The Origins of Criticism (ebook)

Argumento de The Origins of Criticism (ebook)

By "literary criticism" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word "social" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should--if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from. Andrew Ford offers a new understanding of the development of criticism, demonstrating that its roots stretch back long before the sophists to public commentary on the performance of songs and poems in the preliterary era of ancient Greece. He pinpoints when and how, later in the Greek tradition than is usually assumed, poetry was studied as a discipline with its own principles and methods.

The Origins of Criticism complements the usual, history-of-ideas approach to the topic precisely by treating criticism as a social as well as a theoretical activity. With unprecedented and penetrating detail, Ford considers varying scholarly interpretations of the key texts discussed. Examining Greek discussions of poetry from the late sixth century B.C. through the rise of poetics in the late fourth, he asks when we first can recognize anything like the modern notions of literature as imaginative writing and of literary criticism as a special knowledge of such writing.

Serving as a monumental preface to Aristotle's Poetics, this book allows readers to discern the emergence, within the manifold activities that might be called criticism, of the historically specific discourse on poetry that has shaped subsequent Western approaches to literature.

"Andrew Ford has written lively and sophisticated account of the evolution of criticism as an autonomous activity, and illuminated the origins of the modern-day equivalent of those antique experts in literature--the professional academic. . . . [W]hat distinguishes Ford's work from previous studies is the breadth of his scholarship, the detail of his analysis, and above all his historicist approach."--Penelope Murray, Times Literary Supplement0PREFACE ix
ABBREVIATIONS xiii
INTRODUCTION
Defining Criticism from Homer to Aristotle 1
PART I ARCHAIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL AESTHETICS 23
ONE
Table Talkand Symposium 25
TWO
Xenophanes and the "Ancient Quarrel" 46
THREE
Allegory and the Traditions of Epic Interpretation 67
PART II: THE INVENTION OF POETRY 91
FOUR
Song and Artifact: Simonidean Monuments 93
FIVE
Singer and Craftsman in Pindar and Bacchylides 113
SIX
The Origin of the Word "Poet" 131
PART III: TOWARD A THEORY OF POETRY 159
SEVEN
Materialist Poetics: Democritus and Gorgias 161
EIGHT
Literary Culture and Democracy: Poets and Teachers in Classical Athens 188
NINE
Literary Culture in Plato's Republic :The Sound of Ideology 209
PART IV LITERARY THEORY IN THE FOURTH CENTURY 227
TEN
The Invention of Literature: Theories of Prose and the Theory of Poetry 229
ELEVEN
Laws of Poetry: Genre and the Literary System 250
TWELVE
The Rise of the Critic: Poetic Contests from Homer to Aristotle 272
EPILOGUE 294
BIBLIOGRAPHY 297
INDEX OF PASSAGES ISCUSSED 331