Jawdat Haydar’s : dialogic imagination

Abstract EN

The purpose of this paper is to reorient Haydar studies into a more critical direction.

The salutary and emotional appreciation of his poetry does not fully address his complex and dialogic imagination.

Hence, steering away from the general analysis of Haydar as being influenced by a wide array of Western poets, the following paper proposes a Bakhtinian approach to Haydar’s poetry which is rife with Bakhtinian dialogism.

This reading aims at excavating the multivocality of Haydar’s political, literary, social, cultural, philosophical and even the environmental discourses that he engages with in his poetical works.

Haydar’s encounters with poets of the East or the West are not mere salutary gestures to canonical figures.

On the contrary, Haydar’s hybrid consciousness calls so much on the Other to negotiate our pre-Kantian notion of the exclusivity of subjective knowledge and to contest our stereotyped misconceptions of the prowess and intellectual acumen of a Lebanese poet’s relationship to Western canonical poets.