Alexander Key
Stanford University · Slavic Languages and Literatures
Active 1937–2022
About
Alexander Key is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and serves as the Division Director of Graduate Studies at Stanford University. His research interests encompass Arabic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, as well as Language Theory, Literary and Cultural Theory, Literary Criticism (history of criticism, theory of literature), and Persian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. His scholarly work focuses on exploring the intersections of language, literature, and culture within these regions and theoretical frameworks, contributing to the understanding of literary criticism and cultural studies in these areas.
Research signals
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Research topics
- Philosophy
- Literature
- Linguistics
- Art
- History
Selected publications
What are Neoplatonic Poetics? Allegory; Figure; Genre
British Academy eBooks · 2022-01-06
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter uses the space between Greek Neoplatonism and Arabic Neoplatonism to ask what Neoplatonism is and how Neoplatonism appears in literary criticism. Starting with Robert Lowell, al-Ḥallāj, and Robert Duncan, I argue that Neoplatonic poetics is a judgement, made in our twenty-first century moment, that certain allegories contain Neoplatonic cosmologies. I examine Arabic and Greek taxonomical (Menander Rhetor and al-Marghīnānī’s rhetorical figures) and hermeneutical (al-Rāghib and Avicenna’s exegeses) scholarship, and I suggest that poetics itself can be looked at with three categories in mind: allegory, figure, and genre. Exegesis of the Qur’an, exegesis of the Rhapsodies and Oracles, and al-Ḥallāj’s poetry all revealed Neoplatonic truths through allegory. But Classical Arabic poetics did not identify these dynamics, because genre pressures led critics to focus on technique rather than content. We are the only critics who track Neoplatonic cosmologies across third-century Platonists and eleventh-century Muslims.
2020-11-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNotes around Ambiguity: Ibn Sīnā’s Logic, ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s Poetics, Rāghib’s Two-Meanings-at-One-Time, and the Figures of Ibhām, Istikhdām, and Tawriya was published in Volume 2 Philosophy and Language in the Islamic World on page 77.
Note on Translation Practice, Transliterations, and Footnotes
2019-11-13
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingLanguage between God and the Poets
2019-10-28 · 8 citations
bookOpen access1st authorCorrespondingHow does language work? How does language produce truth and beauty? Eleventh-century Arabic scholarship has detailed answers to these universal questions. Language Between God and the Poets reads the theory of four major scholars and asks how the conceptual vocabulary they shared enabled them to create theory in lexicography, theology, logic, and poetics. Their ideas engaged God and poetry at the nexus of language, mind, and reality. Their core conceptual vocabulary carved reality at the joints in a manner quite different from Anglophone and European thought in any period. This vocabulary centered around the words maʿnā (“mental content”) and ḥaqīqah (“accuracy”), two concepts for which Alexander Key develops a translation methodology with the help of Wittgenstein and Kuhn. Language Between God and the Poets helps us see how fundamental the lexicon and lexicography can be to all kinds of theory, how theology can be a science of naming, how logic interacts with language, and how poetic affect can be built on grammar and logic. The four scholars are ar-Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī, Ibn Fūrak, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī.
2019-11-13
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding2019-11-13
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding2019-11-13
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLanguage between God and the Poets
2019-10-28 · 13 citations
bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding2019-11-13
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingJournal of the American Oriental Society · 2019-08-05
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
 
 
 The Rhetorical Fabric of the Traditional Arabic Qaṣīda in Its Formative Stages: A Comparative Study of the Rhetoric in Two Traditional Poems by ʿAlqama l-Faḥl and Bashshār b. Burd. By Ali Ahmad Hussein. Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 98. Wiesbaden: Harraaaowitz, 2015. Pp. xv + 292. €78 (paper).
 
 
Frequent coauthors
- 16 shared
Russell T. McCutcheon
University of Alabama
- 16 shared
Donald S. Lopez
- 16 shared
Ayatollah Khomeini
New York University Press
- 16 shared
Syed Shoeb Ahmed
Princeton University
- 16 shared
Shahzad Bashir
- 16 shared
Emmanuel Lévinas
- 16 shared
Guillaume Dye
Ehlers-Danlos Society
- 16 shared
Kitāb Al-Diyārāt
New York University Press
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