Team-taught with Denis Feeney.

The general aim of the seminar is to explore the range and variety of Greek and Roman texts that speak about the nature of literature/poetry, its workings, and the role it plays in society. We will ask how far such discourse constitutes a coherent tradition, keeping in mind recent claims that “ancient literary criticism” is an anachronistic modern construct. The core of the seminar will be a close engagement with a set of texts in the original, testing the proposition that texts of criticism require interpretation on a footing with that applied to literary or poetic texts. Selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Plutarch and Longinus, will be studied, with attention to ancillary topics, such as the aims and practices of ancient scholarship.