I often think that writing without a lot of clutter and footnotes is the ideal for readable academic prose, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I also derive a lot of pleasure from really top-notch championship-level footnoting. These are my notes from chapter three of my book, which I'm presenting at Cornell next week. It's not quite done — there's a little bit of chapter to be fleshed out and a few footnotes to be fixed before I submit three chapters to the publisher — but it was done enough to circulate before the colloquium; and the footnotes are deeply satisfying.
***
130 Ḥasan ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī. Kitāb al ‘umda fī maḥāsin al-shi‘r, ed.
M. al-Dīn. Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1967.
131 For a setting of Ibn Ezra into
an Arabic poetic context, see Raymond P. Scheindlin. “Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra on
the Legitimacy of Poetry,” Medievalia et
Humanistica 7 (1976): 101-15.
132 Judah al-Ḥarīzī, who will factor into the next
two chapters, left a similar literary footprint in prose composition, using the
full range of Arabic literary models to defend and elevate writing in Hebrew.
133 This is not meant to suggest
that Judah Halevi and Moses ibn Ezra represent anything like the totality of
Arabizing Hebrew poetry or poetics — or even the totality of the form’s
responses to the condition of exile and the status of a minority culture.
However, as poets who were also authors of some of the most significant works
of poetic theory to have emerged from the Andalusi milieu, both in situ and as
they contemplated religious and cultural exile, they are apt as reference
points for contextualizing the Tibbonim as poetic thinkers within both Andalusi
and exilic contexts.
134 For notions of local knowledge and culture, see
Clifford Geertz. Local Knowledge. New
York: Basic Books, 1985. For the foundational statement of polysystem theory
(also referred to as Tel Aviv post-structuralism), see Itamar Even-Zohar.
“Polysystem Theory,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 287-310. It was Rina Drory’s work Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and
its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (originally
published in Hebrew in 1988) that specifically applied polysystem theory to the
Iberian context. In general, I find polysystem theory to be somewhat more
productive than other current theories used for framing and contextualiziang
and organizing our understanding of the cultural history of medieval Iberia. In
particular, it demands particular attention to the elements that make up the polysystem,
thereby yielding precise and detailed text-based readings that can account for
broader cultural phenomena, moreso than theories of cultural hybridity that
draw upon the work of Homi Bhaba in postcolonial studies. As a branch of
post-structuralism, polysystem theory is particularly devoted to breaking down
the binary oppositions of center-periphery and canonical-noncanonical, pairings
that are particularly detrimental to the material within traditional study of
both Semitic- and Romance-language literature in the Maghreb. Entanglement and
itra-actional theory have also become increasingly popular as ways to account
for cultural contact, borrowing, on the basis of the writing of Karen Barad,
from particle physics for metaphyiscal purposes; however, the use of this
theory for explicating cultural contacts outside the realm of the study of
material and manuscript culture is, to my mind, unnecessarily elaborate and its
utility and the benefit of its utility questionable.
135 Qur’ān 12:2, trans. N. J. Dawood.
