Introducing Literary Criticism

A poet, unlike a maker of tables, for example, creates only second-hand representations. The poet’s imitation of, say, a table is, for Plato, an imitation of an imitation, insofar as the table-maker’s table is itself only an imitation of the essential, or divine, form of the table.

The Theory of Forms
The decision to exclude poets from the republic is based on Plato’s suspicion of mimesis, or imitation, which is regarded as an artificial, or untruthful, deviation from the true essence of things. This is based on Plato’s theory of forms.

It is also, in another sense, one of the earliest surviving examples of literary criticism.

The text establishes the conditions of governance for an ideal society or city-state, which will enable its citizens (although not its slaves) to pursue the good life.

The Republic of Plato (428–ca. 347 BC) is primarily a philosophical treatise that takes the form of a dialogue in which Plato’s teacher, Socrates (ca. 470–399 BC), is a main chara

cover for particular interests (of class, race or gender) that the literary critic will (consciously or unconsciously) bring to bear on a text.

One might think of the literary critic as a kind of empathetic chameleon, disinterestedly capable of extending imaginative sympathy to the range of human actors, conditions and motivations that are represented in literary texts.

The best way of becoming a literary critic, then, is to read widely in the work of other literary critics, while also paying careful attention to the literary critic’s object of study.

Our gift for seeing similarity is nothing but a weak rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and also to behave mimetically. And the lost faculty of becoming similar extended far beyond the narrow perceptual world in which we are still capable of seeing similarities.

Learning through Imitation