CLASSICAL CRITICISM - AN OVERVIEW.pptx

THIS PPT GIVES A SKELETAL SKETCH OF THE TYPES OF CLASSICAL CRITICISM. WE CAN UNDERSTAND THE DEFINITION OF MYTH & KNOW ABOUT INDIAN AESTHETICS.

1. AN OVERVIEW OF CLASSICAL CRITICISM PREPARED BY S.CHIDAMBARA RANI ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND OTHER FOREIGN LANGUAGES.

2. Classical Literary Criticism Classical  Literary  Criticism  started from the ancient Greek society. ...  Classical  Literary  Criticism  simply define as the  classical  ideas and imaginary by some  classical  thinkers, there is some of very important writers like Aristotle, Plato. This anthology brings together core classical texts for understanding literature. The selections from Plato illustrate the poetic philosopher’s surprising exclusion of poets from his ideal republic. In his response,  Poetics , Aristotle draws on the works of the great Greek playwrights to defend the value of the art. Horace’s  The Art of Poetry  is a vivid practitioner’s guide that promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight, and decorum. Longinus’s  On the Sublime  explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose. This volume is a work of great value and interest to classicists, students, and writers.

3. Plato and Aristotle Plato  (c. 428–c. 348 BCE) and  Aristotle  (384–322 BCE) are generally regarded as the two greatest figures of Western philosophy. ... According to a conventional view,  Plato's  philosophy is abstract and utopian, whereas  Aristotle's  is empirical, practical, and commonsensical. comparable. Both Plato and Aristotle based their theories on four widely accepted beliefs: Knowledge must be of what is real The world experienced via the senses is what is real Knowledge must be of what is fixed and unchanging The world experienced via the senses is not fixed and unchanging These points led to a sceptic point of view which both philosophers wished to target, as both agreed knowledge is possible. In order to overcome this prevalent contradiction in the argument, it became necessary that each philosopher choose a point to disregard and prove to be unnecessary. Plato chose to reject the claim that the world experienced through the senses is what is real, while Aristotle rejected the claim that knowledge must be of what is fixed and unchanging. This presented problems to be overcome by each philosopher: Plato had to give an account of where knowledge could be found while Aristotle had to account for how to have knowledge of that which is undergoing change.

4. Ideas of Two Theories Plato claimed that Particulars (objects) are only crude representations of their Form. For example, a Beauty Particular such as Helen of Troy is physical and accessible to the senses. Her beauty is also only temporary and relative to the observer, because aging and individual opinions alter how her beauty is observed. Her beauty being combined with non-beautiful parts and non-beautiful perspectives, such as organs, mean that she cannot contain the permanent Form of Beauty within herself. Rather, Plato claimed that the Form of Beauty is not accessible to the senses and is not physical, existing outside of time and space, and so can only be understood through reason. The Form of Beauty (being pure beauty) also differs from the Beauty Particular as it is eternally and irrefutably beautiful no matter who experiences it and at what time. Aristotle refuted Plato’s definition, believing it to be unclear and illogical in claiming that a chair can be understood to be a chair due to its relationship with a form existing outside of time and space. Instead, Aristotle’s method of defining an object's form was through the object's purpose, which it has been given by the designer. So, a chair is a chair because it has been designed to have the function of a chair. That of which the chair is made could have been given a different form if it had been arranged differently. This way, the form of an object exists within the object and all similarly designed and purposed objects, so it is unnecessary to disengage from this world in order to understand a form as it can be observed and understood on earth. This also enables one to have knowledge of an object whilst it undergoes change, as its change is contained within its purpose. For example, an acorn has within its form the potential to become an oak tree if not interfered with. The change which it is to undergo is contained within the knowledge of it’s form. This became the basis of Aristotle’s teleology (study and explanation of functions). Aristotle proposed that "nature does nothing in vain," as everything has a purpose given to it, perhaps by a God. With this, Aristotle looks not only at human artifacts , but also nature: eyes have different structures and methods of operation between species, yet they all share the form of an eye, as they all exist for the purpose of seeing. Even though both philosophers use form to understand objects, only Plato believes it is required to gain knowledge. Plato also thinks it essential to disengage from this world to discover an object's form, whereas Aristotle believes we need only study the objects and discover its function (teleology). The differences between Plato and Aristotle’s theories outweigh the similarities. However, both philosophers do leave holes and questions in their arguments. Plato is often criticised for being too elitist in his views, as he requires a great amount of time devoted to asceticism in order to learn. He also sees the mass public as ignorant and incapable, or at least unwilling to accept the truth of a reality beyond our own.

5. Rhetoric and Oratory Rhetoric  is the art of using language, such as  public speaking , for persuasive writing and speech. ...  Oratory  is the ability to convey a successful speech, and it is a means of performing  rhetoric . The three branches of  rhetoric  include deliberative, judicial, and epideictic Oratory , the rationale and practice of  persuasive  public speaking. It is immediate in its audience relationships and reactions, but it may also have broad historical  repercussions . The orator may become the  voice  of political or  social history . Rhetoric , classically the theoretical basis for the art of oratory, is the art of using words effectively. Oratory is instrumental and practical, as distinguished from poetic or literary  composition , which traditionally aims at beauty and pleasure. Oratory is of the marketplace and as such not always concerned with the universal and permanent. The orator in his purpose and technique is primarily persuasive rather than informational or entertaining. An attempt is made to change  human behaviour  or to strengthen  convictions  and attitudes. The orator would correct wrong positions of the audience and establish psychological patterns favourable to his own wishes and platform. Argument and  rhetorical  devices are used, as are evidence, lines of reasoning, and appeals that support the orator’s aims. Exposition is employed to clarify and enforce the orator’s propositions, and  anecdotes  and illustrations are used to heighten response. The orator need not be a first-rate logician, though a capacity for good, clear thought helps to penetrate into the causes and results of tentative  premises  and conclusions and to use  analogy , generalizations, assumptions, deductive–inductive reasoning, and other types of  inference . Effective  debaters , who depend more heavily on logic, however, are not always impressive orators because superior eloquence also requires strong appeals to the motives,  sentiments , and habits of the audience. Oratorical greatness is invariably identified with strong emotional phrasing and delivery. When the  intellectual  qualities dominate with relative absence of the affective appeals, the oration fails just as it does when emotion sweeps aside reason.

6. Poetic Inspiration Poetic inspiration  can arise anywhere, at anytime. It can even be aroused by imagery and sensations that are not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word. For example, Philip Levine, the 18th U.S.  Poet  Laureate, found much of his  inspiration  in the Detroit factories he grew up working in. As a moralist,  Plato  disapproves of  poetry  because it is immoral, as a philosopher he disapproves of it because it is based in falsehood. He is of the view that philosophy is better than  poetry  because philosopher deals with idea / truth, whereas  poet  deals with what appears to him / illusion. Poetic Devices Alliteration. Assonance. Imagery. Metaphor. Onomatopoeia. Personification. Refrain. Rhyme. Socrates  views the influence of  poetry  as pernicious as it teaches people to value the wrong things and encourages poor dispositions and character.

7. Myth Myth  is a  folklore genre  consisting of  narratives  that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or  origin myths . The main characters in myths are usually  gods ,  demigods , or  supernatural  humans. [1][2][3]  Stories of everyday human beings, although often of leaders of some type, are usually contained in  legends , as opposed to myths. Myths are often endorsed by rulers and priests or priestesses and are closely linked to  religion  or spirituality. [1]  Many societies group their myths, legends, and history together, considering myths and legends to be true accounts of their remote past. [1][2][4][5]  In particular,  creation myths  take place in a primordial age when the world had not achieved its later form. [1][6][7]  Other myths explain how a society's  customs ,  institutions , and  taboos  were established and sanctified. [1][7]  There is a complex relationship between  recital of myths and the enactment of rituals . The term  mythology  may either refer to the study of myths in general, or a body of myths regarding a particular subject. [8]  The study of myth began in  ancient history . Rival classes of the  Greek myths  by  Euhemerus ,  Plato , and  Sallustius  were developed by the  Neoplatonists  and later revived by  Renaissance   mythographers . Today, the study of myth continues in a wide variety of academic fields, including  folklore studies ,  philology ,  psychology , and  anthropology . [9]  Moreover, the academic comparisons of bodies of myth are known as  comparative mythology . Since the term  myth  is widely used to imply that a story is not  objectively true , the identification of a narrative as a myth can be highly political: many adherents of religions view their religion's stories as  true  and therefore object to the stories being characterised as myths. Nevertheless, scholars now routinely speak of  Jewish mythology ,  Christian mythology ,  Islamic mythology ,  Hindu mythology , and so forth. Traditionally, Western scholarship, with its  Judeo-Christian  heritage, has viewed narratives in the  Abrahamic religions  as being the province of  theology  rather than mythology. Meanwhile, identifying religious stories of  colonised  cultures, such as stories in  Hinduism , as myths enabled Western scholars to imply that they were of lower truth-value than the stories of  Christianity . Labelling all religious narratives as  myths  can be thought of as treating different traditions with parity

8. Types of Poetry Poetry was divided into three main types of poetry by the great philosopher Aristotle; theywere comedy, tragedy, and epic. He claimed comedy was simply an imitation of what isinferior and possibly laughable. He claimed the other two, tragedy and epic, were similar inthat they both portray suffering and produce effects and emotions in their readers. The onlydifference between the two was epic was said to be a one verse poem while tragedy was innarrativeform.Today , poetry and literature scholars believe that poetry does indeed contain three maingenres . However, the three are known as lyric, narrative, and dramatic, not comedy,tragedy , and epic. Each of these genres can then be saturated with sub-genres and thensub -sub-genres depending on the rhyme scheme, rhythm, meters, style, and even emotion.Lyric poetry are poems focused on thought and emotion. The poems may be songs-- andsongs may be any other genre.  Narrative, Lyric, and Drama are the three general literary forms into which writing, especially poetry, has traditionally been grouped. A narrative tells a story or a tale; drama is presented on a stage, where actors embody characters; lyric has been loosely defined as any short poem other than narrative and drama, where poets express their state of mind.   Narrative Narrative or story telling developed from ritualistic chanting of myths, and has traditionally been groupedinto two poetic categories, epic and ballad. The stories were not memorized as is generally assumed butinstead bards improvised oral chants, relying on heavy alliterative and assonantal techniques, which seemedto put both the bard and the audience into a trance (Preminger 542).An epic is a long non- stanzaic "poem on a great and serious subject, told in an elevated style, and centeredon a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race"( Abrams 51). Typical figures include demi -gods, kings, and military heroes. Even a millennium  beforeHomer , bards were recording an already ancient oral tradition of epic poems in Sumer and Egypt

9. Mimesis Mimesis  is  a term  used in philosophy and literary criticism. It describes the process of imitation or mimicry through which artists portray and interpret the world.  Mimesis  is not a literary device or technique, but rather a way of thinking about a work of art. society, and its use has changed and been reinterpreted many times since. [ citation needed ] One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of  realism —is  Erich Auerbach 's   Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , which opens with a famous comparison between the way the world is represented in  Homer 's  Odyssey  and the way it appears in the Bible. [3]  In  art history ,  mimesis ,  realism , and  naturalism  are often interchangeably used as terms for the accurate, even 'illusionistic',  representation of the visual appearance of things . [ citation needed ] In addition to Plato and Auerbach , mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as  Aristotle ,  Philip Sidney ,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge ,  Adam Smith ,  Gabriel Tarde ,  Sigmund Freud ,  Walter Benjamin ,  Theodor Adorno ,  Paul Ricœur ,  Luce Irigaray ,  Jacques Derrida ,  René Girard ,  Nikolas Kompridis ,  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ,  Michael Taussig ,  Merlin Donald , and  Homi Bhabha .

10. Platonic Ideal In Book II of  The Republic , Plato describes  Socrates ' dialogue with his pupils. Socrates warns we should not seriously regard poetry as being capable of attaining the truth and that we who listen to poetry should be on our guard against its seductions, since the poet has no place in our idea of God. [iv] :377 Developing upon this in Book X, Plato told of Socrates' metaphor of the three beds: one bed exists as an idea made by God (the  Platonic ideal , or form); one is made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's idea; and one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter's. [v] :596–9 So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. Those who copy only touch on a small part of things as they really are, where a bed may appear differently from various points of view, looked at obliquely or directly, or differently again in a mirror. So painters or poets, though they may paint or describe a carpenter, or any other maker of things, know nothing of the carpenter's (the craftsman's) art, [v]  and though the better painters or poets they are, the more faithfully their works of art will resemble the reality of the carpenter making a bed, nonetheless the imitators will still not attain the truth (of God's creation). [v] The poets, beginning with Homer, far from improving and educating humanity, do not possess the knowledge of craftsmen and are mere imitators who copy again and again images of virtue and rhapsodise about them, but never reach the truth in the way the superior philosophers do.

11. Aristotle’s Views Similar to Plato's writings about mimesis, Aristotle also defined mimesis as the perfection, and imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry in the search for the perfect, the timeless, and contrasting being with becoming. Nature is full of change, decay, and cycles, but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of natural phenomena. Aristotle wrote about the idea of  four causes  in nature. The first, the  formal cause , is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The second cause is the material cause, or what a thing is made out of. The third cause is the efficient cause, that is, the process and the agent by which the thing is made. The fourth, the final cause, is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as  telos . Aristotle's  Poetics  is often referred to as the counterpart to this Platonic conception of poetry.  Poetics  is his treatise on the subject of mimesis. Aristotle was not against literature as such; he stated that human beings are mimetic beings, feeling an urge to create texts (art) that reflect and represent reality

12. Indian Aesthetics Indian aesthetics  is a unique philosophical and spiritual point of view on art, architecture and literature. In  Indian aesthetics , a rasa (Sanskrit: रस lit. The theory of rasa is attributed to Bharata , a sage-priest who may have lived sometime between the 1st century bce and the 3rd century. 1.   Art is the expression of a man's feelings and imagination on through a medium. When both are given a form, it is called art. 2.   Artist has total freedom to deny reality because they are supposed to be the creator of beauty. 3.   The things which attract you to an artwork.Where you feel pleasure in an artwork.It is not important that you capture reality. More important is what you thought. e.g. Van Gogh - Sunflower painting.   4.   Aesthetics is a discipline in which authors and philosophers try to explain the concepts of beauty. Different philosophers and aestheticians have a lot of contradictions between them. But the standard of beauty is the same when it concerns. 5.   Indian aesthetics is earlier than the western aesthetics. Before Italian philosopher Croce there was no real aesthetics. In India, a lot of scholars were particularly interested in aesthetics. their main aim was to understand and find out the meaning of beauty.   6.    Bharata  was the first to write on aesthetics in Bharata's Natya Shastra . mainly in terms of Literature, Drama and Dance. 7.   Theory of aesthetics is, in fact, the theory of “sense of beauty”. In India, there was a separate discipline for the theory of beauty. Indians were not historically inclined, they did not record anything and always dedicated their works to Gurus and Gods. 8.    Bharata’s Natya Shastra  (BNS)- the entire story is told in terms of music and dance and is not written for the folk artists. Purely classical form. Bharat Muni mentioned Indra the lord of heaven who had a lot of dancers. Natyashastra according to scholars were written during 2nd century B.C. or A.D. hence we can say that drama existed for a long time before. 9.   There is a missing link between Indus Valley Civilization and the  Mauryan period, which means that BNS must have been written during the  Shunga Dynasty and that this form must be known in Harappa but does not conclude due to lack of evidence. BNS was the first available theory of music, dance and drama But these forms existed long before.