Plato's Foundatio Analysis

It has been said that literary criticism started before Plato, but he is known the bedrock or the womb that birth other literary criticism. It is the foundation of the building called literary theory or criticism. He prescribes what a good literature or poetry should be. Plato’s philosophy of idealism – the existence of two worlds; the ideal world which is perfect and the visible world which is an imitation of the ideal. This idea criticizes art as an imitation of an imitation. And as a result, in Plato’s Repbulic, he with Socrates talk about what should be allowed in the education of the citizens. Aristotle, reacting to this build on the foundation that his teacher, Plato has laid but in a different way. As Stevens puts it, Plato says that the ideal can be understood only through philosophical contemplation…while Aristotle based his description of the ideal on observation of many individual tragedies and does not rest his notions on a divine realm of forms” (Literary Criticism 55). This Aristotelian perspective will later become part of the …show more content…
Although what is concealed usually spurs the reader into action (interpreting or making meaning out of a text), the process is controlled by what the author reveals, consequently, “the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light” (Iser). However, at times, a preconceived notion of what the text should be influences the readers’ perception of it, and imposing their past experiences or personal experience on the text totally changes it meaning. And according to Iser, it is almost impossible to separate the known from who knows it (NATC 1527). The implication of that is there is a shift in the overall outlook of the text since meaning is created when reader interact with a