City of BeginningsPub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0007
R. Creswell
{"title":"“He Sang New Sorrow”","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how marthiya is central not only to Adonis's revision of the classical corpus but also to his own poetry, which is full of a particular kind of elegy—those for fellow poets. It is by way of the elegy and its variations that Adonis negotiates his turn away from politics and seeks to establish a modernist countercanon, a series of imaginary filiations that provide him with a compensatory, nonpolitical authority. Even while bidding farewell, the elegist makes a claim upon his precursor, seeking to annex some of the previous poet's power. The elegy is in this sense another mode of translation, in which the poet asserts his right to a particular literary inheritance and projects its survival under unpropitious circumstances. Adonis's marathi are markedly distinct from the neoclassical and the collective elegy, his innovations spring from a refusal of their tropes and techniques.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117324464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City of BeginningsPub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0003
R. Creswell
{"title":"The Genealogy of Arabic Modernism","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/PRINCETON/9780691182186.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127049464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City of BeginningsPub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0008
R. Creswell
{"title":"Tehran 1979—Damascus 2011","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This epilogue attempts to answer the following question: Was Adonis's journey from nationalism to Islamism, passing by way of Nasserism, socialism, and extreme leftism, a matter of organic and systematic progress (which one might explicate) in his intellectual convictions, his political positions, and his ideological outlook? Or was it merely a matter of his adapting to historical occasions as they arose—a matter of conforming to the strongest cultural and political winds of the moment? It does so by presenting a short but detailed narrative about Adonis's writings on the Iranian and Syrian revolutions. The intent in relating this history is to bring the story of Arabic modernism as close as possible up to the present as well as to investigate its afterlives, its ability to adapt itself to new conjunctions.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"214 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124217924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City of BeginningsPub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0001
R. Creswell
{"title":"Modernism in Translation","authors":"R. Creswell","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691182186.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book explores the Arab modernist movement, the most significant literary grouping in the Arab world since World War II. It produced a body of work remarkable for its aesthetic ambition and rhetorical coherence. Like many artistic groups of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Arab modernists, gathered around a magazine that acted as the nerve center of their movement: Shi'r [Poetry], a quarterly dedicated to poetry and poetry criticism, founded in 1957 by Yusuf al-Khal. The Shi'r poets' conceptualization of “modernity” or “modernism”—the Arabic word, al-hadatha, can be used for both English terms—was immensely influential.","PeriodicalId":269714,"journal":{"name":"City of Beginnings","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115828628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}