Aristotle's Double Bequest to Literary Theory and Two Discourses of Truth (original) (raw)

LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM LITERARY CRITICISM: Its Nature and importance

The Import of Literary Criticism, 2019

Abstract With the present global inclination to science, technology, and agriculture, criticism seems to have been tilted in that direction. The flame of reading literature seems to be going out gradually but steadily and with it, the reading and mastery of its prescriptive theories and their application to literary texts. If we consider that literature is concerned with life’s affairs which are more pressing than the reading black and white symbols of a text and their abstract interpretation, if we consider that literature is a vortex where distant and usually seemingly unrelated areas of human knowledge meet and interact, that war, the environment, the economy and even politics are involved in literary studies, then we would try to value the text more, and its criticism which is the decoding of the message of the text, which sometimes has a problem solving perspective, would be given its due import, since literature is in fact, a pattern of infinite potentialities, proffered by an absence presence, which have to be investigated through the right procedures. Because this domain is involved with every sphere of life, the import of getting its message cannot be overrated. However, the shade of meanings got without the use of literary theories would be highly informal, judgmental, and oftentimes superficial. Literary criticism is meant to throw light into the text through theories, and to assess the public comprehension of the text. In this vein, criticism is more important than the text, for it says in several ways what the text says. The main thrust of this paper is its attempt at encouraging literary criticism by showing how beneficial it is to the reader, writer and critic as individuals and to the society as a whole. Keyword: Criticism

The History, Nature, and Functions of Literary Criticism -A Brief Survey

Literary Herald, 2023

This study purports to enquire into the history, nature, and function of literary criticism. The function of criticism and the role of the critics change from time to time. This study also explores Aristotle"s conception of tragedy as the perfect form of art. Aristotle"s Poetics (1961) offers an account of what he calls poetry, which is a synthesis of a poet, author, comedy, tragedy, lyric poetry, epic poetry and that they are all imitations but in different ways. It is through imitation that man acquires knowledge, and the end of knowledge is pleasure. Aristotle"s Poetics defines poetry from the point of view of aesthetics and poetry is primarily a structure. This insistence on structure is the central point of Aristotle"s Poetics. Plato, who was endowed with literary gifts, looked at all the problems with a lofty mind. He believed that all earthly things are mere copies of the ideal which exists only in heaven.

Literature in the Light of Philosophy

In the literary tradition covering more than two and a half thousand years, philosophy has been frequently mentioned in close proximity to literature, often as different ways of engaging more or less the same activity. We shall look at this matter briefly in the paper. What is not often said, even though many would probably not object to the idea is that literary criticism is a philosophical, rather than a scientific discipline, insofar as it is exercised by the need to understand, lacking the means to explain the phenomenon it is faced with. Three things really are at issue here: literature, literary studies/criticism, and philosophy. There are interrelationships among them, which is why some of the most important works relevant to the study of literary phenomena are by philosophers, normally the very greatest ones among them. We will not be exploring this history in detail, but only the engendering of literary criticism as a result of the philosophical interest in the literary, of which Plato and Aristotle were apparently the first to devote to it sustained attention. But we shall find that evolution and change within the history of criticism have been by following, sometimes without a conscious decision, the methods of reflection inaugurated in Aristotelian metaphysics in which philosophy is established as the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes.

Towards a Theory of Literary Discourse

Marko Juvan, Literary Studies in Reconstruction, 2011

In post-modernity, literary theory has become pluralistic, perspectivized, and – in parallel with the weakened autonomy of belletristic writing and the deconstruction of the concept “literature” – intertwined with the transdisciplinary, eclectic, and critical discourse of “Theory,” which is directed towards cultural studies rather than towards explorations of the artistic field. Hermeneutic and neo-pragmatist self-reflection has made literary theory aware of its own contingency and of being merely one among several (discursive) practices. As one of the “sciences of the subject,” it has also come to realize that knowledge is subject-dependent and that the field of research (i.e., literature) changes together with and under the influence of its scholarly observation. The answer of literary theory to these challenges proposed here is its disciplinary reconstruction into a theory of literary discourse. Such a theory accounts for the fact that literary texts are part of historical becoming and cultural changes in human life-worlds. This is why it must choose new objectives: first, with its ability for apt descriptions of literary devices (i.e., as a descriptive poetics), it may also contribute to a better critical understanding of the rhetorical powers of other discourses and language in general. Second, it may provide strong arguments to legitimize the indispensable anthropological values of the literary – including and primarily in the present time, marked by the triumph of the new media and globalized economization of all knowledge.

The Artistic Truth in Aristotle’s Criticism

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

The present study examines Aristotle's definition of art. This examination helps in understanding the nature of art and the artistic truth it ought to carry. Aristotle believes that there is truth in art because it is not independent from the reality from which it emerges. The study advances the thesis that all arts are mimetic; therefore, they are produced by imitation. This notion has misled many thinkers by thinking that art is three times separated from the truth, as Aristotle's teacher, Plato has demonstrated in his argument on the nature of imitative arts. However, Aristotle does not repudiate this assumption, but he tries to create a natural bond between art and the reality it produces. In short, Aristotle invites his readers to enjoy the artistic truth in art by separating it from the actual one in reality.

Aristotle\u27s Critique of Mimesis: The Romantic Prelude

1991

The most notable element of Plato\u27s theory of art, or at least the most memorable, is his censorship of poetry from the ideal state (Republic III: 398; X: 607). However Plato\u27s argument is construed, it is enlightening to note the domestication to which it is invariably subjected. Since Aristotle\u27s theory is eminently more amenable to our contemporary appreciation for art, and, in one form or another, is judged more central to the history of Western literature, Plato\u27s attack is dispensed with after due characterization as ironic, unmanageably ambiguous, valid only in a most limited context, or excusable in the light of the extraordinary circumstances peculiar to Plato\u27s profession, day, and society (his philosophic loyalties, didacticism as a norm, and the decadence of Athenian literature). Now we could dispense with the assertions that his ban was an ironic gesture or innocuously hypothetical by pointing out that while the Republic Plato envisioned, in earnest or no...

AN ECLECTIC OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE AS AN ACT OF LANGUAGE AND THE LANGUAGE OF ART

The answer to the question of what language is to literature seems important to discuss for it to have sustained and occupied a distinctive ferment in almost every literary cycle beginning from the Socratesian, Platonian, Aristotelian, traditional grammarians, rhetoricians, formalists, structuralists, post-structuralists and modernists and post modernists thinkers. All these viewpoints see every literary work as an encounter with language but differ in the way and manner of handling of their verbal episteme. Literature is contemporary and with the function of language at the given time. An eclectic overview of literature as an act of language and the language of art will lead to a scholarly effort to be able to justify literature as the sole distinctive actuality of language and of nothing else.