Description
For a quarter of a century, through nine titles that went through multiple editions, beginning with Tawfiq al-Hakim, passing through Naguib Mahfouz, and ending with Abdul Rahman Munif and Hanna Mina, George Tarabishi specialized in novel criticism. He was a pioneer in Arab culture in employing the psychoanalytic method to understand the art form that most expresses the absence of the human psyche—the novel—without being bound by the literalism of that method.
Criticism is not the application of a specific method to the novel; rather, the novel itself dictates the method the critic must use. Psychoanalysis is subject to this principle: it is not meant to be applied ready-made, but rather to be reinvented and reinterpreted through the lens of the novel.
Although criticism is, by definition, a second discourse on a first discourse, as Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi put it, novel criticism, however methodologically rigorous, derives its credibility only to the extent that it is itself creative, not purely applied.
This quarter-century harvest of literary criticism is presented by Dar al-Madarik in three volumes.
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