Arabic literary studies lack a theory that addresses motive as a force that drives structural transformation. Until now, scholars have depended on ritual theory to delineate and define the integral components of the traditional Arabic qasidah. While ritual theory employs a structuralist lens to decipher meaning embedded in a poem’s structural conventions and motifs, its rigid framework falls silent on the question of motive. This paper contends that motive is critical to both the reproduction and innovation of poetic structures that hold the potential to determine modes of expression. Drawing from Silvan Tomkins’s primary motive and script theory, along with Sara Ahmed’s affective economies, I argue that affect and emotion function as primary motives that can drive, or halt, structural innovation in Arabic poetry. Specifically, I examine liminal poets who composed during major epochal change. The transition from the pre-Islamic era to the Islamic era was fraught with emotional and existential crises that placed poets at odds with their own poetic heritage. Poetry is the manifestation of these crises in textual form. While the sheer nature of this poetry’s textuality poses extensive challenges to addressing issues of motive, theories of affect and emotion at least begin by folding the question into its purview and take seriously the power of affect and emotion in transforming and hindering structural transformations within literary traditions.
Rawad Wehbe studies Arabic poetry, poetics, and literary theory. His dissertation explores the relationship between formal innovation and affect in the poetry and lives of Arabic poets who find themselves at the precipice of epochal change. Rawad enjoys teaching and literary translation but needs to prioritize dissertation writing to finish next year.