꾸다마 이븐 자으파르의『 시 비평』연구

A Study on Naqdal-Shi‘r of Qudāmah ibn Ja‘far

This article aims to understand Arabic literary criticism through Naqd al-Shi‘r of Qudāmah ibn Ja‘far. In Naqd al-Shi‘r, Qudāmah, he defined poetry as ‘expressions that communicate through meter and rhyme.’ He explained and defined the notions of word, meter, rhyme and meaning through examples. Further, he explained the different combinatorial pairs (such as meaning and meter, or meaning and rhyme) as in mathematics. Pointing out that existing works of Arabic literature criticism are not well systemized or regularized, he organized a list of technical terms and featured poems whose quality lie between abysmal and excellent. Aristotle tried several ideas of regularization in Poetics and Rhetoric. Such regularization – whether it was targeted at poetic image or rhetoric discourse — is a result of scientific thinking. Establishment and categorization of such notions had an undeniable influence on the field of Arabic literature. Qudāmah also pursued regularization and categorized poems of varying quality. Such pursuit was the first of its kind in the history of Arabic literary criticism. Qudāmah saw criticism as an aesthetic tool and accepted as technology the transformation of thoughts to expressions, which expedited the development of Arabic literary criticism.