Russian Formalist Approach to Jahiz's Critical Views

Jahiz, one of the pioneers of ancient literary criticism, that has gone beyond mere verve criticism and introduced the most important principles of criticism, is one of the most influential critics in directing literary criticism towards rhetorical criticism. As a Adib and Mu'tazilite theologian, who pays attention to the order and aesthetic foundations of the Qur'an in order to prove its miracle; he also pays attention to the beauty of form in evaluating a literary work, to the extent that in Jahiz’s era, literature and poetry were called industries. On the other hand, one of the important critical approaches of the early twentieth century is Russian formalism, in which the founders considered the text’s literary nature to be the subject of literary science and, in a scientific way, they established principles for discovering the laws that make up the literary form. Based on the conducted researches, Jahiz's views on critique are not unrelated to the formalist approach and it even may be fully consistent with it. Explaining this issue and how much Jahiz's critical votes support such a claim is a matter for which this article is responsible and, based on the most prominent principles of Russian formalist critique, tries through descriptive-analytical method, to root out Jahiz's important cash votes in his two books, Al-Bayan wa Al-Tabyin and Al-Hayawan. Studies have shown that there is sufficient evidence in Jahiz's works to prove Jahiz's formalistic approach; based on which, this approach can be considered as one of the dominant approaches of ancient Arabic literary criticism.