ENG 303 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Techne, Platonic Idealism, The Carpenters
Document Summary
English 303: introduction to literary criticism and theory. Plato major concepts, arguments, and interpretive strategies. Understanding plato"s basic formulations is crucial to understanding the enduring debates about literature that follow him. As i and your editors" introductions stress, plato"s essential rejection of poetry on the grounds of its artificiality are presented in the form of reflections that have often set the terms of literary debate in the west (41). His distrust of representational art (that is, mimetic art, which he considered fake, a copy, a lie) and rhetoric (which had, he argued, the potential to mislead) arises still today. Put simply, plato is alive and well and with us, whether we know it or not. Some important assumptions, rhetorical strategies, stylistic features to notice in plato"s writing are: All of plato"s known writing exists in dialogue form, with socrates as the main speaker. The other speaker in the dialogue (and these persons vary) is socrates" interlocutor.
