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‘Was Juvenal a Structuralist?‘ a Look at Anachronisms in Literary Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Kevin McCabe
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Extract

Oliver Goldsmith once wrote that the cultural history of a civilization can be divided into three periods: ‘its commencement, or the age of poets; its maturity, or the age of philosophers; and its decline, or the age of critics.’ Goldsmith went on to argue that the increase of critics is a natural result of the spread of learning, but, at the same time, invariably contributes to its decline. This is because critics represent a lower common denominator in literary taste than the poet or the philosopher, and because they approach culture in a more mechanical or hidebound manner. Goldsmith defines critics as ‘all such as judge by rule, and not by feelings’. He looks back to the days of King William and Queen Anne, and suggests that the decline in letters evident in his own day is partly attributable to the prevalence of criticism:

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , April 1986 , pp. 78 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1986

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References

Notes

1. ‘An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe’ (1759), in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Vol. I, ed. Friedman, Arthur (Oxford, 1966), p. 269Google Scholar.

2. Goldsmith, ibid., p. 287.

3. Ibid., p. 317.

4. Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville, 1974), p. 38Google Scholar: ‘I disagree with those critics who befriend Augustan writers by identifying them with modern allusiveness and subversiveness … The model used by such admirers is the imagination of post-symbolist writers, and … many critics wish to treat that imagination as the character of literary genius in all times and all places.’

5. ‘Is Juvenal a Classic?’ in Critical Essays in Roman Literature: Satire, ed. Sullivan, J. P. (London, 1963), p. 95Google Scholar.

6. ‘Parody in Juvenal and T. S. Eliot’, CPh 53 (1958), 23Google Scholar.

7. The Waste Land, lines 253–6.

8. ‘Juvenal's Satire 4: Poetic Uses of Indirection’, California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12 (1979), 283–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1965), p. 111Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., p. 317.

11. The use of an assumed character is not unknown in Roman literature and rhetoric, though not common in Roman Satire. I am dealing here, however, with scholars who argue chiefly from the present to the past, and not from the past itself.

12. ‘Personae’ in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop (Chicago, 1963), p. 26Google Scholar.

13. The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959)Google Scholar.

14. ‘The Programs of Juvenal's Later Books’, CPh 57 (1962), 145–60Google Scholar.

15. ‘Roman Satirists and Literary Criticism’, Bucknell Review, 12:3 (1964), 106–13Google Scholar.

16. ‘Anger in Juvenal and Seneca’, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 19 (1964), 158Google Scholar.

17. ‘Per her tenebricosum: The Mythos of Juvenal 3’, TAPA 96 (1965), 268Google Scholar.

18. Ibid., 275–6.

19. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B. (Oxford, 1887), iii. 252–3Google Scholar.

20. Goldsmith, , op. cit., p. 288Google Scholar.