On Wednesday October 14, 2020, The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha hosted Dr. Said Yaktine, Professor of Higher Education at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Mohammed V University in Rabat, to present a lecture entitled “Post-Classical Narratives: Reality and Prospects".

Said Yaktine began his address by returning to the fashioning of narratives throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and their subsequent renewal in structuralism in a science of narration. These narratives witnessed an expansion over time beyond the French borders that they grew up within, to thus impose themselves on a global scale, so that by the end of the last century and the beginning of the new millennium they had gone beyond the limitations set during their formation. Developments that expanded the narrative domain thus came to be categorized under the term “post-classical narratives,” with those involved being open to various fields and disciplines, and to different texts and types of narration.

The researcher then addressed the problems presented by this new reality, defined by new narratives and epistemological procedures: new questions began to impose themselves with regard to the “scientific basis” of narratives and literary production, the relationship of post-classical narratives to their theoretical origins, and their receptivity to interaction with different disciplines. Yaktine stressed that viewpoints on the topic vary between skeptical and confidently certain regarding the possibility of new horizons enabling narratives to develop naturally and encompass any type of narrative, whatever the medium might be.

Said Yaktine's thesis focused on viewing narratives as a cross-disciplinary scholarly field open to development. The crux of his arguments was to link scholarly and global debate on “post-classical narratives” with the reality of digital humanities and the reality and prospects of Arab narrative studies: first of all to better understand the world around us, and secondly to stimulate engagement in serious thinking towards developing Arab narrative studies.