January 29, 2007

Platonic Criticism from Murfin and Ray

"Platonic criticism: A type of criticism that judges a work by its extrinsic purpose rather than by any intrinsic (artistic) value, as in Aristotelian criticism. Platonic critics determine the value of a work by assessing whether it has a useful nonartistic purpose or application, such as promoting morality" (Murfin and Ray 345).

The reason why I chose to shed my light on this specific type of criticism (and those of you in that took EL310 with me, forgive me), is because one of Geoffrey Chaucer's perspectives came from the perspectives of his audience and their own judgements of a character's persona based off of morality. The artistic nature is basically irrelevant because Chaucer took many different viewpoints of his variety of audience members, and played the role of a neutral and objective reporter in The Canterbury Tales, causing the reader to pass judgments on the flawed nature of the characters. Overall, the value of the work is more important to me than the overall artistic value, but I will learn throught the course of this class that there are other important ways to find a critique to a specific piece of literature.

Posted by The Gentle Giant at January 29, 2007 7:20 PM
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