Inspiration and mimesis in Plato's criticism of poetry

Plato criticizes poetry in several of his dialogues, beginning with Apology, his first work, and ending with Laws, his last. In these dialogues, his criticism of poetry can be divided into two streams: poetry is criticized for either being divinely inspired, or because it is mimetic or imitative of reality. However, of the dialogues which criticize poetry in these ways, it is not until Laws that Plato mentions both inspiration and mimesis together, and then it is only in a few sentences. Furthermore, nowhere in the dialogues does Plato discuss their relationship. This situation has a parallel in the secondary literature. While much work has been done on inspiration or mimesis in Plato’s criticism of poetry, very little work exists which discusses the connection between them. This study examines Plato’s treatment - in the six relevant dialogues - of these two poetic elements, inspiration and mimesis, and shows that a relationship exists between them. Both can be seen to relate to two important Socratic-Platonic concerns: the care of the soul and the welfare of the state. These concerns represent a synthesis of Socratic moral philosophy with Platonic political beliefs. In the ‘inspiration’ dialogues, Ion, Apology, Meno, Phaedrus and Laws, poetic inspiration can affect the Socratic exhortation which considers the care of the individual soul. Further, as we are told in Apology, Crito and Gorgias, it is the good man, the virtuous man - the one who cares for his soul - who also cares for the welfare of the state. Therefore, in its effect on the individual soul, poetic inspiration can also indirectly affect the state. In the ‘mimesis’ dialogues, Republic and Laws, this same exhortation, on the care of the soul, is posed, but it is has now been rendered into a more Platonic form - as either the principle of specialization - the ‘one man, one job’ creed of Republic, which advances the harmony between the three elements of the soul, or as the concord between reason and emotion in Laws. While in Republic, mimesis can damage the tripartite soul's delicate balance, in Laws, mimesis in poetry is used to promote the concord. Further, in both these dialogues, poetic mimesis can affect the welfare of the state. In Republic, Socrates notes that states arc but a product of the individuals of which they are composed Therefore, by affecting the harmony of the individual soul, mimesis can then undermine the harmony of the state, and an imperfect political system, such as a timarchy, an oligarchy, a democracy, or a tyranny, can result. However, in Laws, when it is harnessed by the philosophical lawgivers, mimesis can assist in the concord between the rulers and the ruled, thus serving the welfare of the state. Inspiration and mimesis can thus be seen to be related in their effect on the education of both the individual, in the care of the soul, and the state, in its welfare. Plato's criticism of poetry, therefore, which is centred on these two features, addresses common Platonic concerns: in education, politics, ethics, epistemology and psychology.

The contribution of representative poets in the development of modern Hindi criticism on poetry

HINDI

The lounger's common-place book; or Miscellaneous collections, in history, criticism, biography, poetry, & romance.

Mode of access: Internet.

British Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary Unity

This dissertation is an exploration of how a small but important group of Romantic critics, finding fault in the ideal of three unities developed by neoclassical Academicians and wrongly attributed to Aristotle, turned to the terminology and practices of the fine arts to emphasize their conception of organic unity in literature. The Romantic analogy to painting in particular enables a philosophical criticism of literature to present the aesthetic semblance of painting, the comprehension of a multitude of details in a harmonious whole that is a natural unity to its medium, as a paradigm of modern-romantic poetry and its aspirations to similar complexity, particularity, and imaginative colour. Further, in extension of the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes of the seventeenth century, the division of ancient and romantic art by Romantic critics like August Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt not only establishes an ethnological and historical difference between the artistic productions of these two cultural periods but also allows, unlike the neoclassical unities, a non-anachronistic philosophical vocabulary of whole and parts or of the general and particular in the criticism of poetry, which involution provides a “rule” more consonant with the laws of the imagination rather than with the rhetorical and absolutist dicta that were thither available in the literary canon.

Framing Culture : Criticism and Policy in Australia

How is contemporary culture 'framed' - understood, promoted, dissected and defended - in the new approaches being employed in university education today? How do these approaches compare with those seen in the public policy process? What are the implications of these differences for future directions in theory, education, activism and policy? Framing Culture looks at cultural and media studies, which are rapidly growing fields through which students are introduced to contemporary cultural industries such as television, film and video. It compares these approaches with those used to frame public policy and finds a striking lack of correspondence between them. Issues such as Australian content on commercial television and in advertising, new technologies and new media, and violence in the media all highlight the gap between contemporary cultural theories and the way culture and communications are debated in public policy. The reasons for this gap must be investigated before closer relations can be established. Framing Culture brings together cultural studies and policy studies in a lively and innovative way. It suggests avenues for cultural activism that have been neglected in cultural theory and practice, and it will provoke debates which are long overdue.

Joy fear and poetry

Joy Fear and Poetry is an original performance work written, designed and directed by Natasha Budd in collaboration with 15 performers aged 7-12 years. It was performed in Brisbane as part of La Boite Theatre’s 2013 Indie Season. The production employs contemporary performance, postdramatic and constructivist methodologies to make an intervention into habituated patterns of positioning children in society. It embodies a model of practice that moves beyond participant empowerment toward a more nuanced process of co-artists creating intersubjective ‘composite texts’ (McCall 2011) for mainstream audiences. Joy Fear and Poetry experiments with techniques for performance making that create conditions conducive to authentic theatre making with children. These focus on dramaturgical, directorial and design strategies harnessed to maintain the performers’ focus, motivation and cognitive engagement within a reflexive, collaborative process.

Fresh Cuttings: A Celebration of Fiction and Poetry from UQP's Black Writing Series

As the first anthology of UQP's indigenous-authored books, Fresh Cuttings represents the very best of fiction and poetry publishing from UQP's Black Australian Writing series. An introduction by the editors and a biography of each author is included.

Reflective writing: The student nurse's perspective on reflective writing and poetry writing.

Summary Background Reflective writing is a mandatory part of nurse education but how students develop their skills and use reflection as part of their experiential learning remains relatively unknown. Understanding reflective writing in all forms from the perspective of a student nurse is therefore important. Objectives To explore the use of reflective writing and the use of poetry in pre-registered nursing students. Design A qualitative design was employed to explore reflective writing in pre-registered nursing students. Setting A small university in Scotland. Participants BSc (Hons) Adult and Mental Health Pre-registration Student Nurses. Methods Two focus groups were conducted with 10 student nurses during March 2012. Data was analysed thematically using the framework of McCarthy (1999). Results Students found the process of reflective writing daunting but valued it over time. Current educational methods, such as assessing reflective accounts, often lead to the ‘narrative’ being watered down and the student feeling judged. Despite this, reflection made students feel responsible for their own learning and research on the topic. Some students felt the use of models of reflection constricting, whilst poetry freed up their expression allowing them to demonstrate the compassion for their patient under their care. Conclusions Poetry writing gives students the opportunity for freedom of expression, personal satisfaction and a closer connection with their patients, which the more formal approach to reflective writing did not offer. There is a need for students to have a safe and supportive forum in which to express and have their experiences acknowledged without the fear of being judged.

Qualifying Cosmopolitanism? Solidarity, Criticism, and Michael Walzer's 'View from the Cave'

Erskine, Toni, 'Qualifying Cosmopolitanism? Solidarity, Criticism, and Michael Walzer's 'View from the Cave'', International Politics (2007) 44(1) pp.125-149 RAE2008

Textual criticism and medieval Irish studies

Many textual scholars will be aware that the title of the present thesis has been composed in a conscious revisionary relation to Tim William Machan’s influential Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts. (Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville, 1994)). The primary subjects of Machan’s study are works written in English between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the latter part of the period conventionally labelled Middle English. In contrast, the works with which I am primarily concerned are those written by scholars of Old and Middle Irish in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where Machan aims to articulate the textual and cultural factors that characterise Middle English works as Middle English, the purposes of this thesis are (a) to identify the underlying ideological and epistemological perspectives which have informed much of the way in which medieval Irish documents and texts are rendered into modern editions, and (b) to begin to place the editorial theory and methodology of medieval Irish studies within the broader context of Biblical, medieval and modern textual criticism. Hence, the title is Textual Criticism and Medieval Irish Studies, rather than Textual Criticism and Medieval Irish Texts

Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

Stylistics, criticism and mythrepresentation again: squaring the circle with Ray Mackay's subjective solution for all problems

This article is a response to an article by Ray Mackay (1996) which constitutes an attack on stylistic analysis in general, and the writings of the above authors and Ron Carter in particular. Mackay's article (in Language and Communication) accuses stylistics of 'scientificness' and claims that its attempt to provide objective analyses of literary texts is futile.1 We suggest that Mackay has misrepresented what stylisticians have said about objectivity, and that his understanding of objectivity, science and the nature of text-interpretative argument is seriously flawed.

Authorizing a tradition: Theory, criticism and (self-) canonization in French Caribbean writing

As critics have noted, Antillean literature has developed in tandem with a strong (self-) critical and theoretical body of work. The various attempts to theorize Antillean identity (négritude, antillanité, créolité) have been controversial and divisive, and the literary scene has been characterized as explosive, incestuous and self-referential. Yet writers aligned with, or opposed to, a given theory often have superior visibility. Meanwhile writers who claim to operate outside the boundaries of theory, such as Maryse Condé, are often canny theoretical operators who, from prestigious academic or cultural positions, manipulate readers’ responses and their own self-image through criticism. While recent polemics have helped to raise the critical stock of the islands generally, they have particularly enhanced the cultural capital of Chamoiseau and Condé, whose literary antagonism is in fact mutually sustaining. Both writers, through a strong awareness of (and contribution to) the critical field in which their work is read, position themselves as canonical authors.