Within the series of critical sessions supervised and directed by Dr. Abdulhak Belabed, Professor of Literature Issues, Critical and Comparative Studies at Qatar University,

On Monday evening, the Qatari Forum for Authors hosted the researcher, academic and translator Dr. Nour Al-Hoda Badis, a specialist in criticism, rhetoric and literary theories from the University of Tunis, to discuss “the problem of pronunciation and meaning to the formations of critical discourse analysis.”

Dr. Badis said that she tried, throughout the university’s scope, to establish a large and integrated project to re-read the heritage and Arabic rhetoric in order to try to renew and revive it through several research papers issued over more than two decades, as her works were among the founding works, and a basic starting point and equivalent to all works in the field of issues of pronunciation and meaning in various sciences,

This is by trying to interrogate traditional texts in different specializations, considering that every work tries to transcend history and to stand at the articulated stage, and turning points in a transformed context, which is called the rhetorical turn, and she emphasized that in the context of her search for the relationship of the word with the meaning, it stood on the collective origin.

It is the concept of the statement and the theory of the statement in the Arab heritage, and important texts were adopted by Al-Jahiz, Al-Jarjani and other known rhetoricians to stand for harmony to find a thin line that connects the various stages and the various writers.

She explained that the seeds of the theory of the relationship between word and meaning were present in the ancient texts that is controlled by the meaning, which leads to clarity, visibility and lack of ambiguity, which confirms the importance of clarity and significance in rhetoric, which is in, turn, reflected in the meanings of the text and discourse.

She explained that the law governing creative studies at various levels is a statement, whether in ancient or modern literature, stressing that there is an intertwining between the various fields, which facilitated its transfer from one work to another.

 

Dr. Badis went on to explain her thesis by saying that it is not possible to know the extent of creativity in a specific text except by comparing it with other creative texts, which is reflected in the miraculous discourse of the Jarjani, and that the oral mind produced the major races and then came the written mind, considering that oral rhetoric is linked to a certain period of time, not everything oral is clear and concise.

She explained that there are two types of the first metaphor, the superficial, the meaning of which becomes clear once it is read, and we refer directly to the signified, and the second metaphor is the metaphor of depth, which can be distinguished between them through the difference between oral and written literary writings (Maqamat), given that the oral field does not tolerate error, hesitation, review and deletion while the text enters us in vertical rhetoric.

In her research in this context, she concluded that the oral sphere that appears to be illusory in that it is not based on parts of meaning, it is in fact dependent on the speaker’s possession of a political, social and psychological culture, which makes the speech in a relationship of communication with rhetoric that is witnessing development, revitalization and re-resurgence in the light of developments and context, and from here it can be said that the discourse is at the core of the issues of rhetoric, confirming that modern oralism differs significantly from the oral tradition of old writers.

She indicated that the summary could be dense in terms of meaning and a complex that needs depth, as the new technical media is a form of new orality based on contexts and conditions that accept and create new ones.

She called on researchers to reconsider the ancient Arabic texts to understand them in light of discourse science and in light of the deliberative linguistic theories that we are witnessing today without falling into exaggerated projections, so that they do not vanish, and the sciences do not freeze and maintain their renewal through modern readings and approaches.

Rhetoric is a means of thinking and expression and a mechanism for management, so that most rhetoricians returned to the search for the question of essence without trying to find a final answer that ends the research, putting into consideration that research on rhetoric is a continuous and progressive process whose importance derives from what is related to the question not to the answer.