Critical Vision: Systems of Meaning and Shifts in Consciousness

The book “Critical Vision: Systems of Meaning and Shifts in Consciousness (From the Critique of Criticism to Textual Distance),” authored by Dr. Sumaya Muhammad Tleis, published by Arab Scientific Publishers, Inc., 2026.
Between the critique of criticism and the critique of the text, researcher Dr. Sumaya Muhammad Tleis, in her book titled “Critical Vision: Systems of Meaning and Shifts in Consciousness (From the Critique of Criticism to Textual Distance),” proposes new critical approaches to how Arab literary discourse should be read. This means that this book opens up the field of Arab critical study to conceptual and procedural horizons that will change the Arab critical perspective on receiving poetic and literary texts, starting from comparison, contrast, deconstruction of concepts and terminology, and their precise definition within their methodological and functional limits. Perhaps this book, with its rich references and modern horizons, offers clarifications and corrections rarely found in other specialized books; had this book appeared years ago, it would have provided a great service to criticism, critics, and the literary scene in general.

The author introduced her work with a definition, stating: "Criticism became involved in a "Westernizing" movement after its transformation from an act of questioning to an act of alienated methodological application, and from a means of understanding the text to an end in itself; and after the intellectual's transformation from a rising consciousness that produces its concepts and looks to the future, to merely a short-term, consumed memory that repeats the sayings of others and becomes embroiled in an inability to innovate an original theory that suits the fluidity of the Arab text and answers its unsettling questions.
Therefore, I present this humble work as an effort that seeks to be part of the open dialogue about the position of Arab criticism in the present and future, through reading from within the problematic issues of Arab intellectual thought and the foundations of the literary vision to ascertain the effectiveness of human consciousness within it; the consciousness that grows whenever we dare to ask difficult questions and challenge established assumptions, to establish modern intellectual, cultural, and exploratory projects. This will only be achieved after rebuilding the tools of critical thinking, as the issue has moved beyond "what is said" to "how it is said," and what its basis is when it is said, and "to whom it is said"; all of this far from believing that modernity is a Western moment that we must imitate."

This work is divided into two sections:
Section One: Inquiries into the Critique of Arab Criticism: From the Resumption of the Era of Consciousness to its Contemporary Conceptual Outcomes.
Section Two: Interrogating the Text: Poetry and the Novel Between the Junctures of Modernity and Penetration. These two sections include a number of research papers and articles united by a singular vision, the dialectic of questioning, and the condition of contemporary intellectual and cultural existence.

The book was introduced with a critical reading by the Lebanese writer and critic Salman Zein El Din, who stated: "There is a great critical effort revealed by this book, distributed between the critique of criticism, in both its theoretical and applied forms, on the one hand, and the critique of the text, in both its study and article forms, on the other. Dr. Sumaya Tleis, in this effort, utilizes the aforementioned skills, both subjective and objective, and engages in processes of reading, interpretation, analysis, comparison, inference, conclusion, and reaching certain findings. However, during the exercise of these intellectual processes, she uses multiple methodologies, ranging from cultural analysis, philosophical approach, structural comparison, cultural method, and others, and may combine several methodologies in a single research, which places us before a methodical criticism adorned with the subjectivity of the critical self, where the objective mixes with the subjective, without this mixture compromising critical integrity. This criticism is in a state between two states, where the critic carefully avoids falling into one of two pitfalls: she neither sinks into the depths of academic over-sophistication nor floats on the surface of transient impressionism. Thus, we are faced with a mature critical text, which is both beneficial and enjoyable to engage with..."