Poetics is necessarily linked to the practice of writing. Perhaps this practice is knowledge of language; thus poetics becomes knowledge of knowledge.
Souad Khalil | Libya
This article engages with a critical study by Henri Meschonnic, translated into Arabic by Ahmed Othman, in order to reflect on the concept of poetics and its inseparable relationship with the practice of writing. It examines the profound shifts introduced by modern linguistics into the study of literature, and questions the persistent misunderstandings that have arisen between linguistic theory and literary practice. By revisiting debates on method, language, genre, and criticism, the article seeks to reconsider poetics not as an abstract theoretical system, but as an active mode of knowledge rooted in writing itself. It argues that poetics cannot be detached from lived experience, ideology, pedagogy, or translation, and that any critical discourse on literature must confront its own philosophical and epistemological foundations.
This is a critical study akin to certain philosophical approaches—which explores how modern linguistics has altered the conditions of literary studies in a non-reflective manner. Literary theory has moved far away from what it was during the Aristotelian era. Yet today, the relationship between linguistics and literature has become a field of misunderstanding. Everything hinges on the conjunction “and” that connects them—without the possibility of substituting one for the other. This position remains under exploitation, while the tangible contribution of linguistics to language education (for example, the modernization of teaching French) encounters no obstacle other than educational ignorance—an ignorance whose effectiveness is nonetheless affirmed, despite resistance and routine.
Thus, Henri Meschonnic argues that this ongoing exploitation, which advances only through disparities and regressions, must at the very least shed its weaknesses and reassess its objectives and methods, in order to overcome an extremely stubborn resistance—similar to what occurs in the teaching of grammar. There are those who, at the moment of speaking or writing about literature, and at the moment of teaching, continue to pride themselves on not possessing a method, as if this absence were a form of human existence. Their sensitivity to texts reveals that their general culture is a dormant inheritance rather than a creative force. The proof of this lies in their dispossession in the face of modernity, their indulgence in a condescending stance, and a faint centralist logic concealed beneath their gentle tone. These are the very individuals who cry out against totalitarian terror and the lack of respect for humanity, yet they have never posed the fundamental questions that should concern them regarding their own role.
They are eclectic thinkers who claim that any method kills its subject—since it supposedly creates it and gives it sharpness—arguing instead that it always produces a skeletal framework. Amid much confusion, they insist that language has no domain of vision in relation to literature that systematization is impossible in the study of values, and that arbitrariness prevails. Yet they still believe in the truth of the text, as evidenced by their acknowledgment of certain erroneous interpretations—such as those of Roland Barthes on Racine. At times, however, their complaints are difficult to understand, for the terms they use function as veils; “the word,” according to them, is deceptive. Ask them to define their terms, and they avoid the issue, claiming that words are deceptive and that their humanity stands against the rigor of the fine arts.
Strip away even their claimed universality, and one is tempted to view them early on as living beings only insofar as they produce. They reproduce their own images among the ranks of minor cultural security officers, and rightly acknowledge that they are those who “think beautifully,” who think in terms of the ego. We misunderstand them willingly, perhaps, because we are not their contemporaries.
Nevertheless, we cannot avoid linguistics. Language cannot interrogate literature, yet harm itself is language and communication. If literature is language, then the illusion of linguistics’ initial provocative privilege over literature must be dismantled, along with the illusion of methodologies that exhaust production—everything that cannot be reduced to linguistics. The text establishes a relationship with the world and with history. The inverse illusion that turns to linguistics for assistance merely provides preparatory material for the future, for an entire phase preceding the attainment of literature’s basic components—psychological and sociological knowledge. This constitutes the literary duality.
In reality, linguistics is a point of departure for rigor and functionality, enabling inquiry—using non-aesthetic and non-reductive terms—into social and subjective experiences, such as time or imagination, as well as psychological criticism. In structural terms, it allows literature to pose the question of writing, while excluding all dualisms and avoiding false analogies derived from formal or thematic analysis, all of which ultimately destroy the written work and exceed production itself.
Thus, the study of productions is poetic in nature. It does not exclude other investigative procedures, yet it should aim at discovery rather than verbosity. We aspire only to think its question—a question that appears to historians or sociologists merely as something aesthetic. It seeks form, meaning, and the coherence between speech and lived experience. It is not separate from the practice of writing; rather, it is knowledge itself. This is not abstract theorization, but a stance toward the written word—the result of a philosophy and, more often, a material practice of writing.
This does not preclude enjoyment of other readings, such as viewing the text within society or literature as a document—readings driven by other philosophies of writing. Yet we cannot judge one endeavor as superior to others, nor even judge a single endeavor in isolation. What emerges instead is an unsupported arbitrariness of the self that stirs emotions. There is no objective, eternal truth—neither in production nor in reading. There is no totality of readings. Still, it is desirable for all that every method be explicitly linked to the philosophy and ideology it entails.
We cannot separate the study of the subject from the study of methodology, nor can we separate epistemological knowledge from the study of the written word or from reflection on the conditions of studying it. Moreover, poetics is nothing more than a quality—or, if considered a noun, it evokes only poetry and versification. Undoubtedly, these are multiple facets of contemporary reflective ignorance. Yet this very reflection is part of the poetics at work in the study of literary discourse—qualitative literary discourse.
This confusion has not been eliminated, even though examples have been drawn not only from poetry but also from poetic lines as a defined language. The perplexity surrounding the direction of poetics persists when we consider the ordinary research devoted to it. The most significant contribution, however, lies in the formal non-distinction between prose and poetry, which appear merely as poorly realized conceptual tools for grasping literature as a long-standing constant pursued endlessly. More practically, however, the focus shifts toward the conception of the text.
The work of Don Cohen did not help dispel this ambiguity. Through regression and confusion, poetics was reduced to the science of poetry. These foundational problems of poetics are situated sometimes at the level of critiquing critical language, and at other times at the level of conceptualizing poetry, production, and the text. Presentism is always evident. Cohen studies, organizes, and attempts to establish a science of something that does not yet exist—having previously enumerated the forms of latent poetics. Since he possesses the possible, the problem of versification does not arise for him. On the table of discussion sits, for him, the guardian angel of poetry: the creation of all possible compatibilities—except, precisely, the authorized ones. Thus poetry is always defined in opposition to prose.
For Jakobson as well, poetry crystallizes easily through the violation of a number of compulsory, conventional rules—a view shared by Tzvetan Todorov in his analysis of poetry. But does the non-individuality of poetry establish a school of thought? At most, everything appears as a phenomenon of the moment. In a reverse direction, Todorov ultimately reduces poetics to the science of narrative grammar. This is a contraction of a structure that constitutes only part of poetics, not its entirety. It is, above all, an abstract observation of a model unconcerned with actual productions.
Poetics thus outlines only the latent, not the real. Production becomes a polluted in-between, a revealing slippage from scientific discourse to normative discourse: “the particular production is subject to the laws of literary discourse.” Even abstractly, this search for genre annihilates production, whereas it is production that annihilates genre. This poetics subjects productions to its theory instead of deriving theory from productions. It defines the literary impurity as offering no reality outside the reflection of theory itself. Yet it advances such that every production can be taken as a special revision of the general genre—even if it does not itself contain production.
Here, model and literary genre merge. The particular—the concrete, the non-individual—can no longer be recognized; only genre interests it. When genre disappears, the problem of value is avoided, and attraction shifts toward poetry or toward narrative grammar. Poetics thus still needs to understand its object. As Todorov states clearly: its method—but for speaking about texts, not about something else. It cannot be researched except through the study of productions.
Yuri Lotman is the only one who envisioned a field of inquiry worthy of literary practice, pointing toward a new methodology for the human sciences. He reiterated what has so far remained a mere declaration of principles—so trivial that it appears self-evident, yet ultimately nothing has matched its application: the incompatibility of semiotic coherence with the linguistic model. In art, a study that separates the level of content from the level of expression is impossible, since such distinctions were founded with linguistics, stylistics, and literary studies.
Poetics is necessarily linked to the practice of writing. Perhaps this practice is knowledge of language; thus poetics becomes knowledge of knowledge. Speaking about poetry makes us more deeply part of the experience we possess. Eliot adds that criticism, like any philosophical activity, is unavoidable and requires no proof. The question “What is poetry?” defines the critical function—the relationship between any mode of effect and contemporary writing practice. It cannot be tested except through their simultaneity.
Both are laboratories of modernity. This initial definition is not a deficiency. The problem of aesthetic relativity itself consists of conceptions and applications of metaphor. Beyond that, the meaning of poetic production itself, in texts from other eras, is metaphorical. Poetics surpasses ancient Aristotelian thought on literature by taking the written word as seriously as lived experience. This is Kafka’s model: not ornamentation, but life itself.
After its formalist phase, poetics may have succeeded in creating a critical language that affirms the tension of conflict that is the text itself, without reducing anything to it. From opposing poetry as a concrete genre to opposing it as a specialized study, the opposition remains one and the same—the singular movement of critical creativity. Poetics must avoid avoiding anything; otherwise, it will immediately repeat the old, quasi-pathological endeavors of the mind.
The modern neglect of linguistics by moderate positions parallels the neglect of poetic logic—mirroring the central logic of Plato when he banished the poet from the city, and of Aristotle when he reduced the poem to imitation.
The task of poetics is to prepare a unified, non-dual critical language in the face of two thousand years of dualism. Its central concern is the practice of writing, whatever its ideology—material, engaged with the world—where a dialectic is established: the dialectic of writing and the world. This does not found any dualism within the written work itself. Writing is a unity of tensions; the text is conflict itself. Duality, then, is not a dualism.
Criticism must be coherent with its object—an object without objecthood, since it is the locus of value. Thus, the scientific posture of poetics must be set aside, for scientificity is merely a façade for subjectivity. What is required is the development of practical concepts for analyzing freedom of implication—concepts that understand the text as form-meaning, from prosody-metaphor to composition-structure: meaning within meanings, without hierarchical sequencing. Interpretation is unavoidable. There is no naïve description. The aim is not to reduce production to formulas.
Rather, the homogeneous relationship of larger units to smaller ones, and the transposition to the level of these units, enables a conception of discursive connectors. The projection of paradigmatic relations onto syntagmatic ones at this level defines the approach. The study of prosody must be developed—especially in prose—to better establish the conditions of form-meaning. Rigidity in non-poetic, metaphorical language must be avoided.
Such rigidity would lead poetics to become a literary study of productions, not of latent structures. What has reality only in each production, and what has reality only in the thought of productions—these are two modes of reality, two modes of critical language, opposed to one another. They must not be confused as if they were homogeneous. The reality of production realizes the reality of the latent model. To analyze literature otherwise is to turn away from literature in practice and see nothing but information—this is security, the posture of “general poetics.”
General poetics must not be confused with genre poetics, which, taken in the name of science, devolves into an old rhetoric. While general models relied on preconceived ideas, poetics is not imprisoned within production, for it possesses a thought of forms within production itself. Reading literature must be continuously corrected and refined through a reading-as-writing, lest it become mere verification or classification of old binary obscurities of writing.
Poetics must turn toward a new pedagogy of literature—the pedagogy anticipated by Ezra Pound in How to Read and ABC of Reading—which approaches the written word as a function of language rather than as an aesthetic activity concerned with beauty or difficulty. The writer’s practice is coherent with living; criticism is coherent with writing. A material education of speech and reading as forms of living can lead to the word of the Other: “The poem must be made from both, and from neither.”
A culture coherent with life—this education of literature, in conjunction with language education as production rather than abstract grammar, and incorporating past texts as productions rather than sanctified models—would transform culture into critical creativity.
Only such an education can formulate a theory of translation—not merely a linguistic theory of translating literary utterances, but translation as the creation of texts, as critical creation. Why should translation not be considered a text? How can it become one? Yet education has dominated practice, producing cultural schizophrenia: writing alongside living. The lost coherence of medieval times and oral or initiatory civilizations is no longer accessible to us.
The abandonment of folklore by scientific culture—from Nerval to Van Gennep, the history of a specialization that declared its own death—marks another form of this dual life. Today, for African cultures, folklore remains alive. This abandonment is a sign of divided living. Perhaps the effort should turn toward confronting two thousand years of Arab civilization lived within a Christian-Aristotelian duality. Such is the critical meaning of this study and this pedagogy of writing.
Poetics, as explored in this study, is not a closed system nor a purely formal science, but a dynamic field inseparable from the act of writing and from the world in which writing takes place. It resists reduction to latent models, rigid methodologies, or genre-based abstractions, insisting instead on the primacy of concrete literary production. By rejecting entrenched dualisms—between form and meaning, language and literature, criticism and creation—poetics emerges as a critical practice that affirms tension, conflict, and historicity within the text itself. Such an understanding calls for a renewed pedagogy of literature, one that treats reading, writing, and translation as creative acts and forms of living. Ultimately, poetics becomes a mode of ethical and intellectual engagement, redefining literature not as an isolated aesthetic object, but as an active force within culture, language, and human experience.
Read: Concepts of Repetition and Difference
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Souad Khalil, hailing from Libya, is a writer, poet, and translator. She has been writing on culture, literature and other general topics.
