Concepts of Art and Literature from Homer to Aristotle

Description

The ability of Greek art, drama and poetry to captivate onlookers, audiences and readers remains as potent as ever despite the vastly different conditions of experiencing these artforms that separate us from the ancients.   Today, all over the world, Greek dramas continue to be performed and adapted; Homer’s epics are forever finding new audiences through new translations, adaptations and interpretation on film; and Greek art attracts millions of people worldwide to galleries, museums and archaeological sites. In fact, the very terms that have become central to our way of categorising and thinking about visual, verbal and aural artforms — music, poetry, lyric, epic, tragedy, comedy, drama, rhetoric, mimesis, icon — are all Greek in origin and again indicate the importance of the Greeks’ achievements as practitioners and theorists in these areas.    
This course explores what ancient Greek poets, philosophers and other writers say about art and literature within the Archaic and Classical eras (c. 750-320 BC).  This era witnessed many of the most influential developments in Greek, and indeed, western culture: the rise of Homeric epic, lyric poetry, speculative philosophy, and great advances in painting and sculpture.  Moreover, in this period critical thinking about art, language and poetry first burgeoned, and included some of the most penetrating and enduring ideas on the nature of art in all its forms.  In other words, this period also witnesses the birth of western aesthetics and literary criticism.  By focusing on texts from the eighth to the fourth centuries BC, this course illuminates the richness of early Greek ideas about visual art and literature down to and including Plato and Aristotle, whose ideas remain influential, but whose status as founders of western aesthetics has been challenged in recent years.  This course also shows how ancient literary and aesthetic criticism embraced other issues central to Greek speculative thought: psychology, sense perception, ethics and emotion, poetics, rhetoric and erotic desire.  The early Greek reception of artworks and literature thus emerges as an important strand of ancient intellectual history and deepens our understanding of what Greek art and literature could mean to its public, ancient and modern alike.