From Plato to Post-modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author

Any lover of Shakespeare, or of the Romantic poets, can concede that poetry is pleasurable. But is it good for us, and can it teach us anything?

These questions may seem odd, but they have beguiled and engaged eminent critics for millennia. What we call literary criticism is really a debate over a few key questions:

What is poetry's wellspring? God? Nature? The human self?
Is poetry superfluous to human progress?
Are the literary arts a vehicle to higher truths or a pack of lies?
Is the author a divinely inspired rhapsode or a mere artisan, "manufacturing" meaning?
To answer these questions, this course engages an enormous range of material. You'll follow the strands of this "conversation" between philosophy and the literary arts down the millennia, profiting from in-depth analyses of works by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Foucault, Derrida, and more.

You'll concentrate on critical reflections about poetry—the oldest of the literary arts, and also come away with lessons on how to understand literature, and all of the arts, more generally. More importantly, you'll be prepared to join in these critical conversations yourself.

What and Wherefore Is Poetry?

Plato believed that poems were lies, and there was no place for poets in Plato's Republic. To him, poets were unreliable, substituting dreamlike visions for the true essences of the world that a responsible philosopher should seek. If the only authentic beauty is the truth found in nature, he asked, then what use is man-made beauty, fabrications loaded down with fantasies and lies?

Ever since Plato laid down this challenge, the critical theorists in this course have striven to prove that poetry is more than pretty phrases, that it has the power to instruct and improve its reader:

Aristotle argued that the sufferings of the tragic hero in Greek drama arouse in us a cathartic surge of terror and pity, even as his fate teaches us moral lessons.
Longinus introduced the idea of the poetic sublime. Unlike rhetoric, which merely persuades, the sublime overwhelms its audience, literally carrying the audience away to a higher realm of experience.