About the Faculty

Beatrice Gruendler
Arabic Language and Literature
Beatrice.Gruendler@yale.edu

Beatrice Gruendler (D.E.U.G. Strasbourg, 1985; B.A. Tübingen, 1987; M.A. 1989, Ph.D. Harvard, 1995) is engaged mainly in three areas of research: the development of Arabic script, medieval Arabic poetry and its social context and modes of communication, and the integration of modern literary theory into the study of Near Eastern literatures.

She wrote her first book on The Development of the Arabic Scripts, in which she demonstrates their Nabatean origin and traces their early Islamic forms, based on dated texts (Atlanta, Georgia 1993, trans Amman 2004). Articles on Arabic script appeared in the Encyclopedia of the Qur'an (2001-) and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Literature (2005-). Her recent work in collaboration with the School of Advanced Research, St. Fe, focuses on the uses of the Arabic consonantal script from a sociolonguistic perspective.

Gruendler's main focus is medieval Arabic poetry, with a book-length study about the panegyrics of Ibn al-Rumi (d. 896) and his iconology of literary patronage (Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry, London, 2003). Related articles discuss the qasida in Muslim Spain and the ghazal as a genre as well as its independently surviving motifs. Gruendler explored the interrelation between rulership and literature in different literary genres in a colloquium, the proceedings from which she has co-editing with Louise Marlow, Wellesley College as Writers and Rulers: Perspectives from Abbasid to Safavid Times (Wiesbaden 2004). Currently she researches literary akhbar to throw light on the often practical roles performed by poetry in the ninth century and its reigning cultural esthetics. Recent articles treat the search for patronage, the intersection between literature, finance, law, and the favorable reception of the new abstract style (badî`, takhyîl) by the governing elite, versus resistance to it by conservative philologists, and the emancipation of Arabic poetics as an independent discipline.

She sees the integration of literary theory into medieval and modern Near Eastern literatures as an important task of the field and co-hosts with Verena Klemm, Würzburg University, regular workshops on this issue at the meetings of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DOT). Under the title Understanding Near Eastern Literatures (Wiesbaden: Reichert 2000), parts of these projects have formed the pilot volume of the new series Literaturen im Kontext: Arabisch – Persisch - Türkisch, edited by A. Neuwirth and others and devoted to innovative approaches by younger scholars.

She has recently contributed a study on the Malady of the Hearts of al-Khara’iti (d. 938) to an interdisciplinary colloquium at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), which appeared under the title Martyrdom and Modernity: Visions of Death and Meaningful Suffering in Europe and the Middle East from Antiquity to Modernity (ed. F. Pannewick, Wiesbaden 2004).

Gruendler teaches undergraduate courses on classical Arabic literature, including a new course on Egypt through the ages co-taught with Colleen Manassa (NELC). Together with John Darnell (NELC) and Michael Fischer (Computer Science) she offers an image-supported course, "From Pictograph to Pixels: Changing Ways of Human Communication." She regularly contributes guest lectures on Koran, love lyric, and the 1001 Nights to the Literature Major’s course on world literatures.

Her graduate teaching comprises an introduction to the methodology of Arabic and Islamic studies and seminars on medieval linguistics, literature, poetics and geography as well as the history of the Arabic language.

CURRICULUM VITAE (pdf)

From left to right:

a. The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century. Harvard Semitic Studies 43, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993.
This book provides an overview of the genesis of the Arabic alphabet and serves as a reference tool for dating early Arabic manuscripts. It presents the gradual shift of the alphabet from the early Nabatean stage (second century B.C.E.), its appropriation for the Arabic language, and its early Islamic development until 100 A.H./720 C.E. It includes chronological charts with analyses of the form, alignment, connection, and diacritical marking of each graph and a discussion of the emergence of the early Arabic scripts.
b.Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rûmî and the Patron’s Redemption, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003 (http://www.routledgecurzon.com/).
b. Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rûmî and the Patron’s Redemption, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003 (http://www.routledgecurzon.com/).
The book gives an insight into panegyrics (madîh), a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern society. Poets in this arabophone multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat. This panegyric genre is represented by Ibn al-Rûmî, who dedicated many of his poems to the last Tâhirid governor of Baghdad. Ibn al-Rûmî’s work is ideally suited to this study, as it addresses the issue of literary patronage and provides a self-portrait of the artist and his social position.
c. Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Beatrice Gruendler and Verena Klemm. Literaturen im Kontext, vol. 1, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000 (http://www.reichert-verlag.de/).
This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Near Eastern literatures and participates in the ongoing dialogue with literary theory. It presents nineteen different readings of Arabic, Persian and Turkish works from the classical and modern periods, throwing new light on the texts as well as discussing chosen theoretical models, their applicability and interconnection.
d. Writers and Rulers: Perspectives from Abbasid to Safavid Times, eds. Beatrice Gruendler and Louise Marlow. Literaturen im Kontext, vol. 16, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004 (http://www.reichert-verlag.de/ ).
Nine essays explore how Arabic and Persian literature from the ninth to the seventeenth century often served dual functions: it conveyed didactic, ethical and ideological concerns to rulers, and it secured the subsistence, status and protection of authors. To conterbalance his addressee’s greater power, the writer invested himself with the authority of religious law and ethical ideals, imparted criticism, and touted the value of his own art. In their adaptations of lament, panegyric, quatrain, love lyric, epistle, statutes of government, dynastic history, mirror of princes and shadow play, authors further pursued a place in the literary tradition, while rulers sought the public display of their culture and largesse and lasting memory.