Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Cognitive Reading of the Qurʾanic Story of Joseph
- 2 Joseph in the Life of Muḥammad: Prophecy in Tafsīr (Exegesis), Sīrah (Biography) and Hadith (Tradition)
- 3 Joseph and his Avatars
- 4 Intertextuality and Reading: The Myth of Deliverance in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah
- 5 Imposture and Allusion in the Picaresque Maqāmah
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Anagnorisis in Arabic Falsafah
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Appendix: Anagnorisis in Arabic Falsafah
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Cognitive Reading of the Qurʾanic Story of Joseph
- 2 Joseph in the Life of Muḥammad: Prophecy in Tafsīr (Exegesis), Sīrah (Biography) and Hadith (Tradition)
- 3 Joseph and his Avatars
- 4 Intertextuality and Reading: The Myth of Deliverance in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah
- 5 Imposture and Allusion in the Picaresque Maqāmah
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Anagnorisis in Arabic Falsafah
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Arabic translation for anagnorisis varies in two fundamentally distinct contexts: (1) medieval Arab translators and commentators on the Poetics, writing within the philosophical tradition of Aristotelian falsafah, used the term istidlāl (occasionally also dalālah); (2) contemporary Arab scholars of literature discussing recognition as a device in narrative or drama tend to translate anagnorisis, where it has become a general concept of the epistemology of narrative, as taʿarruf (see, e.g. Kilito's discussion of anagnorisis in al-Ḥarīrī's fifth maqāmah and ʿAyyād's eloquent rendering into contemporary Arabic of Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus's earliest surviving tenth-century AD Arabic translation of the Poetics); in some cases, where ‘recognition’ is understood in a distended sense as ‘discovery’, either kashf or the more temporally specific laḥẓat al-iktishāf (moment of discovery), may convey the basic sense of anagnorisis (see al-Zayyāt).
Thus a full technical account of anagnorisis in Arabo-Islamic culture should address both:
1. the understanding of anagnorisis among the falāsifah who were working under the erroneous impression, inherited from Simplicius (fl. 533 ad) or earlier, that the Poetics were, like the Rhetoric, part of the Organon and thus one of the instrumental sciences – (a move that contextualises the Poetics within a broadened field of logic in which the purpose of poetry is to produce artful representations through the imaginative syllogism); and,
2. the intuitive use of anagnorisis in its true or proximate Aristotelian sense among Arab authors showing that as a narrative device it is intrinsic to all literary traditions.
Aristotle discussed anagnorisis chiefly in chapters 6, 11, and 16 of the Poetics. Chapter 6 states tersely: ‘the most important devices by which tragedy sways emotion are parts of the plot, i.e. reversals and recognitions’. It is not until chapter 11 that Aristotle defines what he means in this critical phrase: ‘as the term indicates, [anagnorisis] is a change from ignorance to knowledge, disclosing either a close relationship or enmity, on the part of the people marked out for good or bad fortune. Recognition is best when it occurs simultaneously with a reversal, like the one in the Oedipus.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Recognition in the Arabic Narrative TraditionDiscovery, Deliverance and Delusion, pp. 318 - 327Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016