Publisher's Synopsis
Salah Natij's book, Al-Jahiz's Theory of Bayân: From a Hermeneutics of Nature to a Semiotics of Culture is the first comprehensive study entirely devoted to the Bayan theory (communication, hermeneutics, semiology) elaborated in the middle of the ninth century by the Arab encyclopedist and polygrapher al-Jahiz (d. 255 H./ 869). It is a work that restores to the Jahizian theory of bayan its originality by showing that it does not constitute a simple linguistic rhetoric (Balagha), having the verbal statement (Lafz) as its sole object, but a hermeneutic-semiological perspective that studies not only speech (lafz), but also all types of signs that living beings, human and non-human, produce, emit and use to communicate or adapt to their living environment.
