Conclusion The Function of Criticism in Times Past and Present

Abstract

Abstract The writing of any history of criticism such as the present one can only reveal the discourse under consideration to be one of several possible created and contentiously authorized languages. But such a narrative will at the same time not be entirely arbitrary, inasmuch as any number of ideologies, assumptions, and prior histories of literary criticism will be its subtexts, whether taken up more explicitly or not. My subtexts have been the idea of ancient criticism as constituted in part by material from antiquity and in part by the scholarship which has characterized it as ‘ancient literary criticism’. The project has not been to abandon altogether the body of writing we conventionally recognize as ‘ancient literary criticism’ nor the body of commentary on this material; furthermore, my intention has not been to suggest that we abandon the phrase ‘ancient literary criticism’ as a description of the discourses that ancient authors set out regarding the production and reception of literary texts. Yet by beginning from an understanding of criticism as a socio-political process, this study has offered a somewhat different discourse regarding the production and reception of literary texts in Greek and Roman antiquity.