Polyphony and the mask in modern Arabic poetry

Abstract

For nearly a century, literary critics have acknowledged the presence of multiples voices in poetry. Various critics have argued in argued in favor of a variety of participants in the text as the source of voice in a poem. The New Critics championed a text independent from the influence of the poet or the reader. The reader-response critics argued in favor of the reader’s affecting meaning within the text. A number of critics from various schools of criticism have argued that the poet places an image of himself or herself in the poem that, while not a literal depiction of the poem, reflects the individual who composed the poem. In this thesis, we shall accept all those approaches to a certain extent. That is, we will argue that meaning in the poem and the voice of the speaker in the text are affected by sources that are both internal and external to the text. Masked poetry has been selected because the mask, as an imported identity, acts as a neutral ground on which the reader, the poet (or implicit poet as we will call it), and speaker meet. We will argue that these participants in addition to the mask itself are sources of voice in the text. Furthermore, we have selected a number of modern Arabic poems due to the popularity of the mask for the past half century in Arabic poetry. Our model of polyphonic analysis will be derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony and dialogism as he established in The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. In the end, we hope to provide a compelling argument that the participants in a poetic text all contribute to its larger meaning and interact with one another in a polyphonic manner.