Theory of Universes in Arabic Criticism and Rhetoric: Questions of the Apparent and the Limits of the Imaginary
Moulay Youssef DRISSI, Department of Arabic Language, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, Qatar.
Abstract
The detailed examination of poetic and critical heritage among the Arabs reveals that the positions of its pioneers were not limited to defining the cognitive nature that governs mental activity during the creative process alone. Rather, they also aimed primarily at questioning the ways of achieving aesthetic self-consciousness, highlighting the levels of their imaginative vision of things and phenomena, and elucidating the factors that contribute to the creation of poetic universes that differ from the perceptible and tangible material reality. Therefore, they did not stop at contemplating the relationship between sensory perception, mental representation, and creative output. Instead, they went beyond that to investigate the perceived forms and their essences, describing the mental and imaginative processes that govern creative action and enable it to convert perceptual consciousness into various linguistic representations and expressions.
To illustrate this, the research will continue to examine the opinions of some ancient poets and their judgments that made their imaginative methods a moment for reflecting on the limits of creative experience and its expressive and pictorial possibilities. It will question how images of things, worlds, and their material manifestations were cast in poetic expressions and allusions, characterized by comparison, approximation, or differentiation in description, depiction, and formation. The study will also explore the opinions of some critics and rhetoricians distinguished by a particular reading that views Arabic poetry as an aesthetic universe that reproduces sensory aspects through psychological universes, mental worlds, and varied and diverse expressive structures, forms, and representations.
Keywords: Theory, Universes, Perception, Mind, Creativity, Imagination, Criticism.