Critical Theory and Cultural History Problematic of Absence of Cultural Referentiality in Arab Criticism

Abstract

This research paper investigates the relationship between modern literary and cultural theory and history of European culture. It also examines a specific question such as how did this relationship affect, or reflected by, the nature of Arab critical practices? My research paper supposes that while such modern Arab critical practices have produced many of its positive results it also has other negative traces which especially appeared in modern Arabic blog during last two decades of the twentieth century.

Most of modern Arab critics have already succeeded in establishing critical readings and approaches through expendable and epistemological perspectives, and simultaneously they have also produced some misunderstandings, conceptual chaos referring to a lack of awareness of understanding nature of cultural references and historical contexts that formed in their Western theoretical space, and their false ambition to combine different theories, concepts or methods in only one study. Those negative phenomena really require to be studied and investigated under the title of critique of criticism. It also pushes the contemporary researcher to relocate the modern literary and critical theory in the origin of their cultural referentiality which belongs to European cultural history.

The absence of this kind of critical and cultural practice will inevitably accelerate the crisis of theory in its Arabic aspects and maximize its disconnection from Western paradigmatic contexts. Moreover, this will lead to more cognitive chaos, and finally, conclude a loss of specific nature of Arabic text which may become more attractive for non-systematic and non-methodological approaches.