Training course in Casablanca on literary criticism

A private educational institution hosted a training course on the subject of “Literary Criticism and its Approaches to Literary Texts”, whose activities were supervised by the writer Mustafa Laghtiri and whose work was conducted by Muhammad Al-Dunya.

The training course began with a welcoming speech by the guest of the meeting and the teachers of the Arabic language. Dr. Abdel Ali Al-Wadghiri said in one of his pleadings that “the Arabic language is not words that we exchange or write, but rather it is a repository of culture, identity, civilization, and history.”

In an introductory speech, critic Mohamed Dani said that the writer Mustafa Laghtiri is a distinguished Moroccan writer who has experience writing very short stories and then novels. He has drawn the attention of those interested through the diversity of his narrative world and the distinction of his narrative and novelistic discourse, describing his literary experience as a pioneer in Moroccan narrative, as he entered the field of cinema with the novel (Barbed Wires), adding that this experience represents an opportunity to restore confidence in Moroccan writers, so that there is permanent cooperation between the Moroccan writer and those working in the cinema and television sectors in Morocco.

The facilitator opened the training session by talking about the concept of criticism since its early beginnings, highlighting that it was characterised in the pre-Islamic era by simplicity and impressionism and was considered the cornerstone for the emergence of what is called Arab criticism, which literary markets such as the Ukaz market and the Dhu al-Majaz market would contribute to shaping.

As for criticism in the Islamic era, the same source added, it was an extension of its pre-Islamic counterpart, and most of the rulings were limited and born of their time and place, stressing that Omar bin Al-Khattab is considered a developer of criticism that was noticeably influenced by the Holy Quran.

Laghtiri mentioned that in the Umayyad era, criticism multiplied due to the geographical factor distributed between the Hijaz, Iraq and the Levant, which led to a difference in critical standards, as poetry in the Hijaz environment appeared more erotic than it did in Iraq and the Levant environment.

In the Abbasid era, the same author says, poetry and literature turned into an industry and foreign cultures poured into the Abbasid state from Persian, Indian and Greek, and some knowledge turned into sciences such as language, literature, grammar and morphology. Brilliant intellectual names also emerged, including Abu Amr al-Jahiz, the author of the famous saying “Meanings are thrown in the way.” The debate heated up between supporters of the word and followers of the meaning, and criticism was formed as protective pillars for the various intellectual movements.

The moderator moved on to talk about the critical schools in the modern era and the approaches accompanying them; starting with the historical, social and psychological approaches, passing through the structural approach that cried out for the death of the writer and preserved the text and nothing but the text, and the deconstructive approach, concluding the cycle of criticism by talking about the theories of reading, semiotics and stylistics.

Afterwards, a broad discussion was opened about the possible relationships between the networks of criticism and the mechanisms of analyzing the literary text.

Arabic language teachers contributed to the evaluation of this training course, which concluded with the signing of more than sixty of his books by the writer Mustafa Laghtiri, which the Iqraa Private Schools Group presented to its female and male teaching staff.