Literary criticism From Plato To Preasent.

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Hitaxi H Bhatt.

Roll no:-  03

Sem:-    M.A  (Sem -1)

Year :-  2015-16

Enrollment no:-

Email id:- hitaxidave81@gmail.com

Paper:-03(Literey theory & criticism western 1)

Topic:-

Literary Criticism From Plato To Present.

Submitted To:- Dr. Dilip Barad.

Smt. S. B. Gardi,

Department Of English.

M. K. Bhavnagar University.

Bhavnagar.

Literary criticism from plato to present

Literary criticism is the evaluation, analysis, description, or interpretation of literary works. Criticism may examine a particular literary work, or may look at an author's writings as a whole. Our English word “Criticism” derives from the ancient greek term ‘krites’, meaning  “judge”.  A poet would have made certain “judgements” about the themes and techniques to be used in his verse, about what his audience was likely  to approve, and about his own relationship to his predecessors in the oral or literary tradition.

Part 1 Ancient Greek Criticism.

Classical literary criticism: Intellectual and political backgrounds.

1)               Plato: ( 428-ca 347 Bc )

Plato was born in 428 Bc in Athens to a family of long aristocratic linage, a fact which must eventually have shaped his philosophy at many levels.

At the age of 20, Plato like many other young men, fell under the spell of the controversial thinker and teacher Socrates. Most of Plato’s philosophy is expounded in dialogue form, with Socrates usually cast. According to plato, the world of forms, being changeless and eternal, alone constitutes reality. It is the world of essence, unity, and universality, whereas the physical world is characterized by perpetual change and decay, mere existence, multiplicity and particularity.  

2)               Aristotle: (348-322 bc)

The most brilliant student at Plato’s Academy was Aristotle.  Aristotle  was more interested than Plato in empirical observation of natural phenomena, especially in biology, a difference which helps account for the fundamentally differing outlooks of the two thinkers. It is recorded that Aristotle wrote twenty-seven dialogues; it was by these, not the works handed down to us that he was known in the ancient world. Unfortunately, none of them has survived.  What we now have aristotle’s works. which represent only one- quarter of his actual output, are Aristotle’s lecture notes, composed by himself. and his student, largely in the twelve years of his life.

Part 2 The traditions of Rhethoric

·       Greek Rhetoric

Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle:-

The word “rhetoric” derives from the Greek word ‘rhetor’, meaning “speaker,” And originally referred to the art of public speaking. This art embraced a broad range of techniques whereby a speaker could compose and arrange the elements of a speech which would be persuasive through its intellectual, emotional, and dramatic appeal to an audience.

·       The Hellenistic period and Roman Rhetoric

Rhetorica, Cicero, Quintilian.

The great library and museum of Alexandria was a center of scholarship in the fields of science, textual criticism, and poetic composition. The most important Greek rhetorician of this time was Hermagoras . His work on rhetoric, which has been reconstructed by scholars, influenced the rhetorical ideas of major Roman figures such as Cicero and Quintilian.

·       Roman Rhetoric:-

Greek rhetoric made its entry into Rome in the second century bc. Hermagoras had a great influence on two of the major early Roman texts of rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (Rhetoric for Herennius, ca. 90 bc) and Cicero’s De inventione (87 bc). Rhetorica , whose author is anonymous (though sometimes known as “Pseudo-Cicero” since the work was attributed for 1,500 years to Cicero), is the first text to present a detailed discussion of the five-part system (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery) which was central to the Roman tradition of rhetoric.

Part 3 greek and latin criticism during the roman empire

·       Horace (65-8 ac)

The influence of Horace’s Ars poetica, composed toward the end of his life, has been vast, exceeding the influence of Plato, and in many periods, even that of Aristotle. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) is known primarily as a poet, a composer of odes, satires, and epistles. Horace’s life intersected poignantly with the turbulent events of Roman history and politics in the first century bc. Horace’s philosophical and poetic vision is thrown into sharper relief when placed alongside the work of his contemporaries. This rationalization is based partly in Horace’s vision of poetic and political disharmony.

·       Longinus( first century ad)

After the period of the early principate, there were two broad intellectual currents that emerged during the first four centuries.  The philosophy of Neo-Platonism, whose prime exponent Plotinus will be considered in the next chapter. Like Horace before him, Longinus now enters the long-raging debate as to whether art comes from innate genius or from conscious application of methodology and rules.  Longinus argues that nature is indeed the prime cause of all production but that the operations of genius cannot be wholly random and unsystematic, and need the “good judgment” supplied by the rules of art.

Part 4 the medival era

·       The early middle ages

Over the last half-century or so, scholars have challenged the prior perception of the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, ignorance, and superstition. The Renaissance humanists extolled the classical Greek and Roman authors, viewing themselves as their first legitimate successors, and condemning medieval scholasticism which intervened between them and the classical period as benighted. This rejection of medieval philosophy and literature was reinforced by the Protestant Reformation, which associated it with Roman Catholicism.

·       The later middle ages

                          The influence of Augustine – in particular his

view of human will and the need for divine grace – persisted through the laterMiddle Ages, though only as one strand of  thought competing with the doctrines of other the ologians.

                          The later Middle Ages. The tradition of grammatical criticism and textual exegesis had been fairly continuous from the late classical era onward. Allegorical criticism and exegesis of both pagan and Christian texts enjoyed a similar continuity. One of the most prominent streams of thought of the early Middle Ages, Neo-Platonism, saw a revival in the twelfth century. Beyond these continuities, the later Middle Ages witnessed the growth of new intellectual movements, chiefly various forms of humanism and scholasticism, which arose from within the structures and divisions of knowledge that had grown in the later medieval institutions of learning, namely, the cathedral schools and the universities.

Part 5 The Early Modern period To The Enlightnment

·       Early Modern Period

The period beginning around the fourteenth century and extending midway into the seventeenth has conventionally been designated as the Renaissance, referring to a “rebirth” or rediscovery of the values, ethics, and styles of classical Greece and Rome. The term was devised by Italian humanists who sought to mark their own period as reaffirming its continuity with the classical humanist heritage after an interlude of over a thousand years, a period of alleged superstition and stagnation known as the Dark Ages and Middle Ages.

·       Neoclassical Literary Criticism

                Neoclassicism refers to a broad tendency in literature and art enduring from the early seventeenth century until around 1750. While the nature of this tendency inevitably varied across different cultures, it was usually marked by a number of common concerns and characteristics. Most fundamentally, neoclassicism comprised a return to the classical models, literary styles, and values of ancient Greek and Roman authors. In this, the neoclassicists were to some extent heirs of the Renaissance humanists. Many major medieval and Renaissance writers, including Dante, Ariosto, More,

Spenser, and Milton, had peopled their writings with fantastic and mythical beings from here.

·       The enlightenment

            The Enlightenment was a broad intellectual tendency, spanning philosophy, literature, language, art, religion, and political theory, which lasted from around 1680 until the end of the eighteenth century. Conventionally, the Enlightenment has been called the “age of reason,” though this designation is now regarded as somewhat reductive since it fails to comprehend the various intellectual trends of the period.  These images of the Enlightenment, and in particular the power and objectivity of

reason, have been challenged from many directions: initially, by certain figures usually included within the orbit of Enlightenment thought, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who stressed the importance of emotion and instinct, and David Hume, whose

skepticism embraced even the abilities of reason; by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer.

Part 6 The Earlier Ninteen  Century And Romenticism

The period of European history from 1760 to 1860 was dominated by two broad series of events, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, which oversaw the emergence and growth Romanticism

·       The French Revolution: Background and Consequences

  It would not be an exaggeration to say that the effects of the French Revolution of 1789 are still with us. The historian Eric Hobsbawm has suggested that most political struggles through the nineteenth century into the twentieth century have been for or against the principles which were at stake in that Revolution.mation of Europe from a feudal to a bourgeois society. Essentially, the French Revolution, along with the numerous other revolutions that succeeded it, initiated the displacement of the power of the king and nobility by the power of the bourgeoisie or middle classes which comprised recently appointed nobles, financiers, businessmen, traders, and members of the liberal professions.

·       The Industrial Revolution

 The Industrial Revolution, which was given its name by English and French socialists of the 1820s, is cited by Hobsbawm as “probably the most important event in world history” It is usually divided into two phases, the first stretching from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and the second phase continuing effectively until the present day. Large-scale industrialization began first in Britain on account of her wealth, her encouragement of private profit, and her economic system backed by liberal policies which had ousted the feudal guild system, as well as her colonies and effective monopoly of the world market. Industrialism spread rapidly, however; by the mid-nineteenth century France and Belgium were engaged in mechanized production; by the end of the nineteenth century Germany had been transformed from an agricultural economy to the greatest industrial power; and industrialization reached Japan and Italy toward the end of the century.

·       Romenticism  1. (germany and france)

Originally, the term “Romantic” had referred to medieval romance and tales of adventure; its connotations extended to what was fictitious and fantastic, to folklore and legend, as well as to the dazzling and rugged sights of nature. Romanticism, as we understand it, was a broad intellectual and artistic disposition that

arose toward the end of the eighteenth century and reached its zenith during the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was in the fields of philosophy and literature that Romanticism – as a broad response to Enlightenment, neoclassical, and French revolutionary ideals – initially took root. In general, this period can best be seen as one in which the major upheavals such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, along with the growth of nationalism, impelled the bourgeois classes toward political, economic, cultural, and ideological hegemony.

·       Romenticism 2. (England and America)

In England, the ground for Romanticism was prepared in the latter half of the eighteenth century through the economic, political, and cultural transformations mentioned in the preceding chapters. The early British practitioners of Romanticism included Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Burns. The English movement reached its most mature expression in the work of William Wordsworth, who saw nature as embodying a universal spirit,

and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, drawing on the work of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, gave archetypal formulation to the powers of the poetic imagination.

 Part 7 The Tweninth Century

·       Psychoanalytical

Critics, rhetoricians, and philosophers since Aristotle have examined the psychological dimensions of literature, ranging from an author’s motivation and intentions to the effect of texts and performances on an audience.  Freud was aware of the problematic nature of language itself, its opaqueness and materiality, its resistance to clarity and its refusal to be reduced to any onedimensional “literal” meaning. His own writings contain many literary allusions, andsome of his major concepts, such as the Oedipus complex, were founded on literary models such as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. After Freud, psychoanalytic criticism was continued by his biographer Ernest Jones (1879–1958), whose book Hamlet and Oedipus (1948) interpreted Hamlet’s indecisive behavior in killing his uncle in terms of his ambivalent feelings toward his mother. Another of Freud’s disciples, Otto Rank (1884–1939), produced The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909).

·       Structralism

In sociology, anthropology and linguistics, structuralism is the theory that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way that human experience and thus, behavior, is determined by various structures.

·       Deconstruction.

Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. Jacque Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction.

·       Feminist Criticism.

Feminist literary criticism is  informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly.

 It can be understood as using feminist principles and ideological discourses to critique the language of literature, its structure and being.

·       Postcolonial Criticism.

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized).

Literary theory did not arise in the twentieth century; it is at least two and a half thousand  years old, and it cannot be reductively aligned with a group of theories that happened to emerge in our recent history.  Looking back over the history of literary criticism  it is evident that, since the time of Plato, there has been a series of complex tendencies moving first in the direction of universality, reaching a climax in the intellectual hierarchies of the Middle Ages in which theology stood at the apex and where all dimensions of humanity – bodily, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual – had their

appointed place, and where humanity itself had a defined location both within the universe and within the historical scheme of providence.


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