Goldmann's Structuralism: Philosophy and Reception

Author: Dr. Mahrous Mahmoud Al-Qali

In this book, I do not claim to offer a new guide to critical work, theoretically or practically, nor do I play the role of an eloquent preacher proficient in their tools. What I discuss in this book represents a case study of personal struggle in reading theoretical and applied critical works, or rather, the struggle of a long-standing reading of Arab critical output in the field of Lucien Goldmann's genetic (developmental) structuralism. Therefore, the case presented in this book represents a stage in the theoretical and applied literary criticism in Egypt, the Levant, and other Arab countries, where we attempt to provide a description of the state of Arab literary criticism and its critics at the time of the theory's reception. We stand—with some helplessness—to describe the horizon of the theory's reception in the Arab world, to measure the distance of reception between the source and the branch, and to evaluate the extent of changes that affected the source during its transfer to a new Arab cultural field, which operates under the accidental control of reading, the brilliance of selection, and the incompleteness of the image. This type of reading in the source and the branch led us to discover a type of passive reception that revealed the reasons for the incompleteness of any critical methodology imported to us in our Arab world, and here I speak of the tampering with the philosophical source and the documentation that in some aspects rises to academic integrity. I ask the reader to find an excuse, as it was impossible to read the Arab output and present it in a comprehensive form in one book. This is what I will prepare later—God willing—.