Humanism and Literary Theory This discussion is based on Chapter One, "Theory Before Theory," in Peter Barry's Beginning

Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory"(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). We began class by talking about what literature is, and how you know a piece of literature, as distinct from any other kind of writing. We then talked about what literature does, why one reads it, what one gets out of it; I made a list on the board of all the responses, and then began to talk about how "literature" moved from being something one read for pleasure to an academic field of study or type of knowledge. Literary study began in Britain in 1840s, with the idea that the study of literature would "emancipate us from the notions and habits" of our own age, connecting us instead with what is "fixed and enduring"--the idea here is that literature holds timeless universal human truths (and hence can be read without regard to historical context of its production, and without regard to particular historical moment in which we read it and make meaning out of it). The idea behind literary study was to secure middle-class values, to transmit them to all classes (working class as well as aristocracy) so that those values would indeed become universal. The problem with studying lit at the university level initially was problem of defining HOW one studies lit. If the study of literature develops taste, educates sympathies, enlarges the mind, makes one a better human--how are those things measured? How can they be studied and assessed? At the end of the nineteenth century, in both England and America, as academics began to push for university courses in English and American literature, these questions arose. How could the study of literature be defined and carried out in a manner that was disciplined and objective enough to give it status as an academic pursuit (and not just "chatter about Shelley," as one critic put it--or as statements about what one likes or doesn't like in lit.) This debate led, not only to the development of the first English departments, but to the development of the first types of literary theory, i.e., theories about how literature worked, what it did, and how it ought to be read and studied.` There are two main tracks in literary theory. One begins with I.A. Richards' notion of "practical criticism," which we might call "close reading." This theory insisted that the best, and indeed the only, way to study literature was to study the text itself in close detail, and to disregard anything outside the text itself, including the author's biography, the historical context in which the work appeared, how it related to other works both before, during, and after its appearance, and how critics and readers responded to the text. In short, this branch of criticism theorized the literary text as an isolated object, something to be studied in and of itself alone. This is the theory that says what literature students ought to do is read the words on the page, and nothing else. The second track in literary theory looks at the text as a key to understanding questions and ideas beyond the text itself. (This tradition is traced through Phillip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Henry James, among others). Rather than centering on the text alone, this track asks "big picture" questions: How are literary texts structured? How are they different from nonliterary texts (if indeed they are)? How do literary texts affect audiences/readers (i.e. what

does literature DO to you)? Is there such a thing as a specifically "literary" language, and if so, what is it like? How does literature relate to other aspects of a culture, such as politics, or gender relations, or philosophy, or economics? Theorists in this track use the literary text as a kind of springboard to ask questions that are not solely concerned with "the words on the page." Current literary theory comes from both tracks. We begin by acknowledging that "the words on the page" are the basis for any analysis of any piece of literature--the raw material from which any argument or ideas must necessarily come. But the analysis rarely stops with close reading; that close reading shows us something, not only about the construction of the text, but about the author, the reader, the social contexts of both, and about the methods of interpretation available to authors and readers. Both tracks, up until about the late 1960s, shared certain fundamental assumptions about what literature was, how it worked, how we read it, and why reading literature was important. We can sum up these assumptions in ten major points. 1. Good literature is of timeless significance. 2. The literary text contains its own meaning within itself. 3. (related to point 2): the best way to study the text is to study the words on the page, without any predefined agenda for what one wants to find there. 4. The text will reveal constants, universal truths, about human nature, because human nature itself is constant and unchanging. People are pretty much the same everywhere, in all ages and in all cultures. 5. The text can speak to the inner truths of each of us because our individuality, our "self," is something unique to each of us, something essential to our inner core. This inner essential self can and does transcend all external social forces (i.e. no matter what happens to me, I will always be me). 6. The purpose of literature is the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values; on the other hand, literature should always be "disinterested," i.e. it should never have an overt agenda of trying to change someone (or it will become propaganda). 7. In a literary work, form and content are fused together, and are integral parts of each other. 8. A literary work is "sincere," meaning it is honest, true to experience and human nature, and thus can speak the truth about the human condition. 9. What is valuable in literature is that it shows us our true nature, and the true nature of society, without preaching (like point 6); it shows through drama, event, character, and conflict, rather than explaining, lecturing, or demonstrating. 10. What critics do is interpret the text (based largely on the words on the page) so that the reader can get more out of reading the text. So far we're still on pretty familiar ground. What is going to be most striking, and most disturbing, about the kinds of literary theory you'll encounter this semester is how different most of them are from what you already know about how to read literature. The qualities of literature we've listed on the board--the timeless value, the secrets of human nature, the moral lessons literature teaches--all belong to a particular tradition in studying literature. Rather than just being "what one does" with literature, these ideas about the value of literature come

from a particular perspective, which is generally called "liberal humanism" or just "humanism." Liberal humanism started to lose its credibility in the late 1960s. What happened in the 1960s is pretty complicated, in terms of literary and social history. In a nutshell, literary critics responded to the social and political questions arising about race, gender, class, sexuality (etc.) by asking whether these timeless universal human truths found in lit. really were timeless and universal, or whether they weren't just as bound to race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture as everything else in the world. In other words, they started to ask questions like, is Shakespeare really "universal," or did he write as a white male in the 16th century? And if so, how did we come to read Shakespeare as "classic" and "timeless"? Not everything prior to the 1960s fell under the heading of "humanism," however. In fact, many writers throughout the 20th century have questioned one or more of the basic assumptions of humanism, as have several schools of criticism and theory. Marxist criticism and psychoanalytic, for example, which pay attention to how social class and sexuality (respectively) function in producing literature, authors, readers, and particular kinds of interpretations, have challenged humanist principles consistently. What changed in the 1960s was that humanism became labeled as such, as a particular perspective or kind of theory of literature, rather than simply "the truth" about literature and how one approaches it. The theory "boom" that occurred in the 1970s threw all of the humanist assumptions into question. The theories we'll be looking at this semester will strike you as alien and unfamiliar precisely because they throw out all the familiar ways we've learned to think about literature and about ourselves. Just to start with: the theories we'll be reading have certain ideas in common. They include 1. The idea that things we have thought of as constant, including the notion of our own identity (gender identity, national identity, e.g.) are not stable and fixed, but rather are fluid, changing, unstable. Rather than being innate essences, these qualities of identity are "socially constructed." (A lot of the theories we'll be looking at are concerned with HOW such identities are constructed, and how they come to look and feel so stable and constant). Most of the theories we'll look at throw out the idea of there being anything absolute, especially any absolute truth, and instead focus on how everything is constructed and provisional. 2. Theorists also throw out the idea of objectivity, arguing that everything one thinks or does is in some degree the product of one's past experiences, one's beliefs, one's ideology. Where liberal humanists deny this, and insist they can look at a literary text with no preconceived notions of what they'll find, they are only masking their own ideological commitment. This idea relates back to the first idea, that truth is all a matter of perspective; this leads to the idea that thought and truth are all "relative," rather than absolute. 3. The theorists we'll read agree that language is the most important factor in shaping all our conceptions about life, ourselves, literary texts, and the world. Rather than language reflecting the "real world," language actually creates and structures our perceptions of "reality." Furthermore, rather than being speakers of

language, these theorists hold that we are products of language. 4. Because all truths are relative, all supposedly "essential" constants are fluid, and language determines reality, these theorists conclude that there is no such thing as definitive meaning. There is only ambiguity, fluid meaning, multiple meaning, especially in a literary text. 5. Again, because of this idea of relativism, there is no such thing as a "total" theory, one which explains every aspect of some event. (Though of course this critique can circle back against each of the five points I've just named, which have been presented as if they were absolute, fixed, definite, and total). Don't worry if this doesn't make sense to you yet, if your head is spinning after all this. Understanding these ideas is what this course is all about, and I don't expect you to know what's going on before the course has even started. Don't worry too if you dislike all the ideas I've just gone over. Some people would point to the decline of the humanist perspective, and the rise of the modern theoretical perspective (with its insistence on relativism, ambiguity, multiplicity, etc.) as EXACTLY what's wrong with the world today. (If only we could return to the oldfashioned values, and believe in absolute truth, value, and permanence, they say, everything would be or at least a lot better than it is now). That's one of the questions we'll be looking at as we study these anti-humanist theorists this semester. ************************************** * Humanist Literary Theory Following notes are by Jyotsna S. of II Year PSEng. ------In the latter half of the chapter on Humanist theory, the traditions and thoughts of many influential thinkers stemming from both Platonic and Aristotelian thought have been examined. Before even attempting to consider what these thinkers have put down in literature and philosophy as their own traditions, it is necessary to examine exactly what the oral traditions of Plato and Aristotle themselves is. The society of ancient Greece was one that thrived in almost all aspects that modern society can achieve standards of excellence in. It had highly developed and advanced systems of education, legislation and administration; some however arguing that literature itself was incomplete at the time, as ancient Greece only had to make do with drama and poetry. Nevertheless, the influence of Greece spread all across the rest of Europe and the world due to these main events: (not listed in chronological order) 1. The conquests of Alexander the Great 2. Trade routes including what would formally be called the silk route later on 3. Greece becoming a roman colony around 46 BCE. 4. The spread of Christianity across Europe This helped the spread of Greek thought all across Europe, then Persia and Ethiopia and is the reason why most scholars refer to Greek philosophy as the foundation of western thought. Ive also put up a link to more on Greek philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/greekphi/ The philosophers listed agree with either Plato and/or Aristotle in part, or disagree with both. Coming to the philosophers and writers who explore the tradition of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, the first of them is:

QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS Horace mainly explains that the purpose of poetry, or literature in general is that it is dulce et utile, or sweet and useful. Horace insists that poetry serves the didactic purpose that Plato seeks, but provides pleasure at the same time; therefore in essence, Horace states that the two goals are not incompatible. He says that poetry is a useful teaching tool because of its pleasure which makes it accessible. Like Plato, Horace also sees nature as the primary source for poetry but argues that poets should imitate both nature and other authors. Horaces ideas are especially important as they define the ideas about literature that can be traced from the ancient world to the renaissance. Among other such important philosophers is the Neo Platonist St. Thomas Aquinas. Therefore you can see some traces of agreement with Plato on poetry. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: One of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age, Sir Philip Sidney is most famous for his The Defence of Poetry, sometimes cited as the defence of poesy. Apparently he was influenced at least in part by Stephen Gosson. Sir Philip Sidney directly attacks Plato for his thoughts on poetry, the essence of his defence being that poetry , by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. He also says that poetry completes a process that is left incomplete by nature, therefore teaching readers the inner meaning of the things and events of the material world. Finally, Sir Philip Sidney says that the mimetic form of poetry, instead of reflecting inferiority, presents a higher level of reality, something which lends shape to the otherwise raw observation of nature. SIR FRANCIS BACON: Perhaps the most striking element about Bacon is that he not only refers back to Elizabethan tradition, but defends it passionately. He follows Aristotle in the thought that poetry does not present an inferior representation of the world we live in, rather a world better than the one we live in. He also says that history and reason, although tied to human experience, only present the sensory world. Bacon argues that imagination can create realities not yet manifested if not limited by sensory or other experiences. He disagrees with Plato on the fact that poetry manipulates and lies to the reader, but instead Sir Francis Bacon says that poetry presents a feigned history which speaks directly to the human soul. More importantly, Bacon felt that poetry is greater than rationality because reason can only observe the preexisting material world, but poetry allows the mind to create its own worlds and rule over them. JOSEPH ADDISON: Joseph Addison, of the Addison and Steele duo was not only famous for his numerous plays, but also for his thoughts on poetry, following Plato in the sense that he too is concerned with what poetry does to the minds of the readers, although unlike Plato he is less concerned with a poems moral effect, rather with its aesthetics; what he calls how the poem delights rather than how it instructs. Influences of John Locke can also be seen in his ideas. Addison describes two types of pleasure in imagination: Primary pleasure- from the immediate experience of objects through sensory perception , such as seeing the vivid colours of a changing tree

Secondary pleasure- the experience of ideas from the representation of objects, when those objects are not present. For instance, reminiscing about the tree and writing a poem describing its beauty or painting a picture of it. Even though Addison gives more importance to the aesthetic quality of a poem or of literature in general, he states that imagination itself is less refined that the faculty of reason and is more commonly found in untrained minds. This he says because of his belief that reason investigates the cause of things whereas imagination is only content with experiencing them either directly or through representation. EDMUND BURKE: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/burke/ Since Burkes thoughts are somewhat vaster and can be traced back to many other schools of thought, I took the liberty of putting up one link that may prove useful. Burke also follows John Locke in stating that all human knowledge comes from sensory experiences. Burke explains that imagination is a creative power that works in two ways1. To represent images of nature as perceived by the senses 2. To combine these images in new ways Burke also says that imagination cannot achieve creations that are completely original, it only combines the images received from the sensory world, but imagination is not tied to the natural world. For burke, art is not a copy of the natural world, but a sort of recreation itself. Burke also opposes Platos argument that art is merely a copy; instead says that the critical assessment of art must be based on the concept of taste. A shoemaker may want an accurate picture of a shoe, while a dancer may want a picture that gives a sense of the shoes motion and liveliness; an emotional rather than physical quality. Taste is a matter of sensibility according to Burke, rather than a matter of reason or logic. He goes on to say that reason requires education and training, but sensibility can be developed to a greater or lesser degree in all individuals. In this aspect he seems to reflect the thoughts of Addison. A concept which would further help to understand Burke is the Lethe, or the river of forgetfulness, a concept found in Greek mythology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe SAMUEL JOHNSON: One important aspect to keep in mind while examining the thoughts of Samuel Johnson is that of the birth of fiction around the 18th century, following the rise of the novel as an important element of literature. Johnson says that fiction depends on the idea of mimesis, presenting stories which imitate nature or real life, unlike poetry or drama, however fiction depends on the idea of realism, presenting stories to readers as though these individuals were real people. To understand Johnson, one must also look at the mixed concepts of fiction, poetry and realism, for which the roots of all these concepts must be looked at: -the restoration -the post reformation period of the 18th century Like others, Johnson is concerned with the morality of literature. Quite simply, in his view good art is one that has a positive message and bad art contains a negative message, encouraging readers to replicate the behaviour found in literature. Therefore, Johnson feels that novels are potentially more harmful than poetry

as they are more realistic in form; being easily mistaken for descriptions of real life. He also argues that Greek and Roman writers presented the best models for any literary art, which is why any critic or writer must have a thorough knowledge of the classical literary tradition. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Reynolds follows Plato in arguing that the highest and soundest kind of art and criticism refers to an eternal immutable nature of things, a kind of universal idea common to all times and all forms of art. He is referring to a sort of irrefutable art that transcends time and genre, but the question of refuting art itself is derogated by Reynolds as he says that the assessment of a critic is subjective as he is but mortal. The solution to this problem, therefore, is to try and discover the principles of human nature on which all forms of imaginative art are founded, and then try to base an aesthetic standard on those principles. He also agrees that one cannot be trained to feel just as one is trained to reason, however it is a well trained faculty to know when reason should give way to feeling. In essence, Reynolds says that the great end of all art is to make an impression on the human faculties of imagination and sensibility, not on the faculty of reason. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/ context.html Wordsworth broadly follows Aristotelian thought and also reflects the ideas of the school of romanticism, stating that anything closer to nature was superior to anything artificial. Why did Wordsworth turn his attention to the language of speech and writing of the common man, so to speak? The answer lies in the examination of economic and social events of change at the time, that is, a poet catered to the common man more than ever, for the first time in history. Up until the mid 18thcentury, the subjects of poems were royalty as they were the sole patrons of poets. Now however, poets wrote about the common man who could afford to subscribe to them. He represented a large scale shift in European poetry towards the common man, infusing it with pastoral tradition. However, one can question as to how accurate Wordsworths descriptions of the common man are as he himself came from a feudal background and may have had little or no exposure to the average lifestyle or common man. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: http://engliterarium.blogspot.com/2008/11/s-tcoleridge-function-of-poetry.html JOHN KEATS: Keatss views on poetry probably represent at best, Hellenism. According to him, rational thought breaks the world into subject and object for the purposes of classification and analysis in the Aristotelian process called science. Keats speaks about an interplay , in the sense that sensations and empathetic experiences ( including poetry) break down the barriers between subject and object and insist on this interaction between the two entities. However, Keats also feels that poetry and science, empathy and reason are two incompatible elements which are also oppositional. However, the most important key to understanding Keats in this context is negative capability, which in essence is the ability to stay comfortable with uncertainty and doubt without the need to find certainty. This is different from

nihilism, which has an ingrained sense of hopelessness in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability William Wordsworth was born on April 7th, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Young Williams parents, John and Ann, died during his boyhood. Raised amid the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River Derwent, Wordsworth grew up in a rustic society, and spent a great deal of his time playing outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure communion with nature. In the early 1790s William lived for a time in France, then in the grip of the violent Revolution; Wordsworths philosophical sympathies lay with the revolutionaries, but his loyalties lay with England, whose monarchy he was not prepared to see overthrown. While in France, Wordsworth had a long affair with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter, Caroline. A later journey to France to meet Caroline, now a young girl, would inspire the great sonnet It is a beauteous evening, calm and free. The chaos and bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in Paris drove William to philosophy books; he was deeply troubled by the rationalism he found in the works of thinkers such as William Godwin, which clashed with his own softer, more emotional understanding of the world. In despair, he gave up his pursuit of moral questions. In the mid-1790s, however, Wordsworths increasing sense of anguish forced him to formulate his own understanding of the world and of the human mind in more concrete terms. The theory he produced, and the poetics he invented to embody it, caused a revolution in English literature. Developed throughout his life, Wordsworths understanding of the human mind seems simple enough today, what with the advent of psychoanalysis and the general Freudian acceptance of the importance of childhood in the adult psyche. But in Wordsworths time, in what Seamus Heaney has called Dr. Johnsons supremely adult eighteenth century, it was shockingly unlike anything that had been proposed before. Wordsworth believed (as he expressed in poems such as the Intimations of Immortality Ode) that, upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm into the imperfect, un-ideal earth. As children, some memory of the former purity and glory in which they lived remains, best perceived in the solemn and joyous relationship of the child to the beauties of nature. But as children grow older, the memory fades, and the magic of nature dies. Still, the memory of childhood can offer an important solace, which brings with it almost a kind of re-access to the lost purities of the past. And the maturing mind develops the capability to understand nature in human terms, and to see in it metaphors for human life, which compensate for the loss of the direct connection. Freed from financial worries by a legacy left to him in 1795, Wordsworth moved with his sister Dorothy to Racedown, and then to Alfoxden in Grasmere, where Wordsworth could be closer to his friend and fellow

poetSamuel Taylor Coleridge. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge began work on a book called Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798 and reissued with Wordsworths monumental preface in 1802. The publication of Lyrical Ballads represents a landmark moment for English poetry; it was unlike anything that had come before, and paved the way for everything that has come after. According to the theory that poetry resulted from the spontaneous overflow of emotions, as Wordsworth wrote in the preface, Wordsworth and Coleridge made it their task to write in the simple language of common people, telling concrete stories of their lives. According to this theory, poetry originated in emotion recollected in a state of tranquility; the poet then surrendered to the emotion, so that the tranquility dissolved, and the emotion remained in the poem. This explicit emphasis on feeling, simplicity, and the pleasure of beauty over rhetoric, ornament, and formality changed the course of English poetry, replacing the elaborate classical forms of Pope and Dryden with a new Romantic sensibility. Wordsworths most important legacy, besides his lovely, timeless poems, is his launching of the Romantic era, opening the gates for later writers such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron in England, and Emerson and Thoreau in America. Following the success of Lyrical Ballads and his subsequent poem The Prelude, a massive autobiography in verse form, Wordsworth moved to the stately house at Rydal Mount where he lived, with Dorothy, his wife Mary, and his children, until his death in 1850. Wordsworth became the dominant force in English poetry while still quite a young man, and he lived to be quite old; his later years were marked by an increasing aristocratic temperament and a general alienation from the younger Romantics whose work he had inspired. Byronthe only important poet to become more popular than Wordsworth during Wordsworths lifetimein particular saw him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his sardonic preface to Don Juan that the onceliberal Wordsworth had turned out a Tory at last. The last decades of Wordsworths life, however, were spent as Poet Laureate of England, and until his death he was widely considered the most important author in England Humanism and Criticism From a broadly historical point of view, the Renaissance means above all the expansion of the world known to the Europeans to include the far East and America. It means, therefore, an enormous development in communication and therefore in commercial and cultural exchange. From this historical viewpoint it also means the growth of the importance of the bourgeois class of merchants and their participation in political power through the figure of the king. The atomization of the medieval feudal system gradually gives way to more centralized units of power: nations and nationalism become the dominant discourse. The organization of a lay culture around the figure of the king will have

great importance for literature, since it will give rise to the system of patronage. The Renaissance is also the age when the intellectual life receives a new impetus thanks to the printing press. The printing press is the first of the mass media, and it is obvious that it could only be developed in a culture of incipient capitalism, when books can become a commodity which can be massively produced, commercialized, moved around, bought and sold for money. The printing press is an invention which cannot exist but in a market economy. The market ensures that goods must be produced massively and circulated. The availability and the circulation of knowledge are stressed by the humanists: (1) Books are indeed a higher -a wider and more tenacious- memory, a storehouse which is the common property of us all. From a philosophical viewpoint, the Renaissance is the age of humanism. That is, thought is no longer controlled by the authority of Revelation and the church: it makes a freer inquiry into all realms of experience. The influence of religion and dogma is still enormous, but there is a new faith in the power of human reason as an instrument to understand reality quite apart from religious authority. Old problems which were solved by authority are given a new outlook; the old solutions are reexamined, and new answers are sought for. In the realm of literature, an the influence of humanism can be seen "in the practice of bringing reasoned judgment to bear for the first time on literature and literary problems." We have already detected the origins of Renaissance humanism in the scholasticism of the later Middle Ages, which believed in the inherent rightness of human reason. Reason could lead man to the discovery of a measure of truth; it is a lumen naturale which leads us to a lex naturalis. This conception is already on the way to humanism. The Italian humanists of the fifteenth century will go much farther. They "relied primarily in their treatment of literary problems on Nature or reason as their main instrument for arriving at truth." It is true that great importance is attached to the newly discovered classics. The great Italian humanist Laurentius Valla (1406-57) gave them great authority on matters of language and style: (2) Ego pro lege accipio quidquid magnis auctoribus placuit. This is an early statement of the doctrine of neoclassicism, which takes classical authors for established models of perfection. But in spite of this reverence, the classics are commonly reexamined and subjected to critical reasoning. Valla, for instance, will write his dialogue On Pleasure (1431) trying to discuss in a rational way the problem of human conduct. Pleasure had traditionally been condemned by Christian doctrine as something sinful. After an examination of classical philosophical doctrines on the matter, Valla adopts as his final criterion, not ancient precepts or Medieval doctrine, "but the dictates of Nature or reason, on the ground that what was ordained by Nature could not be wrong." Valla applied this independent spirit of enquiry to the authority of the Church as well. There is an enormous growth of interest in all fields of learning and in the arts. Humanists like to see themselves as different from the barbarous Middle Ages; they are proud of the restoration of ancient knowledge they have effected. Already in the first half of the fifteenth

century an enormous number of classical texts is rediscovered, published and commented. For instance, Plato's philosophy is rediscovered and developed by Marsilio Ficino (1422-99); it is popularized by Castiglione and many others, and will influence critical thought on the arts. This work of discovery and edition entailed a development of the techniques of textual criticism. Different versions of an ancient text must be compared, to ascertain which is the most reliable one; editorial decisions must be taken, corrections made and a final text must be established and edited with notes and a commentary. The foundations for this work were laid by the Florentine Niccolo de' Niccoli (1363-1437) and developed by Valla, Politian and others. Philology could be a revolutionary enterprise when set against a culture of textual authority such as the medieval one. Independent textual examination and written dogma are inimical to each other. For instance, Valla denounced as a fake the "Donation of Constantine," an ancient document which justified Papal claims to temporal power. In that document, the Emperor Constantine supposedly gave the Pope and his successors his crown, Rome and Italy. Valla demonstrated on philological grounds that the language of this passage did not belong to the supposed date of the text. In the same way, Valla will examine the sacred texts from a philological viewpoint, and reach conclusions which overturn established beliefs. He questioned the attribution of Dionysius the Areopagite's Celestial Hierarchies and of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, thought to be by Cicero. He also denounces the bad quality of medieval Latin and corrected errors in the translation of the Vulgate by reference to the original Greek. Each of these critical enterprises had a shattering effect on scholastic culture. On the whole, Medieval learning and their version of reality are now regarded with suspicion. Medieval ideas about geography, philosophy and history are revised. Works like Francesco Patrizzi's Della Historia (1560) and Edmund Bolton's Hypercritica (1618) reject many medieval historical accounts as fables, and formulate new principles of history-writing: a careful ascertainment of facts, and constant interpretation on the part of the historian. History is no mere collection of facts: events must also be illuminated with the light of reason to explain their causes and circumstnces. Reason is also stressed in art. The idea of a community of the arts is stressed now, and the intellectual value of the plastic arts is emphasized. Da Vinci and Drer rescue painting from its relegation to the field of manual arts, and stress its spiritual and symbolic value; Leon Battista Alberti does the theorizing for architecture. In the same way, there is a proliferation of Defences of Poetry and Arts of Poetry. The Italian defenses of the role of literature in education come one hundred and fifty years before the English ones appear. The defenses are written along Aristotelian and above all Horatian lines, stressing the pedagogical aspect of art: "Literature was valued not so much for its aesthetic and artistic qualities as for its practical uses, for its influence on character, its ability to train a man for his part in active life, or again, as providing models for expression; and these tests remained characteristic of Humanist criticism to the end." The early Humanist treatises, then, are not essentially different from the medieval tradition, even if a greater emphasis is laid on

secular literature. Poetics is still dependent on rhetoric, and the value of poetry is its educational or moralizing effect on the reader. On the whole, the appreciation of poetry by the humanists was neither too elevated or too dismissive. "To the Humanistic mind poetry was little more than a branch of learning; a means, along with oratory, history, and philosophy, of recapturing something of the lost culture of antiquity, rather than a mysterious and independent art of infinite possibilities." Nevertheless, criticism flourishes as never before and as treatises become more frequent the language of critical discussion becomes more articulate. The tendency to formulate poetic rules must be understood as part of the rational effort to understand poetry, although of course exaggerations and protests soon followed (the German scholar Fabricius extracted 54 rules from Horace's Ars). In the early part of the Renaissance ideas about poetry come mostly from the medieval authorities, Horace, Cicero and Quintilian. Plutarch and the neo-Platonists are also favourite sources. The Aristotelian influence is not generally felt until the late sixteenth century, and is rare in England throughout the Renaissance. On the whole, Renaissance criticism affirms its own independence from the classics, without a slavish subjection to their ideas: modern developments in literature and national peculiarities are legitimated and justified with or without a resource to classical authority, though there are heated debates on these issues. With the critics of the late Renaissance, criticism becomes a literary genre of its own, independent and prestigious. Criticism in France, England and Spain follows the early Italian models, Valla, Politian, Pico, while they have a more imperfect knowledge of their contemporaries. In the early Renaissance the humanists are often related to the Church: later on, there is a greater number of noblemen and important officials among the critics. Renaissance critics are frequently writers themselves, and many hold important political positions. If the medieval critic is a monk, in the sixteenth century the critic is most often a humanist and a courtier. The Renaissance marks the point where the vernaculars begin to take over the cultural role of Latin during the Middle Ages. This is a burning question in the learned debates of the sixteenth century in all countries, because all are facing the same problem: the vernacular tongue is felt by many to be lacking in dignity and capability to deal with many questions of learning. Its syntax is rude (more so in prose than in poetry), and its vocabulary much poorer (as far as science is concerned) than those of Latin and Greek. The issue is therefore a burning one among humanists: very often wellknown humanists (Erasmus, Vives) defend the continued use of Latin. Anyway, there is a fever of translations from Latin and Greek into the vernacular, and this will contribute to transform the language. The translators are forced to introduce many neologisms, which will be called "inkhorn terms" in Britain. The use of such terms is condemned as an aberration by many, but defended as a necessity by others. In Italy, Dante had already defended the need for a vernacular common language. Pietro Bembo (Lingua Volgare, 1512) says it is patriotic to write in the vernacular; in France, Joachim Du Bellay writes the Defense et illustration de la langue franoise, and in Britain Mulcaster and many others link the use of the vernacular to a patriotic feeling. This is not surprising, since

from the end of the Middle Ages larger nations are formed as the feudal system is gradually dismantled. Language is one of the larger ties that are common to a nation beyond the feudal divisions, and therefore improving and furthering the vernacular language is considered an act of patriotism. Literature is also assigned a patriotic role, above all in England and France; paradoxically, the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages are generally ignored, with the exception of Dante and Boccaccio in Italy. In England, the medieval Arthurian romances are despised as remnants of the catholic and obscurantist past; Ascham defends epic poetry but condemns Malory's Morte D'Arthur. Beaumont'sThe Knight of the Burning Pestle is a parody of the medieval romances, like Don Quijote. The literary ideal is now the epic poem, conceived (in a somewhat outfashioned way) as a model of behavior for the ruling class, in the best pedagogical tradition. Homer is considered to be too rough and primitive (although he will be defended by his translator Chapman and by Johnson in England) and it is Virgil'sAeneid which is universally acknowledged as the model of the patriotic epic, such as Ronsard's La Franciade, Camoens's Os Lusiadas and Ercilla's La Araucana. Characteristically, England's own patriotic epic, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, is much more "Gothic," mixing Arthurian elements and medieval allegory with the influence of Ariosto's unruly Orlando Furioso. Under the principle of decorum, each literary genre is assigned its proper public: this had some practical consequences, such as Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc being written for the instruction of Queen Elizabeth. On the other hand, classical theory did not seem to afford any models for that kind of art which really appealed to the people, and for some time this will cause a divorce between the high flights of theory and the actual popularity of the ballad or the popular stage. Lope de Vega is a perfect instance of this conflict, when in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609) he acknowledges in a flippant tone that he cannot produce a theoretical justification of his practice in writing comedies which go against all the classical rules, but will nevertheless go on writing them: Pues que las paga el vulgo, es justo Hablarle en necio para darle gusto. Sometimes the medieval or "Gothic" tradition is justified as a lawful innovation on classical rules: it may go against the rules, but it provides a variety which some feel is lacking in the classical models. However, the appreciation of different kinds of writings and their justification on historical basis is still far away. The Renaissance mind is not a historicist one: learning is assumed to be equally valid in all ages, and no attempt is made to study literary works within their historical and intellectual context (though some effort was made by Politian in this direction). Decorum and truth are assumed to be trans-historical and immovable principles. Decorum also dictates new norms in style; a new attention is paid to matters of language and composition, whether in Latin or in the vernacular. The humanists begin to think of prose -and not only of verse- as something which must be written carefully, something which has a structure of its own: (3) We notice in all good prose a certain element of rhythm -though it is not obtrusive-

which coincides with, and expresses, the general structure of a passage and gives us a clue to the sense . . . . Different rhythms arouse different emotions suitable to the matter in hand. to ignore this is to neglect one of the most delicate points in style. Very often the classics, and especially Cicero, were praised as models of style. But the Renaissance will also voice the need to renew styles. Politian argues that style is a personal thing, something which cannot be copied from another person. After criticizing the defenders of Ciceronianism, Politian "condemns outright the theory of an ideal classical period with fixed and absolute standards." This is a rejection of neoclassicism, and a plea for critical revision of standards. According to Politian, the ancients must be studied, but with the aim of learning from them how to develop our own style. However, we must recognize that these very ideas are classical, and can be found in Quintilian and Tacitus. Sometimes classical theory was interpreted in a limited way and exerted a constraining influence. The Aristotelian concept of mimesis is interpreted as simple imitation, and Aristotle's universalization is understood as idealization. The idea of decorum is all-important. Tragedy and comedy are discussed in terms of social classes. Often the social and moral stereotypes are assumed to be in direct relation: in England, Puttenham advocates a decorum where kings are always brave and virtuous, etc. Lyric poetry is somewhat neglected in theory, perhaps because it does not lend itself to such an easy submission to a social decorum, and because it was given less attention by the ancients. But decorum could also be a principle of right reading, of understanding each element in its context and its genre. For instance, Guarino defends pagan poetry in spite of the "impieties, cruelties and horrors" which can be found in some of the greatest authors. According to Guarino, these matters must be judged not by moral but by aesthetic standards, by "their congruity to the characters and situations described . . . . It is the artist we criticize, and not the moralist." In his view, decorum requires that we read literature as literature, not as an ethical treatise. While poetry was occasionally defined as something secondary in importance, a pastime or recreation (Vergerius), some Renaissance humanists give it a higher value. Poetry is often defined as a civilizing and educational force; poets were the creators of civilization, an idea dear to Cicero and Horace. A few humanists defended the divine origin of poetry: Pico della Mirandola for instance interpreted Plato in a neo-Platonic way, and defended the divine origin of poetry and the supernatural inspiration of the great poets. According to Pico, all poetry is allegorical and hides profound secrets hidden under a veil so that they are protected from vulgar minds -Pico follows Heraclitus and other allegorical readers of antiquity, including neoPlatonism and the Kabbalah, in reading Homer's poems as a treatise on natural science. Nevertheless, there is still a greater emphasis on the moral teaching of poetry than on poetic form. Fiction is still distrusted, and the surface of poetry must be disregarded in order to fix our attention on the content: there is greater discussion of poetic contents and of allegorical interpretations than analysis of poetic form. The same Pico defined imagination as a mental aberration in De imaginatione: imagination, the creator of poetic form and fiction, is distrusted as a disruptive and a chaotic principle.

So far we have spoken of general theories, rather than of specific criticism. "As for the appreciations of individual writers, they consisted for the most part of brief comments of a historical or moral kind." For instance, Homer is usually described as rough and powerful, Virgil as more polished and subtle, and ultimately the more effective writer (another idea coming from Quintilian). But there is no real language of practical criticism or close analysis of particular works: all commentary is immediately dependent on general principles, like decorum, truth, or grace of style. Discussion of poetry in the Renaissance is still focused on essentials, like the nature and aims of poetry in general. Italy was the main center of Humanism during late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Italian criticism is more advanced and elaborate than anything we can find in England. Many of the important statements in English critics come from the Italians or from the classics as they were edited and interpreted by the Italians. There are countless names: Vida, Scaliger, Robortello, Castelvetro, Minturno, Tasso, Beni, Patrizzi, Mazzoni, etc. are the main figures of what has been called "the Age of Criticism," the later sixteenth century. We shall only note a few interesting points raised by two representative critics, Scaliger and Castelvetro. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++