Rhetoric in visual arabic poetry: from the Mamluk period to the digital age

Résumé

Rhetoric has been of great importance in philosophy, criticism and literature since Aristotle, through the Golden Age of Arabic studies and down to modern literary trends. Rhetoric is tightly bound with literary texts in all their manifestations and artistic, literary and analytic gradations. There are three aspects of rhetoric in every literary text of whatever type. One of these has to do with content, that is, with the author's ability to convince the receiver by alternately addressing his mind through logic and proofs and his heart by arousing in him feelings of desire and dread. This aspect of rhetoric is know in Arabic as ?ilm al-bay?n (rhetoric in the strict sense). Another aspect concerns style, that is, a writer's ability to manipulate words and create novel linguistic modes through the use of metaphors, similes and other devices, which in Arabic is called ?ilm al-bad?? ("the science of metaphors and good style"). The third aspect concerns form, that is, the text's structure, its forms and icons. This is known as al-bal?gha al-ba?riyya ("visual eloquence"). Although there are various distinct types of bal?gha ("eloquence, good style, rhetoric in the general sense"), they all have one purpose, namely to affect the receiver in some way.