Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus: the conception of reader response

Abstract

The rhetorical complexion of literary criticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focuses attention on the poet as ‘maker’ of the text rather than on the reader (listener) as ‘maker of sense’ of the text. To talk, as Horace does, of the poet's aim is to presuppose an author-centred approach: readers are dismissed in the Ars poetica with the throwaway remark that the old prefer profit while the young pursue pleasure. In the last third of the seventeenth century, at the high point of French neoclassicism, concern for clarity was paramount and seemed to place the reader in a wholly passive role: the Cartesian Bernard Lamy wrote in De l'art de parler (1675) that in order to attain a gentle and clear style, ‘one should leave nothing to the reader to guess’. It would be misleading however to take at face value this apparent neglect of the reader. Theorists of poetry and rhetoric have always been concerned with the affective impact of language, and literary critics of the Renaissance and seventeenth century give voice to the issue of reader-response by building on the rhetorical inheritance of Horace, Aristotle, and, increasingly in the seventeenth century, Longinus. Horace's Epistula ad Pisones , known usually as the Ars poética , remained a dynamic presence in the literary criticism of the Renaissance and seventeenth century, though it had been familiar since the Middle Ages. Dolce's Italian version appeared in 1535, Jacques Peletier du Mans's French translation in 1545 was first published anonymously in 1541, and the first English version, by Archdeacon Drant, appeared in 1567.

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