Syllabus
1.Classical
Literary Criticism
•Plato: The Republic, Chapter X
•Aristotle: Poetics
2. English Criticism from the
Renaissance
•Samuel T. Coleridge(1772-1834): Biographia
Literaria
(Chapter 13)
•Keats: Letter to George and Tom
Keats “Negative Capability”
Literary Criticism: Introduction
•Literary criticism
is the evaluation of literary works. This includes the classification by genre,
analysis of structure, and
judgement of value.
•The book Republic,
is
one of Plato’s longest works and clearly one of the most important for an
understanding of his thought.
•Richard Kraus explains its
centrality, by reason that in the Republic we
find:
a
unified metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and psychological
theory that goes far
beyond the doctrines of the early dialogues.
The Republic is in one sense the centerpiece of Plato’s
philosophy,
for no other single work of his attempts to treat all of these topics so fully.
(10)
Political and Historical contexts
•“Classical” Athens in the 5th
century BC just before Plato was a thriving democratic city-state.
•The democracy however was very
different from our democracies.
•It was not only direct democracy
rather than representative democracy but also highly exclusive.
•Only adult male citizens were
eligible in the decision-making process.
•The rest of the community, composed
of women, resident aliens, slaves formed a permanently excluded majority.
•Even the most free men, whether
working on land , or cities were poor and had little hope for economic
betterment.
•This widespread problem in the
Greek world was responsible for the class conflict and also the eternal
struggle between different forms of Government.
•The philosophies of both Plato and
Aristotle were integrally shaped by awareness of these political struggles.
•It is widely acknowledged that the
Greek philosopher Plato laid the foundations of Western Philosophy.
•It suggests that Plato gave initial
formulation to the most basic question
•Socrates argues that poetry failed
to examine justice “in itself” because poetic knowledge is confined to
appearances
Critical reading
•G. R. F. Ferrari analyzes the
narrative movements in the Republic to
spot where Socrates loses
control over the conversation and Plato tightens his
authorial grip, and to tell why this shift of control
matters.
•Rachel Barney finds a pattern of
ring-composition that frames the dialogue between themes and their
resolutions,
homing in on Book 10 to show how nuanced such "resolutions" can be.
•Julia Annas
brings the Republic into
closer conversation with the myth of Atlantis, told in
the Timaeus and Critias, which is supposed to illustrate
the Republic's
political proposals.
Republic
•The
focus here
is
clearly the central issue in the dialogue, that
of mimesis
•How mimesis
is
emphasized in
Book X,
•Mimesis plays
a crucial and highly contested role in the dialogue as a whole, figuring
centrally in
Books II, III, and X.
•Socrates picks
up his earlier discussion of it in the tenth and final book in the light the
intervening
discussion in books IV through IX of the role of justice in an
ideal city and in the well-balanced
individual psyche.
•In Book X we will
discuss some of the complexities attendant upon the role of mimesis in
the Republic
•Rather,
Halliwell
argues, “Plato’s importance as the ‘founding father’ of mimeticism
is much more complex and much less easily condensed into a unified point of
view than is usually supposed” (25).
•Halliwell
observes, “Plato introduces mimesis terminology in a remarkably wide range of
contexts,
using it in connection with issues in epistemology, ethics,
psychology, politics, and metaphysics, and
applying it to both the musicopoetic
and the visual arts, as well as to other human practices, including
even
aspects of philosophy itself”
•There is a fundamental ambiguity in
Plato’s use of mimesis in the argument of the Republic, in
particular.
•In Book X, Socrates banishes the
poets from the ideal city, because, he says, “the argument
determined us” (607b)namely,
for the reason established in Book IX that poetry nourishes the
pleasure-seeking and emotive and obscures the calculative and reasoning parts
of the psyche
•In other words poetry is
imitative of the sensible world, eliciting in us conflicting and opposing
perceptions, rather than of the intelligible world of a reason ruled by the law
of (non-)contradiction.
•In relation to the law of
(non-)contradiction, Allan Bloom points out in a note to his translation of
the Republic that
the “earliest known explicit statement of the principle of contradiction–the
premise
of philosophy and the foundation of rational discourse” (457, n. 25)
occurs in Book IV of
the Republic,
where Socrates observes:
“It
is plain that the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or to
suffer opposites with
respect to the same part and in relation to the same
thing”
(436b).
• As
Socrates argues in Book X, the tragic poets are the chief offenders when it
comes to nourishing
that part of the psyche that is attracted to conflictive
emotions and passionate engagement.
• It is
tragic displays of agonistic experience that constitute dramatic force and
evoke intense
audience response:
“Now, then, irritable disposition
affords much and varied imitation, while the prudent and quiet
character, which
is always nearly equal to itself, is neither easily imitated, nor, when
imitated, easily
understood especially by a festive assembly”
(604e).
•Socrates emphasizes “the greatest
accusation”: that it is dangerous not only for the general audience
but also,
he argues, even for those who pursue and practice philosophy.
• Even
“the best of us,” he says, “praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in
this state” (605d)
of heightened tragic emotion.
•In sum:
“[F]or all the desires, pains, and pleasures in the soul that we say follow our
action, poetic
imitation produces similar results in us, for it fosters and
waters them when they ought to be dried up,
and sets them up as rulers in us”
(606d).
•We ought,
Socrates says, to be ruled by those things described in Book VI that do not
draw us into
conflict and contradiction, the ideals of “the just, fair, and
moderate by nature” (501b).
The Republic-Book 10
•The book is called The Recompense
of Life
•Even after 2400
years the Republic continues
to generate intense scholarly and hermeneutical debate.
• The dialogue is between Socrates
and Glaucon
•The chapter begins with rejection
of imitative poetry by Socrates in the ideal state.
•Socrates declares that all poetic imitations are
ruinous to the audience.
Analysis
•In the book 10 Socrates banishes
all the artists from the ideal state.
•He argues that the creations of
art are farthest removed from the truth
•Therefore turns the mind of the
spectator away from the truth
•Example: There are forms of table
but one idea of a table, a table maker can make a table but not the idea of a
table, even farther removed from the idea of a table is the painting of a
table.
• Tables then are of three kinds,
and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the table,
and the painter.
•In addition to artists, Socrates
intends to ban poets too
•Like artists, poets only imitate
the imitation of the truth.
•They are twice removed from the
realm of being and corrupt all those who read their works.
•For example Homers may depict the
courage of Achilles but Homer does not know courage itself or teach others to
be courageous.
•If Homer had really been able to
educate and improve mankind-if he had possessed knowledge and not been a mere
imitator, he would be interested in realities rather than imitations
Works cited
•Raphael Foshay,
Mimesis in
Plato’s Republic and
Its Interpretation by Girard and Gans, Anthropoetics
XV, no. 1 Fall 2009: GA Summer Conference Issue
•A History of Literary Criticism and
Theory by M.A.R Habib, Wiley Blackwell publication
Disclaimer: Some of the bullet points are directly taken from the works cited. This is merely for student's reference purpose only.
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