Cultural Criticism: Problems and Implications and Its Impact on Arab Culture

The Center for Arab Unity Studies published the book Cultural Criticism: Problems and Implications and Its Impact on Arab Culture by Dr. Haytham Ali Al-Sadian.

The cultural criticism project of Abdullah al-Ghadami and others raises three fundamental issues: First, it is a discourse that contradicts what it promises and accomplishes what it denies. The ills it warns against and seeks to expose lie in these very problems it carries. There is no danger to Arab culture and its aesthetic formation except it, if it is not directed properly. However, despite its seriousness, it has become a common cultural discourse in our Arab culture, seeping into its highest academic formations, represented by the university in general and academic studies at its higher levels (master’s and doctorate) in particular.

The second is that the nature of things dictates that the temptation of destruction is easier than the difficulty of construction. Accordingly, cultural criticism, with its hybrid formative nature and the tremendous tools and mechanisms it possesses, is considered one of the richest, most complex and most difficult critical fields. It needs workers whose experience has enabled them to deal with previous approaches and who are well-versed in the auxiliary fields of knowledge. This is so that their move towards cultural criticism, after overcoming what preceded it, is an easy and correct move, and one in which there is a kind of reassurance in the ability of the one who moves to construct, without fear for himself and the texts in his hands from the temptation of destruction with what they contain of dazzle and ease.

Finally, everything that cultural criticism does has not undermined the ability of literary criticism throughout its long history, as it is within the scope of the latter, which has known, experienced, and mastered it. Therefore, cultural criticism is nothing more than an innovation in literary criticism, one that has not exceeded the limits of nominal innovation, with some instrumental additions that could be literary tools without any fuss or commotion.