Canons, Thefts, and Palimpsests in the Arabic Literary Tradition

The purpose of this essay is to explain and also problematize the reasons behind my use of intertextual interaction as an inclusive term that cuts across time and space. With regard to Arabic literary production, ancient and modern, this inclusive term recalls a similar classical and pre-modern understanding of textual engagements as manifestations of textual subordination, anxiety, empowerment, competitiveness, and supremacy. Therefore, the present essay associates this understanding with Arab philologists’ theories of plagiarism. What came once under the rubric of plagiarism has a shared register, parlance, and postulates with current intertextual practices. Both address textual tapestries and matrices whereby threads are woven in an intricate manner. Over time, words, meanings, motifs, and thence theorizations form a constellation. The essay explores a number of Arabic novels of the third millennium as examples of this textual engagement not only with Arabic literary tradition, but also with texts from the global south. Such a substantial and visible textual appropriation invites this critical intervention which, in turn, is bound in dialogue with contemporary literary forays that reflect on texts as tissues of quotations.