The early twentieth century was a tumultuous time for the Arab world: under disintegrating Ottoman rule and aggressive European colonial occupation, Arab writers found themselves simultaneously torn from and pulled towards an Arabic literary heritage and a foreign European tradition. Through translation and imitation, Arab writers produced works of fiction, poetry and drama that spoke to local concerns in a foreign idiom. These new literary forms called for a new set of rules for aesthetic appreciation and criticism. In the last decades of the 19th century, the famous lectures of Husayn al-Marsafi on literary method coincided with the translation of parts of Henri Boileau’s Art Poétique by Muhammad Uthman Jalal (1876) and occasioned a crisis in literary criticism’s direction from a traditional to a revivalist trend, and a third trend that attempted a reconciliation between the two. In the early decades of the 20th century, Taha Hussein, Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad, and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, among others, took charge of the course of modern Arabic literary criticism. Their critical contributions spoke to the contradictory pull between aesthetics and politics in the reading of Arabic literature that continues well into this century. From structuralist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic to socialist approaches, Arabic literary criticism today remains torn between speaking to a Western tradition and finding a critical vocabulary that is more resonant with its own story and context. This paper places the critical terminology of Husayn al-Marsafi’s lectures on adab (Arabic belles-lettres) in conversation with Taha Husayn’s and Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad’s categories of subjective literary criticism to rethink the genealogy of Arabic literary criticism in the 20th century. It focuses especially on the resonance of these categories in the critical work produced in the context of comparative literature programs and initiatives in the Arab world, asking how a return to this earlier conversation between the two critical giants can point to some lingering orientalist, self-orientalizing and colonialist taxonomies in the reading and appreciation of Arabic literature today. The paper finally uses this conversation to reread critical genealogies of the Arabic novel that use Western criteria to dismiss the novels of the early 20th century as failed imitations and thus not relevant to the study of the modern Arabic novel.