Abstract
Literature is conventionally thought to consist of two complementary, comprehensive categories: poetry and prose. The first part of this essay argues this to be a contingent Western construct which goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans and seeks to demonstrate that it indeed is not to be found in the neighboring ancient literary cultures of biblical Hebrew and early Islamic Arabic. The second part suggests that this difference is correlated to these cultures’ conceptions of the language of their god(s), a suggestion which can be seen to complement Erich Auerbach’s argument in Mimesis regarding the separation and mixture of styles in antiquity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 121-130 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Dibur |
| Issue number | 12-13 |
| State | Published - 2022 |