Month: September 2017

Literary criticism has been around in the most general sense at least as long as literature, but the first example of formulated criticism that we have records of comes to us from the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.

In Plato’s Republic, book X, he constructs a dialogue about the user, the maker, and the artist.

“But does the painter know the right form of the bit and reins? Nay, hardly even the workers in brass and leather who make them; only the horseman who knows how to use them- he knows their right form.”

Plato’s mouthpiece goes further, generalizing this description of a specific industry, that of the creation of bit and reins for horses, to all forms of art and craft:

“…there are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them?”

Only the user, the player, or the reader can determine the quality of a product. They know upon touching it, listening to it, or otherwise handling it, whether it is good or bad. The maker will take their feedback and incorporate it. An imitator, a third party who observes this and tries to replicate it, will have no such knowledge. According to Plato, all art is mere imitation.

Aristotle disagreed with Plato on several fronts. They agreed that art is mimetic, imitating reality. However, where Plato treats art as a failure to honestly capture the truth, Aristotle believes that art contributes something unique, when used effectively. In his Poetics, Aristotle focuses on rhetorical devices like diction and meter, and their role in making art affect the audience.

Catharsis (κάθαρσις) was the most essential element of art (especially tragedy, the highest form of art) for Aristotle. The audience must purge their negative emotions- and their positive, finding a balance between pity, fear, and ecstasy. The audience recognizes that the events of a story are not true, and so they can distance themselves from the reality of various forms of horrific and tragic events. Art produces entertainment and education because it imitates, and the imitation is recognized as unreal.

Yet like Plato, Aristotle limits the kinds of stories that can be told. He believes tragedies must have a fixed form. He painstakingly describes the qualities of a tragic hero, the techniques that should be used to induce catharsis, and the rhetorical devices that good art contains. Moral Criticism’s focus on the role of art as education would last as long as Greek Civilization- and recur whenever a civilization admired the Greeks, like the Romans and the Victorians did.