From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author
Follow "the great conversation" between philosophy and the literary arts down the millennia, from Plato and Aristotle through a host of brilliant writers all the way to our present day.
Overview
About
01: Thinking Theoretically
Why think about literature in a theoretical way? What makes literary theory so important? The critic and scholar M. H. Abrams thinks that all critical approaches to literature fall into one of four categories. Learn his highly useful classificatory scheme.
02: Plato—Kicking out the Poets
Ironically, Plato is both the first literary critic and the first hostile critic of literature. He has Socrates banish the poets from the ideal city that Plato describes in the "Republic." In this lecture, we shall consider why Plato kicked out the poets, why he should not have kicked them out, and what his enduring legacy has been to all those theorists who have followed him.
03: Aristotle's "Poetics"—Mimesis and Plot
Aristotle took Plato's negative understanding of mimesis (imitation) and converted it into a powerful method for creating poetry (and particularly tragic drama) that is worthy of philosophical consideration. Aristotle's notion of plot as a unity has also been pervasively influential throughout the history of Western literature. His favorite example was Sophocles's "Oedipus Tyrannos," a play we shall examine in some depth.
04: Aristotle's "Poetics"—Character and Catharsis
Along with a coherent plot, a good tragedy needs character and catharsis. Continuing to illustrate with examples from "Oedipus," we shall explore the nature of the proper tragic hero. We shall then explore the nature of Aristotelian catharsis and how to understand this well-known term.
05: Horace's"Ars Poetica"
This famous epistle-in-verse by the Roman poet Horace contains his (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) rules and regulations for writing great poetry. What is the meaning of Horace's central notion of artistic "decorum"? Why does he stipulate that poetry must teach as well as please? How does he view the critic and the poet?
06: Longinus on the Sublime
The 1st-century writer known as Longinus not only delineated the true nature of "sublimity" but set down rules for achieving it. We analyze his approach to theory and his influential conception of the ideal audience for sublime literature. Finally, we watch with awe as Longinus mounts a direct refutation of Plato's "Republic" that not only converts Plato's negatives into positives, but recasts Plato himself as one of the most sublime poets ever.
07: Sidney's "Apology for Poetry"
We explore Sidney's great 1595 essay defending the divine origin and social utility of poetry. We discuss both Sidney's "positive" moment (his praise of poetry) and his "negative" moment (his refutation of the main arguments made against poetry).
08: Dryden, Pope, and Decorum
Here we consider two landmarks of British neoclassicism: John Dryden's "Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668) and Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (1711). Dryden advanced the still-influential notion of the three dramatic unities. Pope had strong views on the proper role and nature of the critic, and memorably insisted that nature is the final source, end, and touchstone of art. Pope is especially marvelous to read because he wrote his "Essay" in brilliant verse which itself hews to all the canons of neoclassical decorum.
09: Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful
Burke is most widely remembered as a statesman and political thinker. But in his early "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), he laid the intellectual groundwork for Romanticism. With Burke, aesthetics takes a subjective turn. He defined sublimity and beauty by their effects on the subjective self that experiences them.
10: Kant's "Critique of Judgment"
If Burke's "Inquiry" helped introduce epistemology into the world of aesthetics, then Kant's "Critique of Judgment" (1790) transformed that introduction into a full-blown science. What is the meaning of Kant's central assertion that aesthetic judgments constitute a subjective universality? Can it be the case that such subjective judgments are felt equally by all people at all times?
11: Schiller on Aesthetics
Friedrich Schiller is a Kantian with a twist. He turns the master's thought in a new, more fully Romantic direction, seeking nothing less than the reunification of the emotional (Dionysiac) and rational (Apollonian) sides of our being. Explore his remarkable notion of the "play drive" and its linkage to beauty, culture, and the place of poetry in human life.
12: Hegel and the Journey of the Idea
The "Introduction" that Hegel wrote for his "Philosophy of Fine Art" (1835) completes Schiller's Romanticization of Kant. Hegel, in effect, posits a Platonic Form (the Idea), which, rather than remain in the world of pure Being, seeks to enter our World of Becoming. With Hegel as our guide, we shall follow this Idea as it moves through three phases, the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic, in search of a full, sensuous incarnation.
13: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and British Romanticism
Leaving our study of Continental thinkers, we look at British Romanticism. The wellspring text here is the product of the extraordinary friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Learn how their "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) works a transformation in earlier views of mimesis, epistemology, and decorum. And if you've ever wondered where the idea of the willing suspension of disbelief comes from, this lecture will tell you.
14: Mr. Wordsworth's "Preface"
In 1800, Wordsworth added a Preface to "Lyrical Ballads," radically redefining both the nature of poetry and the poet, and their function in society. We focus especially on such key Wordsworthian formulations as poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," the poet as a "man speaking to men," and the role of poetry as an antidote to society's "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation."
15: Coleridge—Transcendental Philosopher
Coleridge was the most learned of the Romantic poet-theorists. His "Biographia Literaria" (1817) adapted German philosophy to British Romantic theory, and he founded modern Shakespeare studies. Explore Coleridge's vital distinction between the natural and the transcendental types of philosophical itinerary, and weigh his hopes for a convergence of the two.
16: Shelley's "Defense of Poetry"
Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry" (written 1821 but published posthumously in 1840) gives us the full and final word on Romantic theories of synthesis and inspiration. Shelley exalts the poet to new heights of glory and offers powerful arguments in defense of the moral and social usefulness of poetry.
17: The Function of Criticism—Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot
Objective criticism shifts the emphasis from the poet to the poem, elevates the critic's role, and creates for poetry a separate, aesthetic space. A pair of seminal essays paves the way: Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864) and T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917). You will master Arnold's famous distinction between epochs of concentration and epochs of expansion, and ponder Eliot's anti-Romantic call for a return to tradition and a new, depersonalized view of the poet.
18: The Status of Poetry—I.A. Richards and John Crowe Ransom
Following the path of Arnold and Eliot, the New Critics set out to defend poetry against positivist notions that threatened to render it useless and irrelevant. In "Practical Criticism" (1929), I. A. Richards crafted a distinction between emotional belief. John Crowe Ransom was in favor of an ontological view of poetry that treated the poem as a concrete universal composed of both a "paraphrasable core" and "lively local detail."
19: Heresies and Fallacies—W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks
Beginning just after World War II, Wimsatt and Brooks gave New Criticism its most radical form. They rejected both the Romantic notion that a poem is the expression of a poet, and the neoclassical idea that a poem should be judged by its effect on the reader. What was their own view? Is there truth to the charge that the New Critics were elitists who reduced poetry to a rarified and purely private experience?
20: Archetypal Theory—Saint Paul to Northrop Frye
A way of reading as old as the Bible received a stunning rebirth in 1957 when Northrop Frye published his masterful "Anatomy of Criticism." What is this "typological reading"? How did Frye go beyond the New Critics to lay out a complex and compelling system to help explain the wider patterns and forces that underlie all great poetry from the Hebrew prophets to T. S. Eliot?
21: Origins of Modernism
During the last century, a paradigm shift occurred that laid the basis for modern (and postmodern) theory. Why does it make sense to call the old paradigm logocentrism? What are its essentials? How did Freud, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche challenge it and open the door for a radically new way of viewing the nature of reality, of meaning, of thought, and of art?
22: Structuralism—Ferdinand de Saussure to Michel Foucault
A key theoretical offshoot of modernism is structuralism. Originating in the linguistic studies of Saussure, it reached its full flowering in the historical studies of the late Michel Foucault. From this lecture, you will learn to define the often-obscure terminology and to decipher the elaborate theories of these much-discussed interpreters of literature.
23: Jacques Derrida on Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida, who first presented his theories to an American audience in his (in)famous lecture, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966), seeks to go the structuralists one better. Refusing to invert established binaries, Derrida seeks instead to deconstruct them. We contrast deconstruction with both Platonic and Christian thought, and outline the main terminology associated with post-modern theory.
24: Varieties of Post-modernism
In our final lecture, we shall trace how the post-modern theories of Derrida are played out in the writings of Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Stanley Fish, as well as in the modern critical schools of New Historicism and Feminism.