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Criticism.Pdf THE NEW ' PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND POETICS ALEX PREMINGER AND T. V. F. BROGAN CO-EDITORS FRANKJ. WARNKE,"* " O. B. HARDISON, AND EARL MINER ASSOCIATE EDITORS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University P r e s s Published by Princeton University P r e s s 41 William Street, Princeton New J e r s e y 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University P r e s s , Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Preparation of this volume was made possible in part by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency dedicated to furthering the values of humane scholarship and culture in America, and by grants from other major foundations and private donors who wish to remain anonymous. Without their support this book would not have been possible. Publication has been aided by a grant from the Lacy Lockert Fund of Princeton University P r e s s . Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, co-editors; FrankJ. Warnke, O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN: 0-691-03271-8 (hardback edition) ISBN: 0-691-02123-6 (paperback edition) 1. Poetry—Dictionaries. 2. Poetics—Dictionaries. 3. Poetry—History and Criticism. I. Preminger, Alex. II. Brogan, T. V. F. (Terry V. F.) PN1021.P75 808.1'03—dc20 92-41887 Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Composed in ITC New Baskerville a n d custom fonts Designed and produced by Leximetrics, Inc., South Bend, Indiana Printed in the United States of America 79 108 CRETIC (1975); G. Yudice, Vicente Huidobro y la motivation IX. PHENOMENOLOGY del lenguaje (1978); M. Camurati, Poesia y poetica X. MYTH CRITICISM de Vicente Huidobro (1980); E. Busto Ogden, El XL READER-ORIENTED C R I T I C I S M creacionismo de Vicente Huidobro en sus relaciones con XII. LITERARY HISTORY la estetica cubista (1983). A.W.P.; K . N . M . XIII. DECONSTRUCTION XIV. NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES CRETIC or amphimacer (Gr. "long at both ends"). XV. CONCLUSION In Cl. prosody, the metrical sequence — « - . — , sometimes felt as a segment of iambo-trochaic and I. EARLY I N T E R P R E T I V E PRACTICES. The practice of lit. crit. has its historical roots in the early used alongside iambs and trochees or, like iambic readings of H o m e r and Scripture, which were most and trochaic, in external compounding with aeolic often allegorical in method and philosophical in (q.v.) units. On other occasions, as is obvious from intent, as in Theagenes of Rhegium (6th c. B.C.), resolution of either long syllable, t h e cretic is r e a l l y the first known scholar to have interpreted Homer a form of the paeon (q.v.), and cretic-paeonic allegorically (none of his works survives), and in measures, though rare in the choruses of Gr. trag- the surviving Gr. Scholia to Homer. Often the edy, are not infrequent in comedy. The cretic me- allegorical readings were Neoplatonic, and in a ter, different from most other Gr. meters, is writer like Philojudaeus (ca. 50 A.D.), Neopla- thought to have been of foreign origin, from a Cretan poet named Thaletas in the 7th c. B.C. tonic tendencies appeared in allegorization of the Old Testament. The texts were regarded as h i s t o r i - Cretics occur in early Roman drama and are also cal, but history was presumed to present a total common in the clausulae of Cicero. An example in pattern of meaning. Frequently, however, myths the former is the song of Phaedromus in Plautus, were treated as decayed history, following the Curculio 147-54: method employed by Euhemerus (4th c. B.C.). This tendency to see myths and legends as histori- pessuli, heus pessuli, vos saluto lubens, cal accounts distorted by linguistic change and oral transmission persisted into the 18th c. (e.g. vos amo, vos volo, vos peto atque obsecro Samuel Shuckford [1694-1754]), and even had a 20th-c. practitioner in Robert Graves. By c o n t r a s t , the meaning and meter of which G. E. D u c k w o r t h the mode of ethical or moralistic interp., at least reproduces thus: "Bolts and bars, bolts and bars, in the Neoplatonic trad, that Porphyry (233-305 gladly I greetings bring, / Hear my love, hear my A.D.) and others followed, was atemporal and di- prayer, you I beg and entreat." Like most other of the more complex Gr. feet, dactic, reading myth and legend as allegories of some part of the Neoplatonic concept of the pas- cretics do not exist in the mod. vernaculars except sage into, through, and out of generation, as in as experiments, but some Ren. songs are in cretics, Porphyry's own elaborate treatment of the cave of and the song "Shall I die? Shall I fly?" attributed the nymphs scene in the Odyssey (see PLATONISM in 1985 to Shakespeare is in cretic dimeters. Cretic AND POETRY). lines appear in Tennyson's "The Oak." Cretics Early J e w i s h and Christian interps. of Scripture sometimes appear in proverbs, idioms, and slang: provide a contrast to each other, with some simi- "After while, crocodile." See PAEON.—G. E. Duck- larities in the Hellenistic period when both were worth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (1952); Maas; influenced by Neoplatonic allegorizing. However, Koster; Crusius; C. Questa, Introduzione alia met- the Jewish trad, tended to more creative play w i t h rica di Plauto (1967); Snell; West; G. T. Wright in texts (see HEBREW PROSODY AND P O E T I C S ) , while Eidos3,2 (1986). R.J.G.; A.T.C.; T.V.F.B. the Christian practice broke into two somewhat antagonistic methods: allegorization and typologi- CRISIS. See PLOT. cal reading (see ALLEGORY) . T h e contrast between the Jewish and Christian trads. is that between a CRITICISM. This article provides an overview of mode of reading that treats the text as rife with the practice of crit. in the West f r o m ancient times possibility, building reading on reading, and a down to the present. For fuller discussion of the mode that presumes a fundamentally i m i t a t i v e or theory of lit. crit., see METACRITICISM and THE- referential conception of lang. that either repre- ORY. sents actual events (see REPRESENTATION AND MI- I. E A R L Y I N T E R P R E T I V E P R A C T I C E S MESIS) or by allegorical interp. finds behind the II. M I M E S I S events the spiritual or moral significance that his- III. GENRE AND TRADITION tory displays (see INTERPRETATION, FOURFOLD IV. DIDACTICISM, AFFECT, AND TASTE METHOD) . Even 20th-c. biblical typologists such as V. IMPRESSIONISM AND OBJECTIVISM Jean Danielou still feared that strict allegorical VI. AUTHORIAL GENIUS, IMAGINATION, interp. would spirit away the historicity of Scrip- AND INTUITION ture, reducing it to mere moral philosophy giving VII. THE NEW C R I T I C I S M inadequate attention to God's plan of creation, VIII. CONTINENTAL STRUCTURALISM history, and apocalypse. E a r l y typologists, of w h o m - [ 248 ] - CRITICISM St. John was certainly one, maintained both the appearances. The old war between philosophy historical and prophetic reliability of the Bible, and poetry to which Plato alluded was f or him the relating the text to the whole sweep of time and war of reality with appearance. refusing to reduce it to some ahistorical idea. The Even for Plato, however, poetry had charm. If method was to discover the events of the New he advocated, half-ironic a l l y through his mouth- Testament foreshadowed in the Old. It was to piece Socrates, banishment of poets from his Re- become incorporated into the fourfold mode of public, it was precisely on account of their per- interp. developed by J o h n Cassian (d. ca. 448) and ceived power to enchant and persuade. Here later St. Thomas Aquinas, and explicitly secular- arises the question of the roles of delight and ized in the letter to Can Grande prefixed to the instruction: in Ion and The Republic Plato's Socrates Paradiso and once attributed to Dante. was suspicious of the delight poets gave and be- Critical practice, therefore, began with strong lieved they taught that appearance was reality. In connections to moral philosophy and theology, addition, they were irrational, even though he and has never moved far from ethical concerns considered their irrationality divinely inspired (see ETHICS AND C R I T I C I S M ) , though at times mo- (see POETIC MADNESS). All of these Platonic short- rality narrowly conceived has been eschewed in comings were however turned into virtues by later favor of some form of aestheticism (q.v.). Such critics. moments often come to be understood as expres- Aristotle attempted to rescue the imitative func- sions of an ethic strongly opposed to dogma, as in tion in three ways. First, for Aristotle, poetic imi- the work of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Still, on the tation was not of the Platonic Idea.
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