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Literary criticism: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Literary criticism
In the 4th century BC, a man named Aristotle sat in the Lyceum and wrote a treatise that would define the very act of judging art for two thousand years. The Poetics was not merely a list of rules but a radical attempt to understand why human beings create stories and why they feel so deeply when reading them. Aristotle introduced the concept of mimesis, the idea that art is an imitation of life, and catharsis, the purging of emotions through tragedy. This was the first time a thinker argued that literature had a specific function beyond mere entertainment, suggesting that the structure of a play could heal the soul of the audience. Before Aristotle, there was no systematic way to discuss a poem or a play other than to praise or condemn it based on moral or political grounds. His work established the foundation for all future criticism, turning the subjective act of reading into an objective field of study. The influence of this text was so profound that it remained the primary authority on literary criticism until the late eighteenth century, shaping the way Western culture viewed the relationship between art and reality.
The Renaissance Recovery
The year 1498 marked a turning point when Giorgio Valla published his Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics, effectively waking the sleeping giant of classical criticism. This event sparked the Renaissance movement, which sought to recover the unity of form and content that had been lost during the Middle Ages. Critics like Lodovico Castelvetro began to write commentaries that reinterpreted Aristotle for a new age, arguing that the poet and author were guardians of a long literary tradition. The focus shifted from the religious texts that had dominated medieval thought to the secular works of the past, treating literature as central to culture rather than merely a tool for religious instruction. This period saw the birth of literary neoclassicism, which proclaimed that literature should preserve the wisdom of the ancients while adapting it to contemporary needs. The recovery of these classic texts did not just change what was read; it changed how it was read, establishing a new standard of judgment that valued the harmony and proportion found in ancient Greek and Roman works. The influence of Aristotle was so strong that his ideas became the bedrock upon which the entire structure of Western literary criticism was built for centuries.
The Baroque Crisis
The seventeenth century witnessed a violent rupture in the history of criticism when the Baroque movement challenged the very principles that had governed Western thinking for millennia. Critics began to question the classical ideals of proportion, harmony, and decorum, which had long been seen as the guarantors of truth in art. Instead of seeking unity, the Baroque aesthetic favored the transgressive and the extreme, embracing a style that was deliberately chaotic and overwhelming. Emanuele Tesauro published Il Cannocchiale aristotelico in 1654, a treatise that developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and a supreme intellectual act. This work argued that metaphor was not just a decorative device but an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth, one that could reveal the hidden complexities of the world. The key concepts of the Baroque, such as conceit, wit, and wonder, were not fully developed in literary theory until this publication, marking a shift from the rigid rules of the past to a more fluid and dynamic approach to criticism. The Baroque crisis was the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from classical antiquity, and it set the stage for the radical changes that would follow in the Enlightenment.
Common questions
What did Aristotle write in the 4th century BC to define literary criticism?
Aristotle wrote the Poetics in the 4th century BC to define the act of judging art. This treatise introduced the concepts of mimesis and catharsis to explain why humans create stories and feel deeply when reading them. The work established the foundation for all future criticism by arguing that literature had a specific function beyond mere entertainment.
When did Giorgio Valla publish his Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics?
Giorgio Valla published his Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics in the year 1498. This publication sparked the Renaissance movement and recovered the unity of form and content lost during the Middle Ages. The event shifted the focus from religious texts to secular works and established literary neoclassicism.
What year did Emanuele Tesauro publish Il Cannocchiale aristotelico?
Emanuele Tesauro published Il Cannocchiale aristotelico in the year 1654. This treatise developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and a supreme intellectual act. The publication marked a shift from rigid classical rules to the fluid and dynamic approach of the Baroque movement.
When did the New Criticism dominate English-speaking university literature departments?
The New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. During this period, critics emphasized close reading of texts and treated the text as an autonomous object without reference to authorial intention. The doctrine declined when departments began to witness a rise of philosophical literary theory influenced by structuralism and post-structuralism.
When did Roland Barthes publish The Death of the Author?
Roland Barthes published The Death of the Author in the year 1967. This essay challenged the author's authority over a text and argued that meaning is determined by the reader's interpretation. The publication was part of a broader movement including structuralism and post-structuralism that continued until the 1990s.
During the Enlightenment, the rise of literacy rates in the public transformed literary criticism from an exclusive pursuit of the wealthy and scholarly into a mass phenomenon. The swiftness of printing and the commercialization of literature meant that criticism arose to meet the needs of a new reading public that viewed reading as a form of entertainment rather than solely as education or a sacred source of religion. These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals, creating a vibrant marketplace of ideas where the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment. The emergent literary market, which was expected to educate the public and keep them away from superstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of the Enlightenment theoreticians. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels became a focal point of this new era, with one critic describing it as the detestable story of the Yahoos, highlighting the tension between the desire to educate and the reality of public taste. The commercialization of literature had its downside, as the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment, and the intensification of criticism was necessary to address the emergence of entertainment literature.
The Words Themselves
In the early twentieth century, a radical shift occurred when Russian Formalism and the New Criticism came to dominate the study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. These schools of thought emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention or reader response. The focus was placed entirely on the words themselves, treating the text as an autonomous object that could be analyzed without reference to the author's psychology or biography. This approach, known as the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy, became almost taboo subjects for critics who sought to understand the text on its own terms. The emphasis on form and precise attention to the words themselves has persisted, even after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves, shaping the way literature is taught and studied today. The New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s, when Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy.
The Death of the Author
The late twentieth century brought a profound transformation to literary criticism with the publication of Roland Barthes' essay The Death of the Author in 1967, which challenged the very notion of the author's authority over a text. This idea was part of a broader movement that included structuralism, post-structuralism, and other forms of Continental philosophy, which continued until the 1990s when interest in concept peaked. Critics began to argue that the meaning of a text was not determined by the author's intentions but by the reader's interpretation, and that the author was merely a vessel for the text to be read and re-read. This shift in perspective led to a new way of reading and responding to literary texts that went beyond the interpretive methods of critique, allowing for a more diverse and inclusive approach to literature. The rise of theory in the 1960s and 1970s also saw the emergence of new critical approaches such as feminist literary criticism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, which sought to address the limitations of the New Criticism and to bring a wider range of voices and perspectives into the field. Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by the New Critics, also remain active.
The Future of Criticism
In the current state of literary criticism, disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the rise of theory, have declined, and a new era of postcritique has emerged. Many literary critics work in film criticism or media studies, and the field has expanded to include nontraditional texts and women's literature, as well as popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences, while Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. The history of the book has become an inter-disciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory, seeking to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects. The field continues to evolve, with new approaches such as affect theory, disability studies, and queer theory challenging the traditional boundaries of literary criticism. The future of criticism lies in the ability to adapt to new forms of media and to engage with a wider range of texts and voices, while still maintaining the core principles of close reading and critical analysis that have defined the field for centuries.