Some People and Issues in Critical History--the Quick Survey
Classical Greek and Roman
Plato (5th century BCE): lliterature is religious and political tool with unpredictable and dangerous results / mere sophists [persuasive spoken rhetoric] are even more dangerous.
Aristotle (4th century BCE): literature [drama / lyric poetry] is a socially necessary aesthetic and political creation and its effects can be predicted and controlled by studying the best models / persuasive rhetoric can be taught and is important to the state)
Horace (1st century BCE): lyric and play writing is a popular social game whose rules can be inferred from what the public likes.
Quintilian Institutio Oratio (1st century CE): rhetoric is a speaker’s art whose rules can be taught.
English Renaissance
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy (1579): gives the English a survey of literary history since the Greeks, and argues that poetry, including epics, plays, lyrics, romances etc., is a special form of spoken and written language that does not claim truth, but describes possibilities and invents new things. Poets teach cultures to improve themselves. At worst, they are harmless because ineffective; at best they are prophets.
English Enlightenment
John Dryden (Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 1668; The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Heroic License, 1677; A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693; The Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern1700): literature should be judged by referring to classical standards, but also should be respected for native English wit and invention. Dryden also began the tradition of analyzing poets by comparing them with their greatest contemporaries (Shakespeare and Jonson; Chaucer and Lydgate or Gower).
Samuel Johnson (The Preface to Shakespeare, 1765; Lives of the English Poets, 1781): The Preface established the publishing tradition of a critical preface to an authoritative edition of a poet’s collected works, in this case praising Shakespeare for all the now-usual reasons, but also subjecting Shakespeare to criticism for his irregular structures and dramatic effects unsuited to C18 tastes. The Lives established the form of the “literary biography,” combining historical data on the author’s life and literary productivity and critical analysis of the authors’ works and lifetime achievement. The greatest literature is that which has pleased the most people for the longest time.
English Romanticism
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (with Wordsworth, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1798; Biographia Literaria, 1817): poetry arises spontaneously from the poet’s emotional and spiritual life, and should speak in the language of common people rather than in elevated artful terms. Poems grow “organically,” like plants, according to their own rules rather than according to the generic prescriptions of classical and neo-classical criticism.
English Victorian
Matthew Arnold (Essays in Criticism, First and Second Series, 1865, 1888; On the Study of Celtic Literature, 1867; Culture and Anarchy, 1869): After the fading of popular English faith in Christianity as revealed transcendental truth, Arnold argued for literature as the new, secular source of anchoring cultural values. Past literatures from all cultures should be studied with an open mind “to see the object as in itself it really is,” free from local cultural prejudices.
English Modern (late-Nineteenth and Twentieth Century)
Psychological Critics— Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939; Carl Jung, (1875-1961) literature arises from psychological conflicts in the author’s unconscious or from deep-seated cultural forces in a “collective unconscious.” Literature should be studied for clues to the structure and contents of the unconscious part of the human mind, or the structure and contents of our culture's "collective unconscious" mind. Criticism is a force for liberating humanity from its unconscious neuroses.
Marxist Critics—Karl Marx, (1818-1883) literature documents the social and economic conditions of the cultures in which it is produced, unless the literature is escapist or some other form of “false consciousness.” Literature should be studied for clues to the hidden operation of the forces which cause class-based oppression, or the forces by which cultural forces are resisting and challenging those forces. Criticism is a force for liberating humanity from its class-based false consciousness.
Belletristic Critics—literature is the possession of every cultivated, educated member of a culture and writing about literature should be beautiful, impressive, undocumented, and apparently effortless. Both creation of literature and writing about literature are arts that cannot really be taught.
Philological Critics—literature contains evidence of languages’ evolutionary change and should be studied as a science to discover rules to document and predict those changes.
New Critics—Great works of literature are unique cultural objects that do not belong to their creators (authors) or to its consumers (readers), but to the critic who alone can unlock the secrets of the works' ability to transmit to cultures the timeless, transcendental truths about human existence. Those truths are what enable people to survive the barren universe of popular culture. Critics are in the business of judging literature, determining which poems best deliver those t-t-t-a-h-es. Critical analysis skills can be taught as professionally as biological or chemical analysis
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