Excessive Discourse in Literary Criticism: a corpus-based approach

This paper explores the triggers, indicators, strategies and implications of excessive discourse in literary criticism - a conservative genre traditionally at odds with excess and fluidity because privileging moderation and rigor. Al Yusfi's work is approached here as the epitome of rhetorical excess in its flouting of established academic conventions. For instance, economy and referentiality are systematically violated in all three volumes of The Temptation of the Imaginary, and indeed in most of his other work. Often, the linguistic is deliberately constructed to take the lead over the extralinguistic, and, when writing becomes an overdose of expressivity, the expressive then dominates the linguistic, thus locating the text far beyond the conventionally academic. The paper argues that excess in Al Yusfi's writing is not merely a writing technique deployed occasionally, nor even a deliberate deviation from the norms. Rather, it is a ritual that pervades the logic of this writer's literary criticism. Indeed, the first volume's subtitle - Writing and the Call of Extremes - already announces a 'compulsion to excess' and suggests an author not disposed to resist the call. This study adopts a corpus-based approach, examining such traces of discursive excess as over-modalisation, modal negation, idiosyncratic word order, amplifiers, absoluters, intensifiers, certainty markers, semantic fields and codifiers of extremes in Arabic. These devices are deployed to exhaustion – indeed, to the extent that exhaustion becomes a writing technique itself.