Re: Bad Ears

Jim said: "I don't think there's any [literary criticism] out there that's
good for more than 50 years -- perhaps the closest is Aristotle's Poetics,
but that's the sole example I can think of (no doubt Robbie can name a
number of classics in the field of rheotric, but who reads those outside of
academia?)."

Who reads the Poetics outside of academia? Who, really, reads Virgil
outside of academia? What percentage of our population, do you suppose,
will pick up Shakespeare's Sonnets or Don Quixote when a school has nothing
to do with it?

I can indeed name a number of classics in the field of rhetoric. And if we
define literary criticism, as we've done several times already, simply as
writing about some writing (or even thinking about or discussing it), I can
describe a long list there too, going back to the Greeks and Romans. I
don't know what exactly you mean by saying that it's not "good" beyond fifty
years, but even beyond five hundred, all of it I know of remains sensible,
much of it remains even profoundly enlightening.

-robbie
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Received on Sat Oct 26 17:54:15 2002