In cooperation with the Arab Institute for Research & Publishing in Beirut, 2021, the Iraqi critic Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim recently released the "Encyclopedia of Arabic Narration," a new book comprising 424 pages.
The publication is composed of five chapters. The first is entitled "A Book that Grow over Time." The second chapter, which features some methodical article, explores the modern critical approaches, the concept of "narration" and its cultural terms, and the methodological base of the book.
In the third chapter "The Critical Base," the writer discusses many topics such as elimination of the virtual boundaries, the context of the ancient Arabic narration, emergence of the major narrative genres, emergence of modern Arabic narration, feminist narrations, confessions, identity, exile, and from the historic novel to the historic imagination.
The fourth chapter features extracts from the writer's journal while writing the encyclopedia and the fifth includes a documentation appendix.
"Throughout history, narration has always been one of the best methods to incorporate incidents. This definition does not aim to distort the function of narration. It's just acknowledging an obvious fact. Still, we cannot say that narration is used to tell the facts just like they happened because its function goes far beyond that.
Narration tells the incidents to endorse them, acknowledge them, and propose them in a suitable order that match its suggestive and expressive functions. It brings the incidents from their occurrence time to their reception time, and changes them until they give up the reason that created them in the first place.
With narration, incidents cannot be used as historic events in their initial form because it often ditches objectivity, and resorts to illusion, metaphor, and inspiration.
"This is how the function of narration becomes efficient and acquires its literary legitimacy, and not by likening it to a mirror that reflects historic facts," Ibrahim wrote.
