Roland Barthes in 1968 claimed,
We now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture…Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing… In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostasesreason, science, law. (43-44)
Do we agree with Barthes? Are we justified in applying “structuralist” approaches to early and pre-Islamic works like the “Mu’allaqa” of Imru’al-Qays or the Qur’an? What advantages do such approaches offer? What are the drawbacks? Can structuralist approaches tell us about issues of authorship for these works? What might explain the continued appeal of structuralist approaches to early or non-Western literatures, and what ethical, historical, and theological issues do they raise?
It will draw support from some combination of Muslim Identities, Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an and Early Islamic Mysticism, Adnan Haydar’s articles, Bashir’s Fazlallah Astarabadi, and/or Versteegh’s chapter on Ibn Maḍ?. We may also find the interview with Raymond Farrin (https://newbooksnetwork.com/raymond-farrin-structure-and-quranic-interpretation-white-cloud-press-2014/) helpful in thinking through these issues.
