Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum in Conversation (original) (raw)
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The fact that the term " aesthetics " was only introduced into philosophic discourse by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 is regarded by some historians of the subject as a sign that the ancient Greeks were not much interested in questions about the nature of beauty and the arts. (For them, ta aisthêtika would have suggested sense perception in general.) Other historians treat this fact as a factoid, a historical curiosity that need not stand in the way of assuming that the ancients responded to works of art in ways much like ourselves and confronted the same problems as we do when we try to think about beauty and art. The problem with this reasonable assumption is that it is hard to amass many actual texts that deal directly with the subject: most ancient discussions of issues we would define as aesthetic are embedded in works devoted to quite other topics, especially politics, ethics, or metaphysics. Thus Kristeller's much‐quoted denial that the ancients had anything comparable to modern aesthetics remains a challenge: " ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art. " 1 The present chapter hopes to throw light on this question by turning from the Greeks' philosophies of art to their literary criticism. The daily, practical business of commenting on poems, interpreting them, and evaluating them implied the existence of standards for evaluating literature. This was especially so in the " agonistic " musical culture of the Greeks, which regularly set one poem against another in a competition to see which was the " finest " (kallistos: Ford 2002, 272–293). Already in the Archaic period, the most prestigious performances of Homeric epic took the form of competitions among professional reciters (rhapsôidoi), and the Athenian contests in tragic, comic, and dithyrambic poetry are well known; amateurs exchanging songs at drinking parties often turned to singing games. All such events raised the question, whether explicitly or implicitly, of what criteria to use when declaring one poem " finest " of all. I propose to study closely two texts from Classical Athens in which the question of standards is discussed. The pair is notable for suggesting that works of verbal art ought to be judged on their own terms. Taken together and set in context, the texts suggest that, in practice if not always in theory, the ancients recognized an aesthetic dimension to literature to a far greater extent than is sometimes allowed. In criticism, the possibility of a literary aesthetics emerges most clearly in the question of whether poets have any autonomy in the sense of immunity to certain kinds of objections
2014
Abstract: Scholars have long noted Platonic elements or allusions in Callimachus ' poems, particularly in the Aetia prologue and the 13th Iambus that center on poetic composition. Following up on their work, Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens, in a recent panel at the APA, and in papers that are about to appear in Callimachea II. Atti della seconda giornata di studi su Callimaco (Rome: Herder), have argued not for occasional allusions, but for a much more extensive influence from the Phaedo and Phaedrus in the Aetia prologue (Acosta-Hughes) and the Protagoras, Ion, and Phaedrus in the Iambi (Stephens). These papers are part of a preliminary study to reformulate Callimachus ' aesthetic theory. 1 The Cicala's Song: Plato in the Aetia* This paper prefigures a larger study of Callimachus and Plato, a study on which my Stanford colleague Susan Stephens and I have now embarked in our co-authored volume on Callimachus. 1 Awareness of Platonic allusion in Callimachus i...
Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature
Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719 Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? Taking Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of "poetische Kritik" as its starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, the essays here gathered explore the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature. Contents Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener What Is Poetic Critique? | 1 Jennifer Ashton Why Adding ‘Poetic’ to ‘Critique’ Adds Nothing to Critique | 7 Michel Chaouli Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used | 19 Amit Chaudhuri Storytelling and Forgetfulness | 35 Jeff Dolven Poetry, Critique, Imitation | 45 Alexander García Düttmann “Echo Reconciles” | 57 Jonathan Elmer On Not Forcing the Question: Criticism and Playing Along | 65 Anne Eusterschulte La Chambre Poétique | 79 Joshua Kates The Silence of the Concepts (in Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Gottlob Frege) | 105 Bettine Menke Theater as Critical Praxis: Interruption and Citability | 125 Walter Benn Michaels Historicism’s Forms: The Aesthetics of Critique | 145 Yi-Ping Ong Poetic Criticism and the Work of Fiction: Goethe, Joyce, and Coetzee | 155 Simon Schleusener Surface, Distance, Depth: The Text and its Outside | 175 Contributors | 203