The History of Literary Theory from Plato to the Romantics 

Love this response!

I am glad to be of service!

Glad you like them!

Thanks, Ana, that’s one of the reasons I put these lectures online!

Glad to hear you have found an alternative to reading PDFs! Hope you find them helpful.

i guess it's pretty randomly asking but do anybody know of a good site to stream new movies online ?

@Alexzander Colten Thank you, I went there and it seems to work :D I really appreciate it !

@Koa Alijah glad I could help xD

Thanks you very much sir for uploading such helpful videos. I am watching you from a very remote village of India.

Glad you like them!

I have put a lot up there. The truth sets us free.

@@LitProf Agreed! Where would you recommend one who is new to the study of literature / rediscovering the joys of reading to begin?

@austinrucker3853 Follow my lecture series on Introduction to Literature I & II

Glad they are of help. I’m very curious what you are reading for the posthumanism section.

@@LitProf We discussed posthumanism during our section on disability studies (for which we read Mitchell and Snyder among others), but we will be returning to the topic with a week on posthuman feminism. For that, we will be reading Stacy Alaimo, Elizabeth Grosz, and Rosi Braidotti.

Thanks for watching. Hope you find them helpful.

@@LitProf indeed! its just, the classes on Longinus, Aristotle and a few others you mentioned aren't on the channel. would have loved that.

I don’t understand. I have lectures up on those writers.

@@LitProf just found them. apologies.

I think it is. Thanks.

Absolutely. What a breath of fresh air. Ultimately these modernist approaches invite a “domineering” attitude to the text. Great stuff. Thank you for uploading.

Literary critique through a lens may well dominate and bias the direction you take, but your subconscious is acting in this way, involuntarily and possibly uncontrollably. Literary analysis through a lens is a way of examining literature to explore and expose the underlying power structures, ideologies, and social norms that shape the text. These critical lenses aim to uncover the biases, assumptions, and limitations that are inherent in many works of literature and reveal how they reflect, reinforce, or challenge dominant social norms and values that contrast in our 'contemporary' ones. By using critical lenses, literary analysis becomes more than just an interpretation of a text; it becomes a way of uncovering hidden meanings and exploring the complex relationships between literature and society. These approaches can help readers and scholars better understand the historical and cultural context in which a work of literature was written and how it continues to shape our understanding of the world today. It seems a bit shallow to dismiss this approach in a single sentence. Maybe you disagree and think the analysis stops where you have defined, I think is worthwhile putting on other hats, consciously, and trying to see past our own perspectives.

My subconscious? What evidence is there for this all-explanatory hypothesis?

@@LitProf Your flippant response suggests that it's not even worthwhile entertaining my point. Fair enough, maybe what I wrote came off with some animosity. I apologise for that, I find these videos very valuable and enjoy watching them and I don't necessarily disagree with your view, I just think there is at least some merit in alternatives. Some all-explanatory response is not what I was going for here anway. Surely you don't disagree that there are inherit subconcious biases in everything we do or think? As for evidence - rational and empirical - I think it is reasonable to suggest that biases arise from our highly idiosyncratic experiences. Empircally, there is a wealth of evidence that shows a very high degree (I've seen upwards of 95% quoted) of mental processes are subconcious.

Sorry, I am thinking about a Freudian concept here. You may not mean it so technically. The problems with social media…

Doug Sikkema Thanks. Glad to hear you're interested.

Likewise!

I hope you find it helpful. I get to contemporary literary theories in another series.

@@LitProf Thanks! I'll let you know what I thought of it when I'm done. Very useful so far - about to start the second Aristotle video.

Thanks very much!

Thanks very much! Are there many students with literary interests at your school?

@@LitProf I think so. One, I go to a school with an IB program, which is very focused on bringing out writing talent. Also, I’ve been asking around in my classes and it seems the demand for such a thing (a place to showcase/craft literary and artistic talents) is there. As of now, however, there isn’t any poetry or creative writing club set up.

The one thing I would certainly avoid in a literary magazine is literary theory, unless it's that of the historical sort.

@@LitProf I agree, I don’t think high schoolers would be very interested in that haha. Just wondering if you had any experience with literary magazines

@@mgenburn5339 I would suggest looking into on-line platforms, the ones that provide for 'blogs', etc. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, they can be pretty straight-forward.

Glad you appreciated it. I think most people are tired of the narcissistic critics and their agendas. Please subscribe, like, and share.

There is no escape from identity politics, for everything he states is from a point of view. He certainly has a traditional Eurocentric point of view that had been, up until recently, normalized due to European dominance. The assumption he outright states is that we are to revere some canon of greats and understand it as what is understood as the intention of the author. That is, the "intentional fallacy." None of this is to say that what he is doing is wrong, or that it is something that should not be studied. However, he is positing that there is a "right" was to read something and a "wrong" way. For him, the "right" was is to assume that ancient European theorists are simply to be revered and not questions, regardless of the effects of doing so on non-Europeans. You are mistaken that what he is doing is not "identity politics." He seems to be defending a European christian point of view and privileging it over any other, and rooting it in his interpretation of what he can portray as "that which is great."

Violet, so true, well said.

Did he read them in English, or the wonderful German translation?

@@LitProf I should think in English, since he lived - like a Bohemian & in dire straits - in London.

@@LitProf to add to that, I think you were also a bit off on the reductionism part, although also right. Nietzsche was incredibly well educated and a philologist, his first work was devoted to Greek tragedy and philosophy, and his will to power wasn't his only concept. However, it could be argued that he leaned on it far too much. Nonetheless, that doesn't make him a hater of culture. Same goes for Freud but of course with different issues. I think the problem is actually the skewed reading of them rather then they themselves. There's some fundamental disjunctive way in which these big and problematic figures have disseminated throughout academia and I'm not sure what is the cause of this.

Look forward to hearing more!

I am largely talking about Books 7 & 10, though it is important to understand the whole context of The Republic, which is a discussion of the nature of justice.

On Christian Teaching

I'm thinking about binging the whole series overnight.

Seriously?

@@LitProf Yes. I've been looking for a very long time for someone to explain things the way you do. I've had lots of inclinations in this direction through CS Lewis and Jordan Peterson and some others. I just started an online college this past week and needed a refresher on critical theory bs, but this goes way deeper into what I'm looking for as the counter and better position.

My book club was so enthralled by this lecture that we decided to put off reading Andrew Klavan's Another Kingdom series until after we finish these lectures.

That's great. Hope you find it helpful!

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

I use the second.

The sequence is on the RU-vid channel under ‘playlists’

On Christian Doctrine

I have series on all sorts of topics. I am afraid these are lectures that I have just reposted. There is a reading list of course. I usually mention the work at the outset of the lecture. They weren’t adapted for the RU-vid audience, just made available.

I am pretty sure it is the Bible as Literature series.

I don’t have one

No notes

It was the Norton Anthology

I disagree. I think Barthes is saying more than the New Critics said about the ‘intentional’ and ‘affective’ fallacies in ‘The Death of the Author’

i mean the anthology

I used the Norton

@@LitProf thanks. great lecture too!

@@philipmorise7970 Thank you!

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback. Western art, not just poetry, is rational up until the nineteenth century, and it is because of mimesis. What the dominant mode of art is globally is irrelevant to my point. There is very little rational that can be said or analyzed about expressionist art, because it doesn’t seek to be understood that way. Whereas literary criticism requires a rational poetics.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-t9Wt0NjZcqk.html

Then you are listening to the wrong lecture. This was explaining the course syllabus to my class and making a few general remarks. The lectures proper begin the next class.

There are a few like Thomas Nagel, though he is abandoning the atheist camp too. I don't see it as Christian apologetics. Revelation provides a more coherent worldview than the Classical framework, and it has not been superseded.

What 'agenda' might that be?

Interesting comment.

I think my point is not that there never were any other types of poetics, but that without the normativity of mimetic poetics, poetics becomes chaotic.

It depends on what one's view of human nature and the nature and work of language. I am no Cartesian modernist.

You might think I am mistaken. I am not disingenuous. I have observed it regularly. The cynical motives imputed to authors by the critics are evident, and if they are accepted then it destroys students’ love of literature. The critique of my critique is more likely to be disingenuous.

@@LitProf I appreciate your reply. I spend a lot of time myself engaging with PoMo theory and though some scholars can be dismissive and don’t put works in proper context as you mentioned, I’ve not felt that it was even close to a majority and I myself often come away from such theory applications with a deeper love and appreciation of lit works.

@GAIJINGUY Not sure how that is possible. Can you give an example?

Well that was a well formed argument.