【正文】 duce them, another to think and theorize about them. As in so many other areas, it was the Greeks who first recognized that there were questions to be asked and answered about these forms of verbal position. Before discussing Greek critical theories, we should better have a brief scan over the literary landscape of Greece from which Greek critical theories derived. First, ancient Greek society placed considerable emphasis upon literature which was termed as poiesis in Greek. People generally all agree that the western literary tradition has begun with the Homeric epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, which remain giants in the literary canon for their skillful and vivid depictions of war and peace, honor and disgrace, love and hatred. Notable among later Greek poets was Sappho of Lesbos, who defined, in many ways, lyric poetry as a genre. Of course the most brilliant and admiring literary achievements made by the Greeks were in the field of drama, especially tragedy, of which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were best representatives. Secondly, for the Greeks poiesis was not an independent sphere of culture as modern people hold, instead it was part of their public or social life. Hence, Geek poiesis have the following features worth ) It had the element of ritual. Epic and drama were closely tied with very specific social occasions. Thus, plays were performed only during certain festivals (Greek tragedy, for example, grew out as part of the annual spring festival in honor of the god Dionysos)。（嚴(yán)羽：《滄浪詩(shī)話 羚羊掛角，無(wú)跡可求。詩(shī)者，吟詠性情者。然非多讀書(shū)多窮理，則不能極其至。（《詩(shī)大序》） The poem is that to which what is intently on the mind (志 ) goes. In the mind (心 ) it is ―being intent‖ (志 )。（《詩(shī)大序》） Thus to correct (正 ) (the presentation of ) achievements (得 ) and failures, to move Heaven and Earth, to stir the gods and spirits, there is nothing more apposite than poetry. By it the former kings managed the relations between husbands and wives, perfected the respect due to parents and superiors, gave depth to human relations, beautifully taught and transformed the people, and 8 changed local customs. (Translated by Stephen Owen) The expressive orientation holds that ―a work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling‖ (Abrams). To be specific, according to the expressive theory, a work of art is the verbal expression of the artist‘s inner feeling or individual personality. And this idea is most succinctly expressed by William Wordsworth. ―Poetry‖, Wordsworth announced in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, ―is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings‖. The expressive orientation is not as old as mimesis or the pragmatic orientation, it came with romanticism in the late eighteenth century with Jean Jacques Rousseau as one of its early precursors and the British Romantics as its devoted practitioners. Before Rousseau very little attention had been paid to the authorial individuality as in something conveyed by a literary work. Indeed, there was hardly any interest in the idea that writers had personalities to express. Wordsworth‘ notion that a poem was the inner made outer was indeed revolutionary in the history of western critical theory because it for the first time emphasized the central role of the poet. And this emphasis is still powerful today in spite of the efforts of objective theorists, such as T. S. Eliot, to eradicate it. Early in the twentieth century, Eliot insisted that the poet‘s effort should be to flee personality and that criticism should concentrate on the poem apart from its author. 詩(shī)者，志之所之也，在心為志，發(fā)言為詩(shī)。 by teaching it transforms them. (Preface to the Book of Poetry, Translated by Stephen Owen) 2. 故正得失，動(dòng)天地，感鬼神，莫近于詩(shī)。（《詩(shī)大序》） Guan Ju is the virtue (德 )of the Queen Consort and the beginning of the Feng. It is the means by which the world is influenced (風(fēng) ) and by which the relations between husband and wife correct (正 ). Thus it is used in smaller munities, and it is used in large states. ―Airs‖ are ―Influence‖。固用之鄉(xiāng)人焉，用之邦國(guó)焉。 言之文也，天地之心哉！ （劉勰：《文心雕龍 庖犧畫(huà)其始，仲尼翼其中。 the sun and the moon, twin jade discs, suspended their signs attached to heaven。 原道》） The power of wen (configurations/culture/literature) is great indeed! It was born together with heaven and earth. How so? (At first) the dark (., the heaven) and the brown (., earth) interspersed their colors。為五行 之秀，實(shí)天地之心， 心生而言立，言立而文明，自然之道也 。 he bent down and contemplated the orders on earth. He contemplated the patterns (wen) on birds and beasts, and the suitabilities of the earth. He drew (ideas) from his own person, and from the objects afar. Thereupon he first invented the Eight Trigrams. (Translated by James J. Y. Liu) 2. 文之為德也大矣，與天地并生者何哉！夫玄黃色雜，方圓體分，日月疊璧，以垂麗天之象；山川煥綺，以鋪理地之形， 此蓋道之文也 。 10. New Developments in Theory (1 week): Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance 11. Writing and Submitting the course paper. 5 Introduction What is the nature of literature? What function – socially as well as aesthetically, does literature perform? What are the intrinsic qualities that a literary work is supposed to have? All these are questions that a critical theory intends to answer. And it is the different answers to those questions that distinguish one critical theory from the other. I For a clear, though seemingly simplified illustration on the orientations that characterize different critical theories, I‘d like to remend you a scheme or a triangle set forth in M. H. Abrams‘ The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). According to Abrams, there are altogether four elements involved in literature: the work, the artist, the audience, and the universe from which the work derives or signifies or reflects. And the emphasis upon any single relation between two eleme