The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture

by Abdelfattah Kilito

Michael Cooperson's translation makes Abdelfattah Kilito's masterpiece available to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Called the most inventive and provocative critic of Arabic literature writing in the Middle East today, Kilito opens our perception with the same breadth of vision, seeking to define the traditional and historical forces that bind one writer to another and that inextricably link an author to a text. This volume benefits from Cooperson's accomplished translation. While rigorously precise, it also allows the wit and humor and the lyricism of Kilito's prose full expression. Drawing on major themes of classical Arabic literature, the essays use simple, poetic language to argue that genre, not authorship, is the single most important feature of classical works. Kilito discusses love poetry and panegyric, the Prophet's Hadith, and the literary anecdote, as well as offering novel readings of recurrent themes such as memorization, plagiarism, forgery, and dream visions of the dead.

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

See also عبد الفتاح كيليطو

Abdelfattah Kilito is a well known Moroccan writer. He was born in Rabat in 1945. He is the author of several books in Arabic and in French. He has also written articles for magazines like Poétique and Studia Islamica. Some of the awards Kilito has won are the Great Moroccan Award (1989), the Atlas Award (1996), the French Academy Award (le prix du Rayonnement de la langue française) (1996) and Sultan Al Owais Prize for Criticism and Literature Studies (2006).

Reviews

[Paul Kerschen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hyperbolic author functions: plagiarism (the tangent) versus forgery (the arctangent). The authentic pre-Islamic ode cannot be nailed down. More tricks from al-Jāḥiẓ, who steals his material, has his material stolen, pretends to have stolen his material just to throw people off.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dead are peaceful. It is the living who are restive, who demand the dead’s testimony.

[dathomira]

useful for historical basis of hadith and poetry and their interaction in classical arabic literary culture.

[Oumaima Hassoun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Et si l'écriture était une légende? Et si la philologie n'était pas une science ?
Et si Taha Hussein avait raison quand il a dit "ليس هناك شعر جاهلي؟"