Re: Bad Ears

From: Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu>
Date: Sat Oct 26 2002 - 20:47:13 EDT

I believe you can name quite a long list of rhetorical classics -- that are read
by academics. Seems like the point I was responding to at the time had to do
with something that's influential beyond those circles. I read Aristotle's
Poetics in High School -- but I guess I'm just weird. I heard Spielberg,
though, virtually quote Aristotle in his description of what makes a good movie
-- you have to be able to create the effect just by telling the story, without
all the impressive visuals.

Shakespeare? My God, man, he's writing for Hollywood this very day :). His
plays, both in film and performance, haven't diminished an iota in popularity.
I know you specifically mentioned the Sonnets and not the plays, but I think if
you look you'll find that over the last century we've seen the publication of
quite a few editions of Shakespeare's sonnets. I used one of them -- 116, I
think -- in my wedding. The words were quite familiar to even the relatively
unliterary members of the audience.

Don Quixote is a fun book and tends to get reprinted a good bit too. If you can
find it on the shelf at Walden Books or Books a Million, people outside of
academia are reading it. I promise.

I would have to separate rhetorical works (about the proper use of language)
from literary criticism (explication of a text) in this discussion, though.
People will always want to know how to speak and write well. People will not
always want to know what Arnold thought about the poetry of Robert Burns, except
as a matter of historical curiosity.

I agree I should have defined my terms and limited the context, though -- I
thought they were apparent from the context of the post, but they may not have
been. What I meant by not being "good" beyond 50 years is that it doesn't
necessarily answer the questions that people are asking of texts now -- that
some of its assumptions are transparently bigoted sometimes, other times
obviously outdated, while other times, no doubt, enlightening. I can see older
Shakespeare criticism taking for granted that the Jew in Measure for Measure was
an unqualified bad guy, seeing his speech "if you prick me" as diversionary
nonsense and not, as many see it today, as radical social critique.

Jim

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> 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 20:28:09 2002

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