literary theory and classical studies
literary theory and classical studiesOne of the most striking features of 20th-cent. intellectual life has been the attention paid to literary theory, especially from the time of the 1960s. This intellectual ferment has produced a confusing variety of approaches, and especially of terminology, which has in turn given birth to a new minor isagogic genre, that of the ‘Introduction to Literary Theory’, the modern equivalent of the Technai rhetorikai or Placita philosophorum of the ancient world. The analogy with the Hellenistic philosophical schools is perhaps particularly close, in that alongside ‘school’ theorizing there is a mass of more or less eclectic work by practitioners who, like Horace, would claim to be ‘bound to swear by no master's words’. Just as no one would regard Aetius' account of Platonism (1st cent. ad) as an even half-adequate account of what reading Plato is like, so summary...
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