“THE reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, quipped Mark Twain when a newspaperman informed him about his obituary published in a newspaper. Of late, the rumours about the death of Urdu literature and Urdu criticism have been circulating and many were visibly shocked. But when young chaps like Qasim Yaqoob come forward with a couple of books on literary theory and critical analysis it is time to rejoice because it means that the news of death of Urdu literature and criticism are “totally baseless and fabricated” — as goes the stock response on such rumours.

In Urdu, we have had since long a steady flow of books that explain what literature is and how it can be interpreted. Those books on literary criticism tell us about different critical theories and different schools of literary criticism. Most of them, however, are mum when it comes to ‘literary theory’ and some of the other new ideas concerning literary criticism — such as stylistics and structuralism — as most of these books were written in the last century.

Understanding literature and its true nature requires some method and a set of principles. These methods and principles are known as literary theory. Rather than explaining what literature means, literary theory explains what literature can mean.

In other words, literary theory is a means to know what literature is and how literary texts can be interpreted. The term literary theory is also used in other disciplines that concern reading of texts and is often referred to as ‘theory’. Most of the modern literary criticism is based on literary theory. Though literary criticism dates back to Plato and Aristotle, the modern concepts related to literary theory (or theory, as some prefer) crystallised only in the 20th century, especially under the influence of structuralist literary notions.

‘Adabi theory’ is the new book that offers some authentic articles on literary theory, poetics and criticism. Written by some of the most well-known scholars, these articles explain what theory is and how modern literary schools of thought, such as structuralism and postmodernism, theorize literary and critical principles. Gopi Chand Narang in his introduction to the book has rightly praised Qasim Yaqoob, the young scholar from Faisalabad, who has compiled these articles in a book form. Qasim Yaqoob has briefly introduced in his preface the idea of literary theory and its meaning. He says that literary theory is a way of understanding the literary process that changes reason, imagination and emotions into a piece of literature. Literary theory, he adds, avoids value judgment as it is objective and principle-based while traditional criticism is given to value judgment.

The Russian Formalism was the earliest attempt to understand and theorize the literary process and later, writes Qasim Yaqoob, the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes helped shape literary theories of post-structuralism. The book, published by Karachi’s City Book Point, includes articles by Wazeer Agha, Gopi Chand Narang, Qazi Afzal Hussain, Nasir Abbas Nayyar and some other bigwigs. It will indeed be helpful for students and general readers who want to understand postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism as well as Saussure’s linguistic ideas that define language as a structure.

Another book edited by Qasim Yaqoob discusses the branch of literary criticism known as stylistics. Known as ‘usloobiyaat’ in Urdu, stylistics is a method of analysing literary works on the basis of linguistic features and styles. Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics that employs morphology, syntax, phonetics and semantics to analyse literary works. Though in eastern literatures there has been a tradition of analysing the texts on the basis of principles of rhetoric, prosody and other compositional techniques, stylistics does so on the basis of linguistic science. The voluminous book, published by City Book Point, is divided into different sections that deal with the basic concept of style, the modern concepts of stylistics, the literary criticism based on stylistics and the applied stylistics.

The articles included are by some of the authorities on literary styles and stylistics, such as Syed Abdullah, Hasan Askari, Aal-e-Ahmed Suroor, Ehtisham Hussain, Mumtaz Hussain, Wazeer Agha, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Gopi Chand Narang, Masood Hussain Khan, Mirza Khalil Ahmed Baig and many others.

While the book on stylistics helps understand how these principles are practically applied as a section in the book describes it with examples from Urdu literature, one fails to understand how the principles of postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism apply to Urdu literature, as most of the books on the issue discuss the theory and rarely if ever any example is given from Urdu literature.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2017