Worked examples

07Worked examples

Model 1 — a critical literary analysis of the traits of the Revival school in a poem

• Task: analyse these verses of Amir al-Shuʿara Ahmed Shawqi, showing his manifestations of renewal and of holding to the old: "Is it an eagle that appeared in the rein of the sky, or a cloud fleeing the violent winds? … Or the carpet of the wind in its brocade, woven by the hand of a bold genie? … It ruled the sky, and among its signs: every beating flutter like a wing."
• Renewal in Shawqi: (a) turning from the old description of the she-camel and the horse to describing modern inventions and achievements — here the aeroplane cleaving the sky; (b) directing poetry to the horizons of the modern age, technical development, and the expression of human progress; (c) relative liberation from the bonds of the occasion and the raising of imaginative depiction.
• Conservation of the old heritage in Shawqi and his schoolmates: (a) keeping one metre and one unified rhyme — here the Wāfir metre with the silent, extended rhyme on the hāʾ; (b) the strength, weight and eloquence of the words inherited from the brilliant ages (anān, hawāj, dībāj, waqqāh, khafūq); (c) opening with a rhetorical interrogation and employing folk heritage and classical Arab imagination (the eagle, the wind's carpet, the genie).

Model 2 — a precise critical comparison of the novel and the short story

• Structural concept: the novel is a wide narrative taking in a whole life or several generations; the short story is a compressed, highly concentrated work that catches a single fleeting moment and gives a single impression.
• Characters: the novel has many characters (main and secondary) whose relations interweave and develop psychologically; the story keeps to one character or very few, shown in one defined situation.
• Time and place range: the novel stretches over years or decades and moves between different places and cities; the story occupies a brief time (a few hours or days) in one enclosed place.
• Narrative language: the novel is marked by expansion, length and fine detail, allowing digressions from which parts can be cut without structural damage; the story is marked by extreme concision and linguistic compression, so that no single word or sentence can be cut without the whole architectural build being disturbed — as the American writer Edgar Allan Poe affirmed.
• Size: the novel begins at 30,000 words and extends to hundreds of pages and volumes; the short story starts from 100 words, never exceeds 12,000, and is read in a few minutes.