[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I disagree with your premise, particularly because I think that your definition of mimetic is so broad that it applies to modern literature just as much as it applies to ancient literature.

*All literature* (or all literature with characters, anyway) provides examples for people to imitate or mimic - this is as true of the Iliad as it is of anything by Jane Austen or J.K. Rowlings. But the Iliad was certainly not written to provide heroic models for people to imitate, as the characters are really pretty flawed...Harry Potter or Miss Bennet are much better role models than Achilles, who spends a lot of time sulking in his tent while his fellow countrymen are out doing the fighting. It is not designed to "show people how to live."

And it's even harder to see who we would imitate in "The Clouds" or "The Frogs" - there aren't really any good models there, either. I really think that the only point of these works was for entertainment, and not to show people how to live.

And I think that this pattern largely continues to the modern period - I don't think that there are a lot of good models in The Decameron, for example (and certainly not the monk who teaches the girl how to "put the devil back into hell"); and while I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, I don't think that his play are explicitly moral works at all. You will find much more morality in a Star Trek novel than in either Shakespeare or the Decameron, as far as that goes.

You are correct, Andrew, and there were a lot of wholes in my argument. However, Epics were mimetic works. The ancient Greeks did not mimic their heroes because they were perfect, anymore than a person today will emulate a rap star or celebrity because she thinks that person is perfect. It was fundamental that humans were flawed, and that was especially true for epic heroes. Epic heroes were humanity ramped up to its highest and purest levels, so if ordinary people are flawed, then the heroes would have epic flaws. Epic heroes were not gods, but the truest form of humans. Anyways, the ancients did not think critically about their heroes anymore than we think critically about our heroes today.

This paradigm changes, however, when the Greeks transition from an oral culture to a written culture. It is difficult to have critical thinking in an oral culture, because you cannot critique an issue, analyze it, break it down, look at it from a variety of angles, and debate that issue on a factual basis if there is nothing written down. Even if you did try to critique something that was said, it could always be countered that you misremembered; even that probably did not happen. What usually happened, as documented by Thucydides in his history of the Pelopennesian war, was that peoples recollections would alter and change to stay consistent or to confirm the facts. Critical thinking and written culture go hand in hand, although ironically, there is some evidence that suggest that Socrates might have been illiterate.

I cannot speak of the Clouds and the Frogs, which I have not read. I have read the Oedipus trilogy and Lysistrata, so my knowledge of Greek drama is woefully inadequate. But the nonfiction accounts that I have read about the Ancient Greeks all say that drama was a way of presenting and critiquing important political and social issues of the day, of presenting these issues in a common forum for all to see. Even if Ancient Greek was not didactic, it was still probably a form of social commentary.

There is also a strain of literature that would be considered low brow, like the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales and going all the way back to the Golden Ass. But even the Decameron is considered an allegorical work. According to Wikipedia ( I know, not the most authoritative or reliable source) the "Decameron provides a unity in philosophical outlook. Throughout runs the common medieval theme of Lady Fortune, and how quickly one can rise and fall through the external influences of the "Wheel of Fortune"." However, it does say that the the purpose of the Decameron was not to educate, but to satirize works like The Divine Comedy and their methods of education.

It is true that Shakespeare was not a didactic writer. But he was also not a book writer. This could also be said about the Greek playwrights; plays usually are not written with the same purposes as books. They are not written to be timeless works to be preserved for posterity, but to be contemporary and often ephemeral works. The very nature of a play is that it only lasts while it lasts, and then you go about your business, whereas a book is something that you return to again and again, or at least it was before commercial markets made reading more of an extensive (reading lots of books) and consumerist activity than a intensive (studying the same books over and over again) activity. Eventually Shakespeare was published in book form, but that was not in his lifetime, and it was mainly done because people believed that Shakespeare had something to teach people.

My chronology, I will admit, is off. I said that the phenomena of the preponderance of novels and books being written purely for entertainment purposes began in the nineteenth century, whereas it was more of a twentieth century phenomena. Most of the books written in the nineteenth century were didactic (Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell), philosophical (the Russian novelists), or were social commentary (Dickens, Mark Twain). When I wrote this I was thinking of the emergence of the commercial book market, which was in the nineteenth century, although it really took off in the early twentieth century. There were books in the nineteenth century that were written purely for sensationalistic or escapist purposes that were geared mainly towards working class adolescent boys; these were called penny dreadfuls, which would be succeeded by comics and perhaps today by video games.

In the twentieth century two trends do emerge on the high and low levels. On the high levels there is modernism, which eschews the values and purposes of preindustrial literature, and instead seeks to capture reality as it is rather than trying to instruct people on how reality should be. On the low end we get escapist fiction, which certainly existed before the twentieth century, but it was in the twentieth century where a escapist fiction became the primary mode of fiction.

Escapist fiction encompasses a set of attitudes, which I think most people would be familiar with. First, it prides itself on not being "preachy," and on not having anything to say. It usually is not political in nature, and it eschews any position that might alienate readers or be controversial. In this attitude it is asserted that literature has nothing to teach us, that the ultimate measure of any book is the pleasure it gives. Furthermore, this attitude contends that the only standard for a book except the market standard. This is the attitude that says everything is subjective (and therefor there can be no knowledge), and that anyone who believes otherwise is a snobbish elitist. It is an attitude that believes that things like politics and philosophy are best left to nonfiction books.

Nevertheless, I do believe that all literature has some moral message, even if that message is that the good guy wins in the end. Every story at some level has a moral or a message, even if that message is that ultimately nothing really makes much sense.

There is mimesis in our culture, as there probably is in any culture, but I think our heroes for the most part are in movies, television, and music than they are in books. In my own experience it was my peers wearing bagging clothes, sagging pants, and mimicking the speech and attitudes of their favorite rappers.

You are right that there are still lots of forms of didactic fiction in our times, among them being your example of Star Trek. However, there is generally cynicism and disdain for any fiction that is didactic in nature. It is considered the height of pretension for any fiction writer to try to teach, or to think that he has anything to teach us(although South Park seems to get away with it). It is okay to mock and lampoon, but not to teach. This trend however, may be very recent, i.e. Post-1950's.

As far as mimesis in character driven books, there is some merit to that. But there is a distinction between a character driven book and a plot-driven book. In the latter the characters are barely human; they exist merely as props to further the plot, almost like dummies on a roller coaster ride. I never considered that in the case of the former these characters were written to be imitated; I always thought of them as character studies, or as explorations of human nature. But I could be very wrong about that.

In sum, I concede that my definitions are flawed, that entertainment driven literature existed before the twentieth century, and that mimetic fiction could still be alive and well today. I still think, however, that the balance has drastically changed, so that today the preponderance of literature is not didactic or mimetic in culture. I am not saying this is a good or bad thing. Still, all this talk of didacticism and mimetism may be superfluous. I still contend that pretwentieth century works for the most part can be considered knowledge because they had objective(objective in that they are the same for everyone) lessons and morals. I still contend that the principal purpose of reading before the twentieth century and especially before the nineteenth century was for spiritual, moral, and intellectual edification, whereas as fiction reading today is done mainly as a palliative or as an anathesgic. Others may disagree, and I welcome disagreement as reasons are given. The initial question I think is still valid, although it needs to be revise and expanded upon:

Is literature knowledge? If it is, why? If it is sometimes, at one point does it become knowledge or cease to become knowledge? Or is it not? If it is not, then what is its purpose? I apologize for the length of this reply.