Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework by Reuven Snir (review)

In 2011, the International Journal of Middle East Studies convened a roundtable of scholars to survey the field of Arabic literary studies in the United States. The five brief essays that they produced reflect a sense of having arrived at an inflection point in the field’s history. Post-9/11 enrollment in Arabic-language courses at US institutions of higher education was at a record high (according to data collected by the Modern Language Association, it peaked at around 35,000 students nationwide between 2009 and 2013).¹ The nascent Arab Spring movements had lent a youthful revolutionary cachet to the popular image of the Arab world abroad, inspiring a burgeoning interest in Arabic cultural production among American undergraduates and in the public sphere. Academic research on Arabic literature was tracking away from the sociological and philological approaches that had dominated in an earlier era to become increasingly theoretical in its orientations, as befitted its new disciplinary affiliations with departments of comparative literature rather than solely with area studies departments dedicated to the regional study of culture, history, and politics. Yet amid their general optimism about the state of Arabic literary studies in the American academy in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the essays in the IJMES roundtable also register a subtle anxiety: a concern that Arabic literature’s newfound cool would mean the wholesale abandonment of the more staid empirical methods that—with their attention to issues of canon-formation and literary form, their privileging of archival work aimed at situating texts within the material-historical conditions of their production—formerly gave shape and purpose to the field. As one contributor put it: “What exactly is the discipline of Arabic literature? Or what, in concrete terms, is the Arabic literary material we can work on?”²

Reuven Snir’s new book, Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework, offers an answer to these questions that is unabashedly—even unfashionably—empirical in its approach. Arguing that Arabic literature can be profitably understood as comprising “one dynamic, autonomous literary system,” Snir’s ambitious goal is to map this system in its entirety, thus making possible “the comprehensive study of the diverse and multifarious texts that make up modern Arabic literature” (2). Such a systematic theory of literature is advantageous insofar as it allows Snir to present a picture that is simultaneously capacious and granular, invested in identifying the macrotrends that have defined the Arabic literary field since the nineteenth century and, in equal measure, in exposing the dialectical play of factors—internal and external, aesthetic and circumstantial—that constantly operate to “defamiliarize” these trends within a process-driven cultural space (3).

In one chapter, Snir inventories an extensive corpus of literary texts, written in Modern Standard Arabic as well as various Arabic dialects, in order to propose six interlocking subsystems within which individual works circulate according to their canonical or non-canonical status, their intended audience of either children or adults, and their identity as either original Arabic creations or translations. Another chapter explores “the diachronic intersystemic changes” to Arabic literature that have resulted from the interference of foreign (predominantly European) literary traditions, and from the extraliterary pressures of religion and politics (100). The book’s final substantive chapter examines Arabic poetry, fiction, and drama as discrete genres linked to specific epochs in the field’s history, but also as composite categories whose “interrelationships and interactions” make them inherently resistant to efforts at temporal and typological classification (175).

In its avowedly egalitarian view of what constitutes Arabic literature, Snir’s book joins the company of Muhsin al-Musawi’s The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters (2015) and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature’s volume on postclassical literature (2008) as the latest recent work of scholarship in English to challenge the foundational structures of Arabic literary studies in both the Western academy and the Arab world. A standard history of Arabic literature’s evolution after the rise...