Abstract

This article provides a meta-critical investigation of the limitations of Egyptian criticism, which has not been able to categorize modernist poetry and, therefore, has become increasingly hostile toward it. I argue that the crisis Arab critics often reference does not refer to a literature in crisis, but to criticism’s failure to theorize about a literature whose main concern has shifted into addressing the crises of the postcolonial state. It is a crisis of a criticism that maintains rigid connections to the theories in which it grounds itself and establishes impermeable boundaries among literature, criticism, and non-literary disciplines. It is a crisis generated by the absence or short supply of meta-critical and theoretical writings that evaluate, critique, and revise the dominant critical discourses.