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Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-ShirbīnīЧитать онлайн книгу.

Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded - Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī


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found, with appropriate variations, in Europe, India, Argentina, Japan, the United States, and Turkey,23 while that of the talking owls is known from Mughal India.24

      Techniques: Marshaling, Association, and Disassociation

      Authors of works in the tradition of polite letters address a given topic or topics by selecting relevant passages from the literary canon, which the author links together using his own observations, marshaling the whole into a coherent narrative with the goal of instructing, enlightening, and entertaining. While this method can give an impression of randomness, with apparent digressions, the successful author manipulates his material to advance an argument that gains cogency from the examples adduced.

      The primary argument of the satirical dimension of Brains Confounded—that the “people of the countryside” are possessed of characteristics and guilty of practices that exclude them from consideration as civilized beings—is made using four main strategies: establishment of a framework of values against which to judge the accused; direct demonstration of guilt through the description of the uncivilized qualities of the accused; insinuation of guilt by association of the accused with other exemplars of uncivilized behavior; and disassociation of the accuser (the author) from the accused by demonstrating the latter’s qualifications as a member of civilized society.

      The first lines of Brains Confounded establish the framework, which is that of a moral economy defined by the opposition of refinement (laṭāfah) to coarseness (kathāfah). This moral economy is explored further below.

      The direct attack is delivered largely through the series of anecdotes in Part One that purport to describe the people of the countryside. Here we learn that they are ignorant of religion and elementary sanitary habits, have bizarre names, possess unappealing physical attributes, commit crimes, and so on.

      The associative technique appears in the form of passages such as the two tales of “The Champions of Discourtesy of Cairo and Damascus” and “The Boors of Cairo and Damascus,” which occur in the middle of the section “An Account of Their [the Peasants’] Escapades.” These may appear to be irrelevant to the topic: their setting is explicitly urban, and they contain no mention of “the people of the countryside.” Nevertheless, al-Shirbīnī explicitly links them to his main theme explicitly by introducing the first with the words “Apropos of this peasant and his discourtesy, I am reminded of how it fell out that the Champion of Discourtesy of Damascus came to Cairo . . .” (§3.46). This linkage to further, nonrural, examples of discourtesy (ʿadam dhawq) and boorishness (thaqālah) appears to be made in order to situate the country dweller, in whom such characteristics supposedly are innate, in a broader moral context. Once his status as a specific case within an established behavioral pathology is established, the peasant’s presence within that universe of obnoxiousness appears the more natural. Similarly, the section on rural poetry in Part One is followed by another ridiculing urban doggerel (“It Now Behooves Us to Offer a Small Selection of the Verse of Those Who Lay Claim to the Status of Poets but Are in Practice Poltroons,” etc., §6), thus again associating the peasant with further nonrural examples of barbarous behavior, this time in the form of demonstrably ridiculous pretensions to high literary culture by the unqualified.


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