【正文】 but the new twist they gave to Platonic theory foreshadows later claims for the poet as visionary, the poet‘ truth as a visionary truth (as what the Romantics did).) Plato and Republic 15 – . Students of Socrates and founder of the Academy in Athens, Plato is the first major figure in the history of Western philosophy. His political and moral philosophy dominate what he says about literature. He locates reality in what he calls ―Ideas,‖ or ―Forms,‖ rather than in the world of ―appearances‖ that we experience through the senses. He regards objects we perceive through the senses as merely copies of Ideas. Our rational powers acquaint us with truth. The poet, restricted to imitating realm of appearances, makes only copies of copies, and his creation is thus twice removed from reality. Furthermore, he is probably possessed by a madness and not in control of himself when he writes. Since the poet‘s activity leads men away from truth, Plato considers him dangerous to society. With some misgiving (since he greatly admires fines poetry), Plato found that he must banish the poet from the republic or limit him by strict censorship to songs of offering innocuous praise of the state. The influence of Plato on subsequent theorists has been immense. Generally, critics who have been concerned with the moral and didactic content of literature have been considered in some sense Platonic. Among twentiethcentury New Critics, such as Ransom, this term is not one of approbation, since to them it suggests separation of form and content and little interest in the ontological status of the poem. 16 (Plato in his academy, drawing after a painting by Swedish painter Carl Johan Wahlbom) 17 Aristotle and Poetics 384 – 322 Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, though he disagreed with his master on many issues, especially on his doctrines of ideas or forms. Poetics was the first extant treatise on poetry in the Western world. Poetics had been lost to European thought for many centuries until it was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Fragmentary as it is (it breaks off before the discussion of edy), its influence has been tremendous. It appears that Aristotle means to answer Plato‘s criticism of the poet as a mere imitator of appearances. He disagrees with Plato about where to locate reality (Plato separates idea from reality or appearance, universality from particularity, and he also denies change). 1) He does not believe that the world of appearances is merely an ephemeral copy of the changeless ideas, instead, according to Aristotle, idea could only exist in the world of appearance, ., idea and reality, universality and particularity are inseparable. 2) More importantly, he believes that change is a fundame。 and victory odes were posed during the actual ceremonies of ) At the same time, the element of ritual was modified by element of agon or contest. In the Athenian drama festivals, for example, the plays of different dramatists were presented petitively, for judging and awarding of prizes (for example, Sophocles was said to have won more than 20 victories at the Dionysian festivals)。 but until poetry could find a theory that would overe its relegation to subjectivity, it would suffer denigration of its value. The rise of aesthetics was such attempt, particularly Kant‘s efforts to establish what he oxymoronically called ?subjective universality‘ in aesthetic response. But, as is so often the case, the problem was not so much solved in favor of another one: As the ontological question led to the epistemological one, so the epistemological question led to the linguistic one. To ask about Being led inevitably to ask about how and what we can know. But other questions came to seem prior to this one. Can what we call knowing occur apart from language, to what extent does language inform us, and to what extent are we enclosed within it? For a very long time, with some important exceptions, philosophers considered language as a way of expressing and municating prior experiences and ideas, which it translated into or represented in words. But as the epistemological phase developed it seemed that the matter was much more plicated, that language, not merely perception, played a constitutive role in the way reality appeared to us. The idea of language as imitating or representing some prior entity now had to vie with the idea that language made these entities or at least establish the limits within which entities existed for us. …. 11 It has always been recognized, of course, that poetry is posed of language. From the earliest times poets have been obsessed with language as medium of their art…. But the new linguistic age saw language as fundamental to human nature, not just as a human tool. The 20th century excursion into language theory known as semiotics or the theory of sign is interested in analyzing language as if it has its own life or is itself a system. The source of this interest is mainly structuralist linguistics, grounded in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, which functioned as the primary inspiration for various languageoriented critical theories in 20th century, such as Russian Formalism, AngloAmerican New Criticism, Fryean Archetypal Criticism, French Structuralism, and Derridean Deconstructionism, etc. All in all, in the age of linguistic turn (or linguistic age), it seemed that if there was anything left of mimesis, its direction has been entirely reversed. The world as we know it copied the structure of language rather than vise versa. 12 1. Critical Theory in Greek Times ? Background Fictions, narratives, dramatizations, special poetic modes of language—these have been produced in all societies from the very earliest times. But it is one matter to pro