Lit Theory

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Thomas Aquinas

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Wrote Summa Theologica, a collection of 13th century religious and philosophical postulations. In his 9th article, Aquinas discusses the use of holy scripture as metaphor or symbolic in any way. He goes on to say that using God in a metaphorical way seems natural because all human knowledge begins with sense experience and corporal knowledge is the only way we can make sense of the spiritual. Metaphors are necessary and useful for the sake of representation because representation is natural delightful for man.

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Plato

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Classical Greek philosopher and student of Socrates who often wrote in a series of Socratic dialogues. In his theory of forms, Plato describes the material world as it seems to us as only an image or a copy of the real world. The forms around us are only abstract representations that can only be perceived by reason. In Republic, Plato describes society as mirroring the individual soul. The soul is divided into three parts: 1. desire (hunger) 2. reason (moral compass) 3. spirit (feeling/emotion). The philosopher must use knowledge to turn the soul upwards away from the physical realm, focusing on reaching higher concepts like beauty and goodness. Education is a means of employing reason as a means of making the soul more virtuous. True happiness is achieved once the soul is properly balanced and virtuous. He champions the concept of the philosopher king as the ideal leader of society who promotes thinking over fighting. In Plato's opinion, art is a mere copy of a copy of the ideal, hence, making it untrue and

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Plato on Rhetoric

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In a socratic dialogue called Giorgas, Plato seeks the true definition of rhetoric, or the art of discourse that aims to persuade, inform, or motivate the audience in some way. In Socrates's opinion, rhetoric is part flattery part admirable attempt to bring out the good in all people. Socrates and Polus, Giorgas's student, debate whether rhetoric can be considered an art. Socrates comes to the conclusion that rhetoric is a knack rather than art, alluding to rhetoric's ability to merely convince an ignorant audience with persuasion rather than fact. Rather than promoting the truth, rhetoric remains entirely cosmetic and without much substance.

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sophist

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a category of ancient Greek teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching excellence or virtue to young nobles and statesmen. Usually charged high fees for tutoring. Giorgas of Leotini: Wrote Encomium of Helen, a piece of rhetoric attempting to defend Helen of Troy who supposedly started the Trojan War. Giorgas discusses reasons why Helen was truly helpless in the matter, explaining that Helen could have been persuaded in one of four ways: by the gods, by physical force, by love, or by speech (logos). He notes that the weak are ruled by the strong and, like Helen, are often taken advantage of. This use of rhetoric is clear example of sophist rhetoric and argument, focusing more on persuasion and public pleasure rather than on philosophical questioning.

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Frye's Theory of Modes

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Literature is "an order of words", and as such he seeks nothing short than to turn literary criticism into a science unto itself. Implicit in this goal is the abandonment of criticism from anything outside of criticism itself. That is not to say there aren't valuable insights to be gained from philosophies extraneous to literature itself, but Frye maintains correctly that in order to make literary criticism a proper science, it has to establish it's central principles from no source extraneous to literature. With that said, Frye maintains that literature can be approached from many different perspectives, again so long as they stem from literature at the core.

Frye proposes an anagogic phase wherein a symbol is treated as a monad. The anagogic level of medieval allegory treated a text as expressing the highest spiritual meaning. For example, Dante's Beatrice in the Divine Comedy would represent the bride of Christ. Frye makes the argument that not only is there a lateral connection of archetypes through int

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Plotinus on Beauty

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Plato’s reservations about art: Plotinus’ response to platonian themes answered within his own terms (systematizer: groups of 6 essays). Plotinus sees beauty of art as the way to the ideal forms. We are “caught in the lower world and need to turn higher”. Platonian notion of being human, we fundamentally desire the higher things. Plato—we don’t learn, we unforget (anamnesis is unforgetting). We come with inherent knowledge from before life and seek it out.
Mimesis: The good naturally represents itself.
The author function: The artist has a beautiful soul that is in connection with higher forms.
Beauty: Art attempts to produce beauty. One element of the beautiful is when it instantiates what it can be. i.e. a desk on “duskiness”. There is a ladder of beauty. The fact that we find something beautiful is an indication of its goodness. “The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body and being beautiful” suggests beauty is a feature o

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Longinus on the Sublime

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Sublimity: Language effect based on the grandeur and echo of a noble mind. The sublime is so large and grand that you can’t quite “grasp it”. The sublime cannot be represented to yourself, i.e. the grand canyon or infinity. Sublimity is a contest (aristocratic notion inherent). Sublimity is in the mind as well as in the words. “It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit” which suggests the idea of “genius”. Sublimity introduces the concept of the test of time: “when a man of sense and literary experience hears something many times over, and it fails to dispose his mind to greatness or to leave him with more to reflect upon that what was contained in the mere words, but comes instead to seem valueless on repeated inspection, this is not true sublimity; it endures only for the moment of hearing.” 5 Sources are:
1.) Great thoughts (reference below)
2.) Inspired Emotion
3.) Figures of Thought/ Figures of Speech
4.) Noble Diction
5.) Elevated Word Arrangement
Ro

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Augustine

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Wrote early theological text On Christian Teaching, describing how one can interpret and teach the Scriptures. He describes literal and ambiguous figurative signs. Ambiguous signs have an unclear meaning and should interpreted with regards to a literal (things as things, nothing more) and figurative (could this mean more?) meaning.

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Dante

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In order to understand the literal we have to understand the allegorical meaning. In Canto One of Inferno, Dante makes the classical poet Virgil his guide into the underworld, stressing his admiration of classical literature. He also uses many allegories as representations of religious life, most notably the Three Beasts symbolizing various sins. The journey through hell up to paradise allegorizes the Christian's life journey, pitfalls and all, toward religious salvation and virtue.

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The Death of the Author

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Roland Barthes argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated. “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text is quite futile.” Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny.

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Author Function

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“First, they are the objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago.”
- The "author function" is linked to the legal system and arises as a result of the need to punish those responsible for transgressive statements.


• 2. The "author function” is not universal or constant in all discourse. There was a time when those texts, which we now call “literary” (stories, folk tales, epic, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any question about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Texts however, that we now call scientific… were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, scientific texts were accepted on their own merits… authentication no longer require reference to the individual who had produce

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The Function of Criticism

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Arnold. The critic should strive to “see the objects as in itself it really is” and has a celebrated definition of criticism as the “disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” Provided literary criticism with an important social function and paved the way for its “institutionalization”. Criticism meant an engagement with other subjects vitally connected with society and culture. He counseled moral betterment and spiritual renewal, achieved through the appreciative reading of the best literature. A good critic is a person of culture embarked on a steady, steadfast inquiry into self and society.

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The Touchstone

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Arnold: When you read something historic, it gives you a “mark” of height that you judge and use as a touchstone to establish “quality control” in what you attempt to do. Reading good works is a “moral exercise” from which you learn to discriminate and make fine nuanced judgments on the value of experience. These discriminatory skills will “carry over” into your life choices. The idea of an “aesthetic educator”

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“life imitates art more than art imitates life”

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Oscar Wilde. Art for Art’s Sake: In contrast to Pater who suggests that art is the only thing that is real, Wilde suggests that art is not real and that is precisely why it is important. Art is not about the world. “Nature is the place where birds fly about uncooked.” Introduces in paradox i.e. “The only real people are the people that never existed” to further idea like Hamlet is more real to me than you are. “We prefer a probable impossibility to an improbable possibility.”
Historical: Wilde is antihistoricist with an anti-romantic thrust as he devalues inspiration. He is antihistoricist because of the constraints it imposes on individual expression. “It is not the moment that creates the man, but the man who creates the age.”
Life Imitates Art More Than Art Imitates Life: Founded this concept along with “Art never expresses anything but itself”

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Intentional Fallacy

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Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy", a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important principle of New Criticism and was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946 rev. 1954): "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."
Wimsatt and Beardsley divide the evidence used in making interpretations of literary texts into three categories:Internal evidence is the actual details present inside a given work. External evidence is concerned with claims about why the artist made the work: reasons external to the fact of the work in itself. The third type of evidence concerns any meanings produced from a particular work's relationship to other art made by the same artist