The Virgilian Pastoral Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Modern Era. Nancy Lindheim. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+378 (original) (raw)
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CLASSICAL CRITICISM: A CRITICAL ENQUIRY
Abstract Literary creation and criticism are two significant facets of human life. Creation is almost as old as human history and criticism is nearly as old as literature. The study of literature requires the knowledge of contexts as well as texts. What kind of person wrote the poem, the play, the fiction and the essay? What forces acted upon them as they wrote? What was the historical, the political, the economic and the cultural background? Was the writer accepting or rejecting the literary convention of time, or developing them, or creating entirely new kinds of literary expression? Are there interactions between literature and art, music or architecture of its periods? Was the writer affected by contemporaries or isolated? The present paper is an attempt to interpret the answers by the critical enquiry of classical criticism. The classicists form the foundations of contemporary theories of criticism. Key Words: I
Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 8 Vol.12 2022 August
David Publishing Company, 2022
is not only a literary artist but also a literary critic in the Victorian age. As a critic, he carried through his aesthetic ideology of the critic as artist that he treated the critic activity as art creation. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. is one of Wilde's critic work exclusively on Shakespeare's sonnets. It is a piece of critic work as well as a piece of creative art in the form of novella, which well demonstrated Wilde's critical ideology of the critic as artist. This present paper will try to analyze Wilde's Shakespearean critic from his ideology on critic and art by taking the case of The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
The Critic: Important Essays1 I. TRADITION AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT TEXT I
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to 'the tradition' or to 'a tradition'; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is 'traditional1 or even 'too traditional'. Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, cf some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are 'more critical' than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is aS inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a booK These essays have been selected keeping in view the essays prescribe by major universities of Pakistan. nd feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in heir work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, non those aspects of his work in which he least resembles Dyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to Hud what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his oredecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity. Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and it you want it you must obtain It by great labour. It involves, m the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nea'rly
An Unfaithful Return to Poetics
I would like to begin by observing a peculiar fact. Nowadays, many more concepts of philosophy and critical theory can be found in art than there are artistic ideas or tropes feeding back into the philosopher's Imaginary. The paradox is that the eloquent overuse of notions such as "body-without-organs" (BwO) by artists today overlooks the indebtedness of the artists' favorite philosopher (Gilles Deleuze) to an artist (Antonin Artaud) in this glaring example. My interest isn't to restore the legitimacy of art discourse proper and "pure," a stance that would be hard to defend. Rather, I'm compelled to ask what has happened to the conceptual imagination of the artists today? Does the fact that philosophy and critical theory enjoy the status of intellectual authority in matters of art mean that artists, in spite of their linguistic proficiency and excellence in self-reflectiveness, lack conceptual imagination? The claim remains recklessly general unless we limit and define the sense of our interrogation. That is, we might have to address the problem from a historical-materialistic account of the conjuncture in which contemporary art is produced today. 1
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
on Rome and the Papal States, is organized chronologically and addresses a series of papacies between 1404 and 1667. These chapters collectively show how the language of Virgil's eclogue becomes a commonplace in the praise of Renaissance princes, especially in the courts of Renaissance popes. Religious interpretations of the fourth eclogue are addressed in the third part, with a chapter each on the Christian Virgil, epic, pastoral, and the visual arts. Chapter 7 is an investigation into Renaissance conceptions of Virgil as holy or potentially prophetic, with discussions of Dante Alighieri and his commentators, Coluccio Salutati, and others. Perhaps the author could have done more here to address how Renaissance conceptions of the Christian Virgil differ from late antique and medieval iterations of this idea. Nonetheless, the chapter provides several nuanced and critically contextualized readings of difficult passages. Chapter 8 addresses primarily Jacopo Sannazzaro's De Partu Virginis and Marco Girolamo Vida's Christiad, but also two lesser-known Christian epics. Chapter 9 deals with the nativity eclogue as a subgenre and includes analyses of Virgilian presences in isolated eclogues by Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Patrizi, and Giles of Viterbo, among others. The last chapter addresses visual representations of the Cumaean Sibyl beginning with the lost Sibylline Cycle of Palazzo Orsini in Rome and including representations of the Sibyl in sacred spaces in Siena, Florence, and Rome. This substantial study will be of value to scholars of classical reception; of Italian Renaissance literature, art, and political and religious culture; and of Renaissance studies more generally. The critical assessment of the Virgilian origins of the idea of the Renaissance will surely need to be taken into account in future narratives of the period. The detailed critical analyses of texts and artifacts will, furthermore, prove to be a useful interpretative tool for readers from a variety of specialized disciplines in Renaissance studies.
One of the most influential movements in modern critical scholarship, the New Criticism is a philosophy of literary interpretation that stresses the importance of studying literary texts as complete works of art in themselves. Although the term New Criticism was first coined in the nineteenth century, it was not until American critic and poet John Crow Ransom, founder of the Kenyon Review wrote a book titled The New Criticism (1941) that it became established in common academic and literary usage. In essence, the New Critics were reacting against established trends in American criticism, arguing for the primacy of the literary text instead of focusing on interpretations based on context. However, as René Wellek has noted in various essays detailing the principles of New Criticism, proponents of this theory had many differences among them, and beyond the importance the New Critics afforded the literary text itself, there were many differences in the way they approached critical study of literary texts. Wellek writes that among the growing number of New Critics in the 1930s, there were few that could be easily grouped together. For example, he puts Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren among the leaders of what he calls the " Southern Critics. " Mostly, they are grouped together due to their reaction against previously established schools of criticism, such as impressionist criticism, the humanist movement, the naturalist movement, and the Marxists, and the fact that many of them taught at Southern universities at the time they created the theory of New Criticism. In addition to rallying against traditional modes of literary interpretations, the most significant contribution made by the New Critics, according to Wellek, was the success with which they established criticism itself as a major academic discipline. New criticism first started as movement replacing the bio-critical and historical methods that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these methods instead of the text itself, the biographical-historical contexts of the text were examined whereas the text is the sole evidence for interpreting it. The life and times of the author, may be of interest to the historian, but not necessarily to the critic. The text ought not to be confused with its origins: