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study of classical influences on the thinking of the modern moulders of cultural and literary studies is still in its infancy.38 |
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On a less portentous level, it is worth noticing how the word ''rhetoric" has replaced the word "logic" in the analysis of literary modes (e.g. "the rhetoric of fiction," "the rhetoric of motives," or "the rhetoric of criticism"), when not replaced by more au courant metaphors such as "code" and "decoding" (from Prague and elsewhere). Similar borrowings from classical theory and terminology are to be found in Derrida's use of the Plato's pharmakon for his own specific purposes.39 Ekphrasis has been found a useful critical tool for the explication of modern as well as ancient literary phenomena.40 Again, examples could be multiplied. |
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The epistemological nihilism of Gorgias and Antiphon, the relativism of Protagoras, and the scepticism of the Pyrrhonists, as reported by Sextus Empiricus, seem to surface again in the dubieties of the unstable sign as expounded by Derrida, who even resuscitates the belief shared by Gorgias, Cratylus, Lucretius, and Varro in the heuristic value of the pun. Gorgias, in particular, merits attention in that he impatiently stated that nothing exists; if it does, it is not knowable; and even if it could be known, it could not be communicated to anyone else.41 By rejecting the search for valid epistemological foundations for discourse as a chimera, he could then refine language as a pragmatic tool, which could be pressed into service in the defence of Helen of Troy and whatever other causes the sophist might decide to take up. Such pragmatism was bitterly opposed by Plato, who did believe in attainable knowledge and despised sophistic orators, since, like some modern critics, they obviously felt that they had only to be interesting rather than informative or truthful. This sophistic stance, typified by the anthropocentric relativism of Protagoras, is arguably a less anxiety-laden attitude that of some Deconstructionists, who openly despair of the epistemological validity or stability of any literary interpretation, but continue to wander in the wilderness, offering subtle analyses of selected literary texts, while elevating the critic to the status of the creative artist, who has no inhibiting theories to prevent him practising his craft. |
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Some of these resemblances or apparent borrowings may be regarded as fortuitous. Fortuitous too may be the resemblances between the positive discussions of Nothingness and Absence in Heidegger, Gadamer and some deconstructionist critics and the more sceptical examinations of the concept in Plato's Parmenides (160b ff.) and Sophist (237a ff.), although philosophi- |
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38 See the perceptive survey of Selden (1990) 166: he traces the lineages of Marx-Benjamin-Althusser-Jameson; Nietzsche-Derrida-Bakhtin-Foucault; Freud-Norman O. Brown-Jacques Lacan-Harold Bloom, but, as he admits, this is only to cite the most familiar names. For the growing importance of Bakhtin in literary studies, see the bibliography s.v. |
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39 See Derrida (1981); for other examples, Kennedy (1989) xii. |
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40 For references see Fowler (1991) and Bartsch (1989). |
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41 See Guthrie (1969) 193. |
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