Transcript Religions Studies Dialectic vs Polemic

Approaches to Study
Dr. Stephen Ogden
LIBS 7023
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Polemic and Literature
 The problem of Art –
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The environment of Art is Beauty
How can polemic be beautiful?
What separates a novel from a non-fiction
work?
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Is it just plot, characters, setting – i.e. elements of
fiction – or does art have a entirely different
quiddity: quality, element, nature?
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
Approaches to Study
Polemical
 Greek, “Polemos” = “War”
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OED: Polemic: a strong verbal or written attack on a
person, opinion, doctrine, etc.
 Polemic is one type of rhetoric: put in plain
English, intended to defeat an enemy with
words.
As a bellicose form of writing, the object is
Victory, not Truth.
 Polemic, as an aspect of writing, is a techne:
and so is able to be learned by method.
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Polemic: absolutist language
Sam Harris, Letter to a
Christian Nation
“Can we even conceive of
a project more
intellectually forlorn than
[Christianity]?”
 “How can any educated
person think this
anything but a hilarious,
terrifying, and
unconscionable waste of
time?”
Animal Cruelty: Lab Experiments
Animal Cruelty: Lab Experiments
Approaches to Study
 Polemic
 Absolute
 Final
 Certainty
 Implied Intolerance
 Dialectic
 Relative –the second idea is a partner
 Developing
 Doubt
 Implied humility: (“two sides to a story”)
 Possible unknowns
 Possible errors
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Lionel Trilling
 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination.
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The quality of Imagination separates art from
didactic (“teaching”) or discursive (“reasoning”)
writing.
Literature – novels, drama, poetry -- is in the
realm of Art, and art has its own nature and
function.
Imagination creates a virtual experience of an
abstract idea – a world with no God, for example
– which reveals potential actual effects of ideas.
Polemic and Literature, con’t
Dialogic novel
 An artistic method – a means of applying
literary imagination – which puts ideas in
equal dialectic within a novel through use of
character, dialogue, and even setting.
 Heteroglossia—”multiplicity of voices”
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The reader makes his or her own decision
about the strongest or most appealing idea
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Anti-authoritarian
Allows Free Will to the reader.
Polemic and Literature, con’t
 To a dialogical understanding of fiction, Polemic is
inartistic: i.e. the more obviously and insistently a
novel teaches, or even preaches, the less artistic it is.
 Didactic: designed to teach or preach.
 An artistic question—balance needed between
“instructing” and “delighting”
 Questions are:
 freedom of the reader
 Reliability of the text.
Principles of Literary Criticism: C.T.
Winchester (1912)
 Art Criticism: “the intelligent appreciation of
any work of art and a just estimate of its worth
and rank.”
 Taste: “the power to appreciate (or faculty of
appreciation) the æsthetic qualities of any
work of art.”
 Literary Criticism: “concerned only with the art
of literature, but general nature of criticism is
the same whether the subject be literature,
painting, sculpture, music.”
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