The Silent Body, the Talking Body. Conceptual and Aesthetical Rhetoricization of Body and Emotions Within Naǧīb Surūr’s Folk Theatre and Muǧūn’s Poetry

Wittgenstein’s second linguistic inquiries laid the foundation for pragmatics scholars’ focus on contextual and personal influences in linguistics acts, as well as for the approach, adopted by the first scholars in cognitive linguistics, to the observation of rhetorical devices (e.g. metaphor and metonymy), emphasizing their role as cognitive tools necessary to think/feel emotions, rather than merely linguistic phenomena. As illustrated by European and Arab scholars in Arabic Rhetoric, linguistic investigations in the fields of pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics find their (non-Western) equivalent in the subjects and inquiries of balāgha within Arabic linguistics and, in particular, topics and trends addressed in ʽilm al-bayān, a branch of the balāgha. My proposal will demonstrate how Naǧīb Surūr - an Egyptian poet, dramatist and literary critic - revisited the conceptual and aesthetic rhetoricization of body and emotions within his variegated literary production in several ways: through the poetic symbolism of the“Silent Body” in his folk theatrical tetralogy (1966-68 and 1972-1974) as well as through the exposed, explicit and mortified “Talking Body” in his muǧūn-inspired poem Kussummiyyāt (1967).