A stylistic assessment of Abu Tammam's poetry (original) (raw)

The main object of this thesis is to assess the various techniques of poetic language in Classical Arabic as they appear in a particular corpus: the work of Abu Tammam. After a general introduction which is meant to put the poet and his production in the right historical and socio-cultural context, different aspects of his conservatism are dealt with (e.g. poetic register, archaism, dialectism), before introducing the concept of 'foregrounding' which will provide the rest of the analysis with Its theoretical framework. According to this principle, a work of art in general is marked by its deviation from norms. Such deviation is behind the element of interest and surprise which gives significance and value to a piece of art. In Abu Tammam's poetry, the foregrounded feature occurs in the form of parallelism or a deviation, and in both cases, it is picked out by the reader who will interpret it in relation to the background of the expected linguistic pattern. In the analysi...