Week II Reflection

Though most of the ideas that were developed during antiquity are now erroneous (or only considered relevant by a misinformed few), some of the basics continue to hold ground. The Aristotelian examination of plot is used to some extent in every field of literary theory. Though we have come to understand that the specifics may rather pedantic and unforgiving it seems as though literature and its criticisms have used the ideas as a basis of understanding. What Aristotle and the other philosophers of antiquity did not consider was the change that literature inevitably encounters over time—the change in readers, in the world in which writers exist, or through an autonomous change in literary devices. To them the greatest writer was Homer, whom would have lived 500 years before. No one else came close, every writer and storyteller after attempted to imitate to the last detail. The equivalent today would be a desire to copy Shakespeare, none of the styles or individual authors would have existed over the last 500 years (Realism, Romanticism, Modernism, Joyce, Hugo, Swift, Melville, Milton, Pynchon, etc.) only men and women that attempted to be Shakespeare and always failed in the eyes of critics, and therefore readers. It may be harsh to make the compression because in 350 B.C. there was no accessibility to variety and ultimately no chance of change; if one critic with authority is fixated on a 500-year-old author that is survivable, change has a chance, but when every great philosopher, critic, and Joe Blow only has eyes for that one author change is stifled by desire, and the status quo is perpetuated by need. My attention is called to this idea of change only after reading through the Russian Formalists, who contend that change in literature, like literature itself, is as a result of the internal (in the circle of literature), not of the outside world…a great change from Greek Antiquity.