This paper will summarize and examine the activities and ideas cultivated in al-multaq? al-adab? li-j?mi?at h?alab (The Literary Forum at the University of Aleppo). Established in the early 1980s when the city of Aleppo was gripped by civil uproar and state violence, this Forum assembled some of Syria’s finest independent-minded thinkers and writers to create a space of intellectual rigor and literary experimentation. The culture critic Muh?ammad Jam?l B?r?t thought up the idea of a cultural forum as antidote to the climate of political intolerance, decided on its format and events, and composed its inaugural charter. He engaged the young Forum members in a thorough reckoning with the poetic and critical legacy of Ad?n?s and Majallat Shi?r. His co-organizer Fu??d Mir??, in turn, worked to soften and de-radicalize Sovietized modes of literary ideology prevalent in Syrian official discourse. The Forum members, I will argue, devised a plan and a poetics for coping with their moment’s crises of culture based on informed connections with both an Arab tradition of modernity and a global space of intellectual and literary enterprise. The continuous in-depth conversations it fostered were ultimately conducive to a change of sensibility in both the novel and the prose poem under conditions of extreme political duress and material deprivation. I will discuss the significance of these shifts and frame them within the context of the Forum’s overarching critical project, its selective uses of literary theory and translation and its re-orientation of modern Syrian literature. What is the lasting impact (if any) of this collective undertaking in the otherwise bleak cultural life of Baathist Syria? I will propose hypotheses about the continuity of the Forum’s achievements into the 21st century.