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Wolfhart Heinrichs

فولفهارت هاينريشس

Notable figure 1941–2014 · Source: Harvard Gazette, «Wolfhart Peter Heinrichs» (Faculty of Arts and Sciences memorial minute, 2015) · Second source: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, GND authority record 136206883: Heinrichs, Wolfhart (b. 1941), Arabic studies

From Germany; worked in the United States

Field: Rhetoric and poetics

Affiliation

Rhetorician; The Hand of the Northwind (1977)

Biography

Born in Cologne, he studied Semitic languages and Arabic at Cologne, Frankfurt, London and Giessen, took his doctorate in 1967, taught at Giessen (1968–1977) and then at Harvard from 1977. He wrote Arabische Dichtung und griechische Poetik (1969) on Ḥāzim al-Qarṭājannī's foundation of poetics, The Hand of the Northwind (1977) on how the term istiʿāra (metaphor) changed among the rhetoricians, and a study of the origins of the ḥaqīqa–majāz distinction. He was a co-editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam.