ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author limits herself to the critique of specific structuralist techniques of analysis as they have been applied by individual critics in the field of pre-islamic poetry. She demonstrates the success and failure of these techniques and to suggest the application of other approaches—structuralist and otherwise—that might lead us to a firmer intellectual and esthetic grasp of this until now rather elusive literature. More worthy of critical examination is Abu Deeb's pioneering work "Towards a Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry." Abu Deeb's attempt to organize the elements of the poem into "bundles of relations" appears vague and inconclusive. Abu Deeb concludes that the parts of the poem contribute to a "total meaningful structure." This is hardly a novel discovery, but merely a reiteration of the basic supposition of the nineteenth century Romantics, Coleridge's "organic unity." Abu Deeb's bundles of relations thus reveal little other than his misunderstanding of one or two of the elements of the poems.
