Playing with words: The ethnography of poetic genres in Yemen.

The continuous tension between poetic creativity, social norms, and literary traditions that set the rules for textual production and interpretation has shaped the Yemeni history of poetic production. Acting as a unitary language, literary traditions tend to unify poetic practices, working against creative tendencies to revolutionize poetic language. I examine such tension through the ethnography of three genres: qasida, humayni, and free verse, each having its own stylistic devices for conceptualizing its vision of reality. What are the cultural norms, the educational regimes, and modes of textual production that engender each of these genres? Cultures define their authoritative utterances that set the tone of artistic and scientific works which are continuously cited and imitated. In jurisprudence culture where official texts are produced through analogy, poetry is seen as a craft and qasida as a model text from which other texts are generated. In such context, claims to inspiration express assertions to creativity and attempts to move poetic production from realm of science into that of imagination. In pleasure culture, the intertwining of poetry and music open the poetic text to improvisation and to departure from qasida traditions linguistically, rhythmically, and thematically, constituting a lyric genre of love and eroticism, known as humayni. Modern verse constitutes a rupture with literary traditions. The autonomy of the aesthetic from the moral, the change in the medium of poetic transmission from the oral to the written, and the ascendancy of prose genres allow for experimentation and appropriateness of aesthetic techniques associated with other literary genres. Loyalties to poetic genres are banners of identification with special social arenas and, as such, political conflict and historical transformations are played out in poetic contests. The choice of poetic genres is socially conditioned and dependent on the poets' sense of themselves and of their readers or listeners. In a context where genre loyalty speaks volumes and is critically judged, how is this multiplicity dealt with by the poet in his production and performance? How do these genres interact and how, in the process of interacting, are they redefined?Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsMiddle Eastern literatureRhetoricSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124113/2/3001056.pd