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and oratory in the same category, and he distinguishes them from the work of the philosopher, who is primarily concerned with facts and truth. |
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Plato above all was concerned with the impact for good or ill on the citizen audience of the faulty representations of reality and truth purveyed by poet and sophist. His answer, since according to his way of thinking the audience would imitate the lessons of dramatic art, was a rigid censorship, and the elimination of poets from his ideal state. Aristotle's different philosophical viewpoint allowed him to defend the utilitarian value of poetry as both philosophically educational and also emotionally valuable in his theory of Catharsis. This utilitarian value ascribed to poetry leads at once to the potent set of concepts in ancient literary criticism that revolves around the distinction of utile and dulce in the production of art. These concepts above all concern reader-response. The didactic function, indeed the didactic nature of poetry had long been a given in the implicit rationale for poetry's place in society not for nothing has Homer been described as the Bible of the Greeks. Plato and some predecessors had come to question this concept not because they offered a different view of poetry, but because the teachings of poetry as they knew it, were in fact wrong or at best unreliable or unprovable or just unphilosophical. It was left to Philodemus to argue the case best for the pleasure element per se in poetry. The idea that poetry should serve a social purpose, that is should be didactic (indeed provocative) is still part and parcel of neo-Marxist and feminist theory, while modern literary education assumes automatically that the close critical study of relevant texts (including selected classical texts) is a potent part of a humanistic education, a more humanistically useful element of that education than, say, the philological study of Sanskrit or Tibetan texts, or entomology and vulcanology. This may be seen as just another version of the common (but not universal) ancient belief that literature should have utility enlightenment and moral improvement, if not political action as well as pleasure or aesthetic appreciation as its goal. |
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To see analogies and resemblances between ancient and contemporary literary and cultural theory is, it would seem, easy enough. How profound these connections are will continue to be a matter of debate. |
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The present volume can do no more than present a sample of the possibilities for the possibly fruitful engagement between modern critical theory and the study of Greek and Roman classical literature. The intention was to dispel some of the incomprehension that surrounds this interaction. Not all of those who were invited to contribute could do so and the editors are therefore all the more grateful to those who were willing to contribute their time and patience to this enterprise. A brief guide to the contents of the volume may prove helpful. |
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Of the less controversial methodologies, Narratology is applied by I. de Jong to Homer. Using the modern concept of "embedded focalization", the |
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