The Qatari Forum for Authors held a new session of “The Female Critics and their Approaches” initiative presented by Dr. Abdelhak Belabed, Professor of Literature Issues and Curriculum of Critical and Comparative Studies at Qatar University.
The session hosted the critic Dr. Mohammad Obaidullah, Dean of the College of Arts at Philadelphia University in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan who has won many important awards such as Edward Said Award for Arab Enlightenment and Katara Award for Arabic Novel in the field of studies and criticism. Also, he is a member of many associations and committees and he is a poet and researcher who has many important publications.
Dr. Belabed began the session by emphasizing that this initiative comes within the forum’s initiatives that call for enhancing a culture of criticism in society and demand for reading in a way different from what many are accustomed to. He began his speech by expressing his happiness with the name of the initiative and confirmed that the term approach is a term the critics like who have come from a literary background with its participation and discussion and providing a deep view of literary production.
As about criteria and concepts of this literary and critical project, he explained that one of the explanations of the diversity that characterizes his critical steps stems from his great interest in the Arabic Language and that the writers whether they are ancient or modern go through the same worlds and that authors tried to present in the past and are still presenting within their literary view a perspective and conception of the mysterious world and the ambiguous existence.
He explanted that in the beginning of his formation as a critic, he relied on various readings and was never inclined to narrow specialization so he did so during his academic studies where he specialized in modern literature and at the doctoral stage he specialized in Pre-Islamic Literature noting his interest and keenness not to establish fake walls between the eras of the Arabic Language which is considered one of the longest-lived languages and this makes us don’t need scholars in the language to explain what the ancients brought.
Dr. Obaidullah confirmed that the group of professors who educated him was graduates of the Egyptian Classical School which is encyclopedic in nature and this made him resemble a traveler who feels happy through his multiple trips in the worlds of Arabic language.
Regarding the subject of literary genres, he said, “The fictional creativity was prevalent in the past while the structure of the novel entered recently and entered the realms of the story after discovering awareness of genres that is not based on the principle of inertia.” He talked about some of the models that the researched and mentioned some of his observations in this aspect and a number of prominent characteristics that distinguished it.
Dr. Obaidullah talked in details about the differences between the novel and short story. In this context, he said, “I was guided to this type within reading and I notices that some didn’t mention the difference while working on this type of writing that comes between the short story and the novel.”