances our understanding of its social role and reveals how poetry simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, a larger perceptual culture. The main modes of poetic seeing I examine in this dissertation are: takhy'l's capacity to make one 'see what cannot be seen' (ru'yat ma la yura), twelfth-century calligraphic visual poems of the twelfth century, the renewal of the poetic motif of the ṭayf al-khayal (the phantom of the beloved). One outcome of reading the poem's visuality is the throughline that connects Andalusa and Maghriba poetry. My claim here is that twentieth-century Moroccan poetry was able to elaborate a new poetics within a larger (experimental) visual culture, which in drawing from an Andalusa-Maghriba visual inheritance, could free itself from colonial aesthetic imposition. Throughout the dissertation, I trace in the concept of poetic knowledge, which emerges from the dynamic of poetic seeing and the poem's social role, a poetics that encompasses a poet's personal vision as it reaches for a collective one; a poetics that attempts to transform the reader's ways of being in, and seeing, the world.
Subject(s) Literature; al-Andalus; Arabic poetry; Morocco; Poetic visuality; visual poems
Language en
Publisher eScholarship, University of California
Type of publication etd
Rights public
Identifier qt37n3g17d
Repository Berkeley - University of California
Added to C-A: 2024-10-02;09:55:28