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the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., to Pherecydes of Syros, Anaxagoras, and Metrodorus of Lampsacus. Refined as a method of interpretation by Stoics such as Annaeus Cornutus and neo-Platonists such as Porphyry and Proclus its attractions are as compelling to Northrop Frye and Paul de Man as they were to Dante. Literary history too, in forms that seem perhaps somewhat unsophisticated now, goes back to Aristotle and the industrious cataloguers and classifiers of Alexandria and Pergamum. Various formalist analyses of narrative, drama, and style in general still tend to return, for comparisons and contrasts, to their classical roots. Ancient examples of explication de texte and hermeneutical or "critical" readings may be found in Plato's Protagoras, the treatise On the Sublime, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus' On the Classical Orators and On the Arrangement of Words. |
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In a less explicit way various classical writings concern themselves with the theoretical bases of modern critical practice: notably semiotics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and reader-response criticism.36 The discussion of matters semiotic in Plato's Cratylus, and then in Aristotle and the Stoical and Sceptical philosophers (noticeably in the interpretation of omens, oracles, and dreams as well as literature) is easily connected with current semiological interests. Such prolegomena are scattered through the Platonic corpus and Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric. Similarly both Plato and Aristotle concerned themselves with the impressionable psychology of the reader. Plato's fear that immoral fictions would adversely affect the character of the reader (Rep. 377397) was countered by Aristotle's theory of catharsis (Pol.1342a; Poet.1449b27). |
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One noticeable resemblance between ancient literary criticism and contemporary critical theory is that there is little agreement about the limitations of the literary critic's field; attempts to fence it off from aesthetics in general, linguistic theory and epistemology, history, moral philosophy, psychology, and rhetoric are generally unsuccessful.37 |
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Because our foundational classical texts have dealt with literature as part of a larger philosophical perspective, they have served as inspiration for a number of modern conceptual systems. Karl Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus' atomism; Nietzsche was a professor of classical philology at Basel; Freud drew extensively on classical myth and drama for his terminology; Bakhtin derived inspiration from Menippean satire for his investigation of Rabelais and the novel; and even Foucault has to invoke ancient authors from Plato to Artemidorus in his History of Sexuality. The |
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36 Noted by Kennedy (1989) xi. The relevance of modern semiotic theory to classical studies is pressed by Rubin (19789) 17 in an examination of Eco (1976). |
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37 Noted by Russell (1981) 1. |
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