With the participation of the owners of three creative experiences in poetry, novel and children's literature, the session "The Current Reality of Literary Criticism" discussed, within the activities of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, which concluded its activities yesterday, a number of problems, and reviewed the writer's concerns in the absence of institutional support and serious criticism.
The session was attended by: Ali Al Shaali, the Emirati poet and founder of Dar Al Hudhud for Publishing and Distribution, and Hussein Al Mutawa, the Kuwaiti writer and photographer who won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award - Children's Literature Branch for the year 2019 for his book “I dream to be a cement mixer”, and the novelist Reem Al Kamali, owner of the Sultanate of Hormuz "And the" Dalma Statue ".
Emirati writer Turki Al-Zaabi, who managed the dialogue between speakers and guests in a smooth manner, started the discussion by touching on the reality of literature in its relationship to criticism, and the extent to which creative work was affected by the levels of criticism.
Hussein Al-Mutawa presented a historical basis for the meaning of criticism, which he considered is still governed by the old concept on which Arab criticism was based, based on the idea of distinguishing good from bad, and finding a single standard for this idea, referring to the dialectical relationship between the literary text that preceded criticism, which came as an attempt to extract and dismantle And reading literary texts, depending on Plato's theory of simulation, and the attempts of structural, deconstructive, and semiotic schools to understand the literary text through its terms and rules. He considered that the question of literary criticism at the present time lies in the attempt of some to subject the text to the authority of strict literary criticism.
For his part, Ali al-Shaali pointed to the misconceptions circulating about criticism, in return for his role in revealing the precious and precious of the literary texts presented, explaining the erroneous popular understanding of the term criticism away from historical rooting, which led to the writer's aversion to it at a time when it is supposed to be Criticism is the disclosure of beauty points, the anatomy of the text in a way that is commensurate with what the people of this “workmanship” have reached, and the tools the critic has learned of the text’s subject to allow him to explore its depths.
Al-Shaali saw that the mechanism of criticism between poetry and the novel is the same and relates to analyzing the text and communicating it to the recipient correctly. He continued: «I want to see my text with real criticism, and to verify that I have succeeded in conveying the required meaning, and here we must recognize that the author works with one hand and strives to enrich the scene versus the critic who works with the principle of rapid criticism, or the vulgar praise that does not add anything to the literary text, And does not raise the level of public taste.
Working
For its part, Reem Al-Kamali emphasized the absence of an actual monetary movement, and the absence of work on Emirati literature except from some Arab critics present in the country, in exchange for the absence of the Emirati critic, which presented her often to subjective criticism that reached the limits of defamation at times She asked, "I do not know why there is no effective critical work by critics on an academic and scientific scale?", Which Kuwaiti writer Hussein Al-Mutawa commented on, emphasizing the necessity for real Arab monetary institutions, and studies institutions specializing in social and psychological sciences, similar to Schools of criticism in the rest of the world J, which is inseparable from the reality of society and addressed by literary works subject to the conditions set strict.
Ali al-Shaali stopped when the writer tried in the field of Western publishing industry, to liberate from any kind of authority and to cancel the mediator between the writer and the public, due to the latter's feeling that the publisher is practicing a kind of gagging on the text away from the technical and linguistic justification that cannot be argued either by the writer or Critic or audience.
Creating and solving a problem
Through her fictional experience, Reem Al-Kamali stopped working as a writer on fiction and language, considering that the literary novel is the art of creating a problem and the talent to search for a solution, using models from the personalities that she presented in her open works on the door of questions and possibilities.