Literary theory is often regarded as a twentieth century invention, with no precedents prior to modernity. This deeply seated perception relegates older discourses on literature to the status of source material, pertaining to literature’s past, rather than as springboards for literature’s future. Drawing on the rich resources of premodern rhetoric and literary theory from the Islamic world from 11th to the 19th century, GlobalLIT shows how Persian, Arabic, and Turkic literary-theoretical traditions shape the ways in which texts from these worlds were read and translated.
The empirical foundation for GlobalLIT is its focus on premodern rhetorical texts and treatises, including especially the catalogues of literary tropes and devices that governed much discussion around premodern poetry across the Islamicate world. Broadly, our material corresponds to balagha, the premodern discipline encompassing rhetoric and literary critics, which shaped how Persian, Arabic, and Turkic poetry was read as assessed before modernity. While this empirical body of work comprised much of our translational activity during the course of this project, our aims were also conceptual. We aspired to challenge the dominances of Eurocentric literary theory and to gain a better understanding of how premodern texts were read and appreciated in the original contexts within which they were conceived.
In a time when the discipline of literary studies has, according to many reports, is losing its relevance for contemporary existence, GlobalLIT demonstrates the ongoing relevance of premodern rhetorical traditions for contemporary culture across the Muslim world. We identify the questions and concerns that drove literary critics from the medieval and early modern periods and examine how they conceived of their task, and how they conceived of literature. GlobalLIT considers the aesthetic standards that inform the work of critics in times past. In so doing, it helps contemporary literary critics to critically reflect on the assumptions that we bring to the act of reading.
During the years of its activity, from 2018 to 2024, GlobalLIT made significant headway in developing an approach to literary theory that is not beholden to Eurocentric literary paradigms. We did so by generating extensive case studies of the translation of literary-theoretical and rhetorical traditions from Arabic into Persian and from Persian into Turkic languages. We demonstrated the profound role played by translation in shaping the paradigms through which poetic texts were assessed and read across the premodern Islamicate world. While advancing a post-Eurocentric literary theory, we also managed to shed light on a number of literary texts that had hitherto been marginal to existing literary canons (Tahmasebian, “Arbitrary Constellations,” 2021; Gould, “The Antiquarian Imagination in Multilingual Daghestan,” 2021).
In an increasingly monolingual world, there is tremendous value for society in research that demonstrates the creative role played by translation in generating literary form. Beyond demonstrating the innovative extensions to existing understandings of literary tropes that translation helped to bring about, we also develop an account of translation that is inclusive and relevant to a multitude of literary and non-literary discourses. For the premodern critics we study, translation was an imprecise art that realized its creative potential in translational encounters that were deemed untranslatable or otherwise resistant to translation (Gould and Tahmasebian, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, 2020). The practice of rendering a text from one language to another was an occasion to generate a new approach to literature and to discover latent potentials in the target language.
