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"imitation" or some kind of representation of the World, was a seductive concept which dominated ancient criticism. If we leave aside such meanings of Mimesis as the re-enactment of a composer's work by a performer (itself a very problematic concept) or the re-enactment in ritual of a myth,45 then two important issues involved in ancient discussions of Mimesis may be distinguished. First, there is the Mimesis that is concerned with the representation of reality, however philosophically defined, by artistic means (ut pictura poesis), and then there is the imitation (in various ways) of earlier authors by later writers, what we now term Intertextuality.46 |
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The first kind of Mimesis entailed Plato's rejection of poetry as real mimesis, since it is rather the mimesis of doxa, human opinion, an unreliable reflection of the transcendent world of Forms. Aristotle counters with the view that poetry reflects universalia in re, rather than the specific events of human life and history. Poetry is therefore more philosophical, in his view, than history. Plato's attempt to elevate philosophy over poetry is not unlike modern attempts to elevate literary theory to the level of creative writing, its very subject of investigation. This problem of how literature relates to the real world continued to plague ancient theorists. They offered a number of answers, one of the more important being "Allegory", which aimed to solve the problem of the non-correspondence of literary statements with external facts through various modes of interpretation. The texts had to be read properly, or, as we might now say, "decoded," in order to understand the true meanings of the text. The method in altered form is still acceptable in modern critical theory,47 but its roots, as was observed earlier, go back to the fifth and sixth centuries. Aristotle also managed to break away from the "mimetic" picture of artistic discourse by his insistence that rhetoric at least was not "mimetic'' but was pragmatic, and aimed to change the world, not reflect it, as did poetry and prose forms allied to it. |
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Another prime concern for ancient critics and theorists of literature was the nature of audience response. On the more scientific level no one was more assiduous than Aristotle in his investigations of the machinery of audience affect in his examination of "Plausibility" in the Rhetoric. Aristotle was interested in the mastery of the audience by the orator and the rhetorician. Just as the mastery of nature by means of scientific analysis was the aim of his biological works, so the search for the ideal system of government is the object of his political works not least in the anatomies of the Athenian and other systems of government. The significance of the power of rhetoric, i.e. the definition of ruling concepts, of rhetoric as the manipulation of language for a particular purpose, was no more lost on |
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45 On these meanings, see Nagy (1989) 47. |
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46 See Russell (1981) 112. |
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47 See e.g. de Man (1981) and his discussion of "allegories" of reading in Greenblatt (1981). On Hellenistic allegorization, see now Dawson (1992). |
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