Abstract

Cultural criticism is a new approach of literary criticism which studies literary texts in order to discover their latent intellectual and cultural infrastructures under their apparent layers. In other words, the critic tries to unravel the latent meanings and thoughts behind the text through introspection, without considering the apparent decorations and rhetoric. AbdollahGhazami the contemporary Arabic critic, has analyzed Arabic poetry by means of cultural criticism. This article, through descriptive-analytic approach, tries to review his most important achievements in the field of cultural criticism. The findings of this study indicate that Arabic poetry, to Ghazami, in addition to its positive aspects, has got some negative aspects which has been ignored by traditional criticism because of its obsession with formal beauties. He believes that through the passage of time, these deficiencies have been internalized in the unconscious of the Arabs and have become a producing cultural system. To him extreme obsession with the formal and apparent aspects of poetry gradually has overwhelmed the mentality of this people and has formed the general code of ethics. Ghazami believes that poetry can create an appropriate context in which cultural infrastructures grow and because of this function of poetry, to him, cultural criticism approach is an inevitable necessity.