@article{Negotiating:1636,
      recid = {1636},
      author = {Blankinship, Kevin Mark},
      title = {Thresholds of Doubt: Negotiating Authorship in the  Paratexts of al-Maʿarrī},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-06},
      pages = {297},
      abstract = {This dissertation treats the controversial Syrian poet Abū  l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. AD 1058) as a case study of medieval  Arabic authorship. On one hand, readers have traditionally  attributed to authors like al-Maʿarrī a stable position  whereby their writings transparently reflect their life and  thought. On the other hand, recent scholarship on  manuscript culture considers medieval authorship as  unstable and diffuse, in contrast to the writerly unity of  print culture. Left unreconciled, these competing views  perpetuate misconceptions, such as that al-Maʿarrī must  either be a sincere believer or a devious doubter. In my  assessment, neither end of this spectrum is satisfactory.  Therefore I draw those ends closer together by examining  the paratexts — titles, prefaces, glosses, and other  writings attached by an author to his own works — of  al-Maʿarrī, which are part of a lifelong effort to curate  his own legacy. 

I focus on three paratexts from Luzūm mā  lā yalzam (Self-Imposed Necessity), al-Maʿarrī’s poetry  collection notorious for its critiques of religion: an  introduction, a self-commentary, an exchange of letters.  This choice of texts is deliberate, since it in response to  reader doubts that al-Maʿarrī must consolidate his  authorship. I use insights from functional linguistics,  such as that language is a social practice; its use  represents agency exercised within constraints; and that  language users negotiate personal and social conceptions of  identity. 

Through this analysis, I gain purchase over  al-Maʿarrī’s rhetorical stance encoded by his paratexts.  That stance is best described by Robert R. Edwards’ term  “counter-authorship,” namely a position of authority  against authority. Through explicit formulation and  implicit performance, al-Maʿarrī resists literary and  religious orthodoxy wedded to political power by setting  out an ethics of writing, commanding the physical margins  of texts, and forcing dialectical engagement by readers. To  show historical continuity, I also include a chapter on  modern receptions of al-Maʿarrī’s authorship. This  demonstrates the persistence of his image as a  counter-authority, albeit in another time and with  different stakes. 

These findings mediate between the two  opposing views of medieval authorship described above. On  the one hand, they reveal how authorship and textuality can  be stabilized through mechanisms like paratexts, while on  the other, they complicate authorship as biographism by  heeding questions of rhetoric, audience, and convention.  The results of my study also show the importance polemical  discourse, namely the anticipation of and response to  reader doubt; and of textuality, namely the physical,  documentary form of the text itself. That these both join  in the process of negotiating authorship as much as the  text’s very language becomes clear in a case like that of  al-Maʿarrī.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1636},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1636},
}