The Intentional Dimension in the Arab Critical and Rhetorical Heritage A Reading in the Origins of Heritage Pragmatics

Abstract

The old Arab critical discourse had given a great attention to authorship or (intentionality); be it authorship or reception. It made the aesthetic response to the phenomenon of creative poetry or prose dependent on the intention to compose poetry first, and then receive that speech in the manner of that intentionality in a second time; so as the purposes of production and reception become equal. This topic reveals the importance of this basis, which has occupied the minds of Arab critics and rhetoricians in their poetic theory and in the conditions of proper reception of poetry and rhetoric.

How did our ancient critics view intention? What are the conditions that determined their intentionality? Is there a convergence between these ideas and what the pioneers of Western pragmatics advocated in the field of intentionality, which in turn was made the core of the communicative process in discourse, taking into account the contextual paradoxes that exist between Arab heritage backgrounds and contemporary Western studies?