From Plato to Postmodernism - Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author.pdf - ttc - rhea137

From Plato to Post-modernism:

Understanding the Essence of Literature

and the Role of the Author

Part I

Professor Louis Markos

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

Louis Markos, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English, Houston Baptist University

Louis Markos received his B.A. in English and History from Colgate University (Hamilton, NY) and his M.A. and

Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI). While at the University of Michigan, he

specialized in British Romantic Poetry (his dissertation was on Wordsworth), Literary Theory, and the Classics. At

Houston Baptist University (where he has taught since 1991), he offers courses in all three of these areas, as well as

in Victorian Poetry and Prose, Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose, Mythology, Epic, and Film.

He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has won teaching awards at both the University of Michigan and Houston

Baptist University. In 1994, he was selected to attend an NEH Summer Institute on Virgil’s Aeneid . In addition to

presenting several papers at scholarly conferences, Dr. Markos has become a popular speaker in Houston, Texas,

where he has presented five lectures at the Museum of Printing History Lyceum (three on film, two on ancient

Greece), a three-lecture series on film at the Houston Public Library, a class on film for Leisure Learning Unlimited,

a class on the Odyssey for a retirement center, and a lecture on Homer and the Oral Tradition for a seniors group.

His audiences for all these lectures and classes have been identical in their make-up to the typical student/client of

the Teaching Company. Although a devoted professor who works closely with his students, Dr. Markos is also

dedicated to the concept of the professor as public educator. He firmly believes that knowledge must not be walled

up in the academy, but must be freely and enthusiastically disseminated to all those “who have ears to hear.”

Needless to say, he is overjoyed to be fashioning this series for the Teaching Company.

Dr. Markos lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife, Donna, his son, Alex, and his daughter, Stacey.

Bibliographical Note

I would like to take a moment here to suggest strongly that all students of this series purchase the textbook Critical

Theory Since Plato , revised edition, by Hazard Adams (HBJ, 1992). This excellent collection of literary essays

contains nearly all the works that I will be discussing in this series. Although the works I will be discussing do

appear in numerous anthologies, Adams’s collection is the only one I know of that is comprehensive enough in its

depth and breadth to include them all.

At the end of each lecture outline, under the heading “essential reading,” I will begin by giving the author and title

of the main essay (or essays) analyzed in that lecture. If the words “in Adams,” appear directly after the title, that

indicates that that essay is anthologized in Critical Theory Since Plato . In some cases, I will follow this citation with

an alternate source for this essay, especially if that essay is part of a larger work that I think it would be helpful to

consult. (This, for example, is the case in Lecture Two: the lecture primarily concerns itself with Book X of the

Republic , which is anthologized in Adams; however, since many readers will want to consult the Republic in its

entirety, I have included a citation to that effect.) Full bibliographical information will, as usual, be given in the

Bibliography at the back of Part II.

Let me also warn the student now that the Bibliography will contain somewhat fewer secondary sources than is

typical for the Teaching Company. There is a reason for this. I want to encourage students to immerse themselves in

the primary material, in the theoretical essays themselves. Indeed, most students who have the courage to do so will

often find that the primary material is actually clearer and more forceful than the secondary material that is supposed

to explain and elucidate it. Don’t be afraid to read the theorists directly! If you give this series your full attention

and thought, you will be equipped with the requisite tools and background to enter yourself into the ongoing

dialogue of literary theory. That is my goal as a teacher; to usher you into that wonderful dialogue and then leave

you in the capable hands of Aristotle and Sidney and Shelley and Eliot to add you own unique insights to theirs.

Finally, you may also notice that the Bibliography is somewhat sparse in recent scholarship. There is a reason for

this too. With each passing decade, literary theory becomes more and more esoteric, more and more impenetrable.

The critics who write the scholarly essays have stopped speaking to the general public and are writing only for their

fellow academics. (Indeed, most Ph.D.’s today find themselves unable to pierce through the jargon and fractured

syntax of modern theory and those who critique it.) I have tried to confine the Bibliography to works that are written

in relatively lucid, jargon-free prose and have focused on enduring classics rather than scholarly fads. However,

though my Bibliography avoids this “bitter fruit” of modern academia, I will, in the course of my lectures, try to

give the student a sense of what is going on in the academy: what the “squabbles” are and what the status of poetry

is at the moment. In addition, in my glossary, I engage quite fully the modernist and postmodernist critique of

traditional literary theory. Students desiring a fuller exposure to the modern/postmodern mindset are encouraged to

study the glossary closely.

Once again, I issue my challenge: go to the primary sources! If you purchase only Critical Theory Since Plato and

challenge yourself to read one essay each week for the next year (guided, where relevant, by the lectures in this

series), you will have gotten a richer, more vivid, more lasting education than you would by reading a shelf-full of

books about theory. May God speed you on your voyage as you enter, to quote Machiavelli, “into the ancient courts

of ancient men.”

A full annotated bibliography can be found at the end of the booklet for Part II. Due to size limitations, we could

not include the bibliography in this booklet for Part I.

Table of Contents

From Plato to Post-modernism:

Understanding the Essence of Literature

and the Role of the Author

Part I

Professor Biography ............................................................................................i

Bibliographical Note .......................................................................................... ii

Foreword ........... .................................................................................................1

Lecture One Thinking Theoretically ..............................................3

Lecture Two Plato: Kicking out the Poets ..................................... 5

Lecture Three Aristotle’s Poetics : Mimesis and Plot........................7

Lecture Four Aristotle’s Poetics : Character and Catharsis............10

Lecture Five Horace’s Ars Poetica ...............................................13

Lecture Six Longinus on the Sublime .........................................16

Lecture Seven Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry”................................19

Lecture Eight Dryden, Pope, and Decorum....................................21

Lecture Nine Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful........................24

Lecture Ten Kant’s Critique of Judgment ....................................27

Lecture Eleven Schiller on Aesthetics ..............................................30

Lecture Twelve Hegel and the Journey of the Idea ...........................33

Timeline ............. ...............................................................................................36

Biographical Sketches …………………………………………………………37

Glossary ............. .........................................................................................Part II

Bibliography ...... .........................................................................................Part II

iii

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