Streams in Arab Literary Criticism

1.    Introduction Citation: Entehaa Abbas Aliwi. 2026. Streams in Arab Literary Criticism. Social Lens 3(1), 32-35. Copyright: © 2026 by the authors. Submitted for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license

The Arab critic has precedence in their criticizing his texts through the recipient critic who derived from specialist readers in their criticism of literary, poetic, historical, and cinematic texts. This is a unique phenomenon, especially if we consider it. We saw that the critic tends to use a narrative style in presenting his work, taking several multiple expressive outlets and means to achieve his goal of broadcasting his psychological suffering. Thus, he uses a literary title indicating the romanticism of the scene, not the criticality of the text that contributed its part in a camp of critical exchange of some literary works, according to its own foundations and laws. This confirms the meaning that criticism (‘text on text’) attempts to establish critical traditions of importance and benefit, by presenting the literary text as a message launched by writers at a historical moment burdened with frustration. This critical scene needs in-depth studies according to the procedural uses of the tools of Arab criticism on new techniques and serious expressive means in literary discourses (poetry and prose) with hierarchical structures. This is in an enlightening moment in which the culture of the alternative rushes to a conscious peak, and cultural discourses convey the highest stages of the text’s allusive contextuality away from the burden of Arab criticism.

Attention to linguistic structures and manipulating sentence states through certain techniques. The most prominent of these are postponement connected to the psychological and emotional state; emphasis used to increase affirmation in the presence of fluctuation and instability; oath as support for emphasis; and separation and connection mastering the linking and leaving of sentences, showing the stylistics of praise in composing texts. Interrogation was used to move the addressee’s mind and shift the question from its original meaning to other figurative meanings such as wonder and alerting. The styles of command and prohibition directed counsel, reflecting the weakness and softness and lack of domination on the reins of judgement. Finally, vocative style showed its effect in sermons by drawing the attention of addressees, occurring in different expressions as well. The spontaneity of skill in critical streams in Arabic literature reinforced the artistic value of styles that revealed the critics’ brilliance, breadth of culture, precision of sense, and richness of critical reservoir, as they often tended toward employing it in their textual contexts. Critical streams include diverse oral forms that are classified generally within the diversity of arts and their various forms, with their close connection to the contents of their topics that formed prominent phenomena of development in traditional critical culture. Critical streams are a fertile critical phenomenon that occupied a wide space in many sources of Arabic literature, and abundant material from it is available from books. Attention to them through collection, classification, explanation, and documentation constitute a promising field for further efforts on this topic, and specialized literary and critical studies can follow other issues such as the reception of its texts or its effect on studying narrative structures in literary texts.

The nature of the artistic use of critical streams is linked with linguistic skill and rhetorical taste with stylistic phenomena that reflected the specificity of critical performance and its artistry, indicating the speaker’s aim and the addressee’s state. It reflects a high level of eloquence and critical ability enabling suitability in speech between the meanings expressed and the styles used in their performance. It highlights components of beauty in different manifestations of critical deviation that forms a stylistic feature in verbal and semantic ornamentation in their critical formulations, so that their speech rose to high degrees of criticism and refined literature.

The research explored the Arab criticism streams as a cognitive, cultural and aesthetic toll, and its role in developing recipient’s aesthetic sense, and acquiring skills in artistic analysis for critical reading. The study aligns with significant changes in cognitive perception of poetic methods, considering them a platform that can be read in multiple ways.

2.    Methodology

The study used the descriptive analytical method, based on collecting information from relevant sources to build the theoretical framework of research and deductive analytical method to explore relevant intellectual and critical literature.

Stream One: Journalistic Criticism

Journalistic criticism is a key characteristic of the required change that arises, quite strangely, from a simple naming. It is one of the key aspects of the practice of press freedom, due to its ability to reveal the benefits of journalistic work. The old journalistic criticism, which requires replacement, continues in comparison as the new criticism. New criticism understood as a counterpart to artistic criticism, is broadly concerned with a series of referential statements that grant the journalistic text itself a precise analytical reading, without an explicit reference to any specific method. As a result of that critical intelligence, the newspaper consists of presentation and the precise organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form, and approve the stylistic features that reinforce these means. This reading never goes outside the journalistic text to legitimize its ideas (Jamal Jasim 2009).

Interpretive data on which the term ‘journalistic criticism’ is based, is actually a media study that seeks to shape political, economic, social, and entertainment media works. Thus, journalistic criticism is the evaluation of professional practices and then interpreting and analyzing them through rules related to the media system, in addition to evaluating the contents of the journalistic discourse, its style, and its journalistic means. Journalistic criticism reveals uniqueness, power, and durability far from ordinary speech. Nevertheless, the motivation to represent that strength and permanence affects us and requires us to transform journalistic criticism into communication and reduce its strangeness (Nihad Al-Takrli 1979).

It thus becomes a principal element in planning our literature and criticism suitable for our civilization. The distinctive contribution of journalistic criticism lies, in reality, in its acknowledgement of the nature of these forms and their applications in a pure manner to the mind of reading and writing; their function in the process of foundation, the development of appropriate discovery methods, and the consolidation of the concept of literary capability that can generate all the elements of the edifice. For reading journalistic texts, this capability allows to make the journalistic text meaningful, and to make journalistic language speak rather than the person: written works, not authors.

This truth lies in the concentrated focus on the nature of journalistic writing as a social institution and the nature of reading as a social activity (Mohsen Jasim Al-Mousawi). The basic principle of journalistic criticism is that signifiers are worthy of consideration without being bound to the written text, toward coherent response. It gives a new role and a new description to the critic: it makes him a contributor to the work he reads. The critic creates the accomplished work through his reading and then rewriting it in light of his own vision. He does not remain merely a consumer of a ready-made product. Thus, the journalistic critic does not need to erase himself humbly before the work and submit to its requirements. On the contrary, he actively constructs its meaning. We are not yet able to recognize, in a distinctive way, the nature of ‘journalistic criticism’ on which we rely.

Stream Two: Historical Criticism

This is what is called ‘higher criticism’ and is considered one of the branches of literary analysis, through verifying the origin of texts. It also verifies holy books and specializes in critical collection and chronological arrangement of source texts. Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, and Brunetière are its pioneers. Thus, historical criticism is based on texts, examining and scrutinizing them to reach historical truth fairly, away from subjectivity (Theory and Cultural Criticism, Dr. Mohsen Jasim Al-Mousawi). So, is it significant for the special activities of reading and writing? Or is it merely delivering a pre-prepared content to readers, or a content-obsessed criticism aimed to present psychological facts of the author and the world behind him, and to confer permanent, tangible, singular meanings to literary works? This historical criticism proposal is achieved with great difficulty, because by our civilized nature we cannot imagine or understand except with great effort, the critical nature of the human being. Responses represent a completely different system with an essential cognitive nature. Rather, there is a need for advanced, mature methods to know the critical facts of history, and then textual criticism, encoding and presenting them, not merely fascinating terms that surround the truth. There is a need for methods to deal with their roots in the general experience of cultural societies representing an acceptable human form, deeply rooted, with lasting impact on creating cultural world specifically. We possess a deeply rooted poetic wisdom to create a cultural critical world rooted in the relations we observe in cultural exchange between countries, and in scientific integrity and precision on the other hand (Abdullah Ibrahim et al. 2005).

There is a premise stating that criticism governs every discourse whatever its type, and its existence is not restricted to literary genres only, and extends to history and cinema. However, it is subject in every genre and every art to the critical laws of that genre or art. It seems that the tradition and criticism in certain literary genres is not harmful, for criticism is subject to development and change. The traditional criticism may be dominant in a certain period or a certain literary school, but it soon weakens in an era that clears the way for another critical formula.

Despite the claim that the critical schools that appeared in the nineteenth century and afterwards, notably structuralism, deconstruction, and semiotics, attempted to rescue the old critical laws and distance them completely from their methodology in order to prevent any serious danger from mixing the two.

Stream Three: Image Criticism

The culture of image criticism is the key example of a relational textual structure (Jamal Jasim Amin 2009). Other cultures have no importance except through interaction with its link. In reality, the randomness itself in the relationship between image criticism and another makes language conservative by its nature. The image defines itself; it is an integrated whole (Jamal Jasim Amin 2009). It is capable of generating other images through a successive and interlinked critique of images (new images), in response to a new society experience (Terence Hawkes 1986). It is a new organization because it does not allow individual arbitration, and constitutes its own truth. The distinctive feature of a true culture of image criticism is that it refers to something specific (Terence Hawkes 1986), and as an explosion of a culture that gains its importance and its critical value.

The meaning communicated by image criticism is simple because it has a greater capacity to perform meaning arising from society (Muhammad Mubarak and Muhammad Al-Dali 1988). There is, however, an ambiguous system between market culture, critical culture and image criticism, especially poetic criticism. The isolation of the intellectual, in its different forms, leads to the narrowing of cultural openness on the pages of newspapers and in closed halls at festivals of rhetoric and stylistics (Rhetoric and Stylistics, Muhammad Abdul Muttalib).

Thus, when we ask what can image criticism culture do? Does it contribute to the study of a society? The distinctive societal characteristics of a culture become very clear, beyond what any single image-piece conveys. The image, after all this, gathers is type of culture viewed through a critical reading of the book of cultural criticism (Critical Reading of the Book Cultural Criticism, Abdul Karim). Being visual in nature, it takes a printed form. Alongside the commitment to visual culture, there will be a commitment to image criticism. Thus, image culture presents to society a direct intellectual character, a literary feature, and a material existence in the artistic critical space.

Stream Four: Cinematic Criticism

Cinematic criticism accompanies poetic production. It is a process of analysis, evaluation, and appreciation of the artistic work in general, and the dramatic and cinematic work in particular. It is therefore a method of observation and writing criticism. Accordingly, the film critic analyzes and deconstructs what happens on the television screen in terms of the scale of shots, the logic of their sequence, and interprets the development of characters. Thus, cinematic criticism is a mediator between the film and the recipient, enabling the recipient to see the cinematic work as an artistic work. It is transformed at the level of literary effect in general. Narration, description, dialogue, and characters can exist in any literary work, whatever its genre. A cinematic artistic image always includes a narrative structure in a distinctive narrative critical movement, including cinematic criticism at the level of the cinematic itself, such as a novel or short story without dialogue, in a cinematic poetics to establish cinematic criticism for the dramatic work.

Arab criticism, both old and new, reflects this phenomenon and confirms its existence. It is sufficient to refer to the seven long odes composed of nearly eighty verses, in which narration and narrated dialogue dominate half of them, while description dominates the other half. Narration and description jointly form cinematic poetic images, from which cinematic criticism then emanates.

In addition, the pioneers of the modern poem are influenced by the Imagist school and Eliot’s poetry, especially in using daily language, drawing the scene through a set of images that attract the recipient, and eliminating cultural unemployment through a critical culture diverse in literary genres. It aims to highlight on areas of critical imbalance in the camp of exchange for some literary works to elevate the technique of criticism (‘text upon text’) for all prose and poetic texts equally. Cinematic criticism needs more than one critical study according to the procedural use of the tools of artistic criticism, and then knowledge of the cinematic critic in new techniques and serious expressive means in literary discourses (poetic and prose) that have hierarchical structures. In such an enlightening moment when the culture of criticism pushes towards a literary and stylistic art, and cultural texts reach the highest level of textual criticism with an allusive degree far from the burden of stereotypical criticism.

Stream Five: Reader-Response Criticism

The abundance of modern critical approaches, resulting multiple artistic critical forms in approaching textual context, by a method that suits textual criticism, leads the reader toward adopting the stylistic method while taking the artistic method within the folds of the study’s sections to address some issues that the context of reader criticism cannot accommodate in vocabulary, ideas, and meanings. Through this combination in addressing artistic and critical issues, while emphasizing the relationship of these phenomena within the framework of their textual interaction, reader-response criticism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s from the United States and Germany. It reflected the role of reader in shaping the meaning of a literary work, especially in the works of Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser. Richards analyzed a set of university student’s incorrect readings at Cambridge University in 1929. Rosenblatt in her book Literature as Exploration (Rosenblatt 1938) emphasized the importance of avoiding the teacher’s imposition of any ‘preconceptions about the correct way to respond to any work’. Lewis clarified his vision in his book An Experiment in Criticism (Lewis 1961). Reader-response theory granted the recipient an important status, as an element capable to confer a ‘real existence’ on the work and concluding through interpretation and interaction with it, through shifting criticism from the author to the text and from the text to the reader by filling gaps, which makes the reader a participant in the creative process and in its social and cultural contexts.

Stream Six: Mythological Criticism

Mythological criticism was not fabricated literary texts, rather, it is a spontaneous product emanating from that reality. It was borne from conditions, situations, events, and occasions of different natures and varying importance. As expression connects with the purpose of understanding, its contextual and critical potential appears in the suitability between the styles and the meanings they perform and express, which increases the meaning’s clarity and gives it beauty.

Mythological and fairy tales have their great narrative for listening and enjoyment. Since this literary type is an art, it must be evaluated. Thus, mythological criticism appeared, which turned to criticizing the textual corpuses that specialized in these subjects. The writer often resorts to these corpuses for political, religious, and cultural reasons in criticizing contemporary Arabic poetry (Ramadan Al-Sabbagh 1998)

The myth is: ‘a tale in which the gods play an essential role’ (Muhammad Al-Saleh 2006). Myth includes the religious, historical, literary, and symbolic aspects, and it includes symbolism, horror literature, fantasy and fable, stories of jinn, superstitions, and the supernatural creatures. Therefore, mythological criticism ‘is based on extrapolating mythological phenomena within creative texts, tracing the sources of the these employed myths, classifying them qualitatively, determining the methods of mythological employment in the creative texts under study, to identify their manifestations within the literary work, and the extent to which they retain their characteristics as a mythological character, incident, or situation, by retaining the minimum essential characteristics, and the extent of their transformation within the literary work’(Hafnaoui Baali 2007). Through deconstructing the text, interpreting it, and reading it within the mythological conception of symbols and imaginative images, through the mythological elements in the work and the mythological element’s ability to take shape in accordance with the creator’s vision and knowledge backgrounds, through symmetry, similarity, analogy, differences, changes, ambiguity, and multiple visions, that the creator can exploit them so that the myth shines in the literary work (Shadia Shaarush n.d.).

Stream Seven: Ethical Criticism

Because most forms of critical creativity in the Arabic literary text are connected to contextual artistic values, critical arts had an active and influential presence in literary texts. This presence reflected interest at the critical level within the binary of the text and the critic, awareness and choice. In the judgments of ethical criticism, it represents a force with effect, excelling in adorning its texts with various kinds and colors of critical arts, with differences among writers in such ethical criticism. It is an ancient and modern critical method that evaluates literary and artistic works based on their moral value and their impact on the social context in spreading higher values. It focuses on judging content, behaviors, and characters in the work according to standards of good and evil. It is rooted in classical Arab criticism and continues as a tool to analyze novels and poetry to guide social values. Thus, it seeks education and refinement of higher values while maintaining the specificity of a culture. This is reflected in their retention of characteristics of inherited artistic performance in different expressive patterns, demonstrating their skill and the originality of nature. Within that cultural specificity, one of the prominent features characterizing ethical criticism is that it evaluates the artistic work on the basis of what humans should be, not just what they are. Therefore, it appears often in the criticism of novels, poems, and even in the criticism of civilizational production in the formulation of speech. That notable presence and the precise employment of many critical embellishments helps highlighting meanings and adding a beautiful touch to ethical criticism, together with the spontaneous nature of their ethical criticism, given what their employment often requires of deliberation and reflection.

3.    Conclusion

Current research explores new cognitive fields in critical studies of Arab Literature, and highlights the analytical dimension in studying critical discourses, textual creativity in beautifying the literary text in all that is subjective, and adding an aesthetic touch that stands on its own. With this vision, Arabic literature is transformed into a set of accepted critical trends. The general direction of criticism, heads towards complexity and ambiguity in the methodological understanding of the Arab reader, far from simple text interaction. This is in addition to the Arab methodology's call to activate critical processes of attentive listening, drawing the attention of the Arab reader, and turning towards a world composed of existing, parallel things subject to an objective view. Current research indicated a temperament motivating literary texts. It highlighted different positions that varied in value and diversified in content, ranging from general views praising the immediate emotional response accompanying reception, indicating enjoyment of listening to writers and rhetoricians and sometimes exploring some characteristics of their literary texts, in addition to some critical insights.The research monitored the most prominent phenomena related to texts, their critical contexts and their analysis. This research is just tip of iceberg for Arabic literature in general and in the right of women orators in particular; and our last supplication is that praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds.