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.
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
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
· Roman Rhetoric:-
Greek
rhetoric made its entry into Rome
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
· 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 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
·
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
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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