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{"id":18164,"date":"2016-06-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2953"},"modified":"2016-06-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T00:00:00","slug":"critic-at-the-agon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/06\/critic-at-the-agon\/","title":{"rendered":"Critic at the Agon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A<\/span>t the beginning of his account of The Origins of Criticism<\/em><\/a>, Andrew Ford offers an initial definition of criticism: \u201cTo begin this study, criticism will be any public act of praise or blame upon a performance of song.\u201d That definition brings out several features of early criticism. First, like the performance of song or poetry itself, criticism is a public performance: \u201cwe should consider the critic, no less than the poet, a performer before a social group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further, the terms \u201cpraise\u201d and \u201cblame\u201d\u2014taken from the Greeks themselves\u2014place criticism in a spectrum of acts that might be glory or shame. Poetry and song occurred in an agonistic setting, and the critic was the judge of the agon. Ford emphasizes the fact that praise and blame are judgments rather than interpretations and this reminds us \u201cthat interpretation need not be the primary function of criticism and helpfully separate the history of criticism from the history of aesthetic response. What people felt as opposed to what they said about poetry is not only inaccessible to the historian but should not be accorded a priori <\/em>the same importance it may have in modern, privatized notions of aesthetic experience\u201d (3).<\/p>\n

In contrast to post-Romantic distinctions of \u201ccreativity\u201d v. \u201canalysis,\u201d the critic and the poet occupy \u201cdifferent social roles.\u201d And they are indeed social roles: \u201cit is necessary to think of \u2018performances\u2019 rather than \u2018texts\u2019 as the objects of criticism, since Greek poetry did not become an affair of private reading until late in the fifth century\u201d (4). The critic had more in common with an Olympic judge, assigning his 9.2s and 9.5s, than with the reader and writer ensconsed in some Manhattan office.<\/p>\n

To get early criticism right, it\u2019s also necessary to understand what the Greeks meant by \u201csong.\u201d It was part of \u201cmusical\u201d culture, but for the Greeks mousike<\/em> included not only music in our sense but also literature and poetry and other arts. Critics offered praise or blame regarding anyone who claimed to be following the Muses: \u201call the arts associated with the Muses, singing and dancing as well as music in its narrow sense\u201d (4).<\/p>\n

He illustrates, arrestingly, with a scene from the first book of the Odyssey, in which Penelope tries to stop a poet from singing about the fallen heroes of Troy: \u201cPenelope appears with her maids at the threshold and bids the singer to switch to some other theme because his present song is painful to one whose husband has yet to return (1.328\u2013 44). At this point Telemachus intervenes with a speech that can be said to counter Penelope\u2019s blame with praise: reproving his mother, he tells her that if anyone is to blame for the fates men receive, it is Zeus, not singers. Phemius has only been performing the latest song, which is what everyone likes to hear; Penelope should therefore steel her heart and go back to weaving with her maids. That is her place and her task (ergon<\/em>)\u201d (6). <\/p>\n

Telemachus claims to have the kratos<\/em> to determine who speaks and sings; his criticism (praise) is simultaneously an assertion of authority over his house, his first assertion of authority. Neither Penelope nor Telemachus offer criticism based on purely formal or aesthetic criteria; the issue is fitness to the social setting, and who gets to judge fitness.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"