NARRATIO BREVIS IN THE ARABIAN PENINSULA: FROM THE FIRST ITTIǦĀHĀT TO THE RECENT PRODUCTION OF ḪALDŪN AL-DĀLĪ

Abstract

Narratio brevis, in the renewed form of the short story (SS), gained the spotlight in the Arabian Peninsula and played the role of cultural rendez-vous or multaqā in Arabic. Michalak-Pikulska noted that the short story (qiṣṣa qaṣīra QQ) expresses the awareness and sense of injustice suffered in many contexts. In addition to this, Ramsay and Bū-Ša‘īr summarized some main tendencies of the
short story, spanning from (magical) realism to folklore, up to (refuse of) modernism. War and conflict are of course found in the Kuwaiti narrative, triggered by the Gulf War events. Al-Ḫarrāṭ individuated the rise of a new sensitivity (ḥassāsiyya ǧadīda) as the underpinning factor for the QQ, and he also defined it a phenomenon of transgeneric writing (al-kitāba ‘abra al-naw‘iyya).
Taking into due account all the above, and the historical factors that framed the literary production, this paper traces the main steps and literary developments of the SS in the Peninsula and focuses on the recent production of Khaldoun al-Dali (Ḫaldūn al-Dālī), a young Yemeni writer who is author of very short stories. The aim is to provide an overall but representative outlook of the literary developments, after al-Faraǧ the Kuwaiti pioneer of SSs in the area.