Stylistics and Curriculum Construction Criteria: A Reading of Selected Examples of Contemporary Arabic Poetry

Abstract

Every approach to critical analysis has its own distinctive features upon which the researcher and critic construct their vision and determine the extent of its effectiveness in addressing the discourse they seek to critique and analyze. The stylistic approach stands as one of the linguistic approaches endowed with exceptional capacity for reading the text and probing its depths through linguistic and phonetic phenomena. It is one of the structuralist approaches that dealt with the text as a fortress closed upon its inhabitants, never going beyond its language, which is considered its most important and most prominent artistic component. The present study has adopted the stylistic approach in order to identify, through it, the features and characteristics of the contemporary Arabic poem, in an attempt to reproduce its significations and to deduce the differences between it and other poems of bygone eras. Since the studies and researches that addressed the Arabic poem through criticism and analysis guided by the steps of the stylistic approach have fallen short of reading the symbolic dimensions latent in each level of stylistic criticism, this study comes to unveil that, in order to complete what others have left incomplete.