أثر المنهج اللغوي في النقد العربي القديم

الملخص EN

This paper investigates “the Effect of the Linguistic Methodology in the Old Arab Criticism”.

Most of the Scholars who studied poetry were linguisticians before being critics ; therefore, their critical judgments were in accordance with the linguistic methodology that prevented them from realizing most of the aesthetic poetic images.

They considered the analysis of poetry and its criticism as kind of a lexical work.

They, however did not realize the significance of context in the understanding of the effective inspiring meanings of a text through the interrelationship of all the semantic levels.

Poetry for them was a general experience that all poets have in common in the same way they share their language.

Accordingly, the interpretation of most of the Diwans (collections of poems) was dominated by this methodology.

Those scholars were basically concerned with explaining the vocabulary of the poem rather than what the criticism of poetry required them to do to the poetic image and questioning it.

Only through the latter did the poetic wit can be explained in terms of the poets’ exploiting of the linguistic power of vocabulary.

Attempting to interpret the Qur’anic verses according to the same methodology, those scholars had also failed to realize many of the rhetorical images and portrays of the Glorious Qur’an.

Hence, the linguistic criticism emerged as an aspect of literary criticism.

It, then, gave rise to many critical issues and developed them such as that of (the Old and the Modern) which sprang from the core of conflict between poets and linguisticians when time had been a criterion of critics’ recourse.

Interest focused on the common verses of poetry, i.e.

independent lines of poetry that made sense by themselves, and on the unity of the verse in terms of vocabulary, form, and meaning completion with the completion of the line.

Because of the domination of the linguistic methodology over the general critical sense, the phenomenon of Tadmeen (extension in meaning) is considered as a poetic deficiency.

Consequently, the linguistic methodology has contributed much in formulating the principles of the Arab theory of criticism to the extent that the interference between linguistics and literary criticism was a characteristic of the old Arab literary criticism.