Literary language and critical values: a dialectic of ancient and modern

This chapter explores some of the implications of Michael Silk’s view that ancient criticism lacked a number of concepts fundamental to an adequate understanding of literary language – not least, the Russian formalist notion of defamiliarization, and the distinction, invoked throughout Silk’s own writing, between ‘elevation’ (roughly speaking, stylized formality of register) and ‘heightening’ (roughly speaking, expressive enhancement and intensification by various means, including defamiliarization). As well as reflecting on the paradoxical idea that ancient critics were blind to some of the most important qualities of the texts with which they engaged, the chapter ponders several possible reservations about Silk’s hypothesis of a gulf between criticism and literature in antiquity. Selective observations on Aristotle’s Poetics (including elements of comparison with Shklovsky’s account of defamiliarization) and on the treatise On the Sublime are used to outline an adjusted perspective from which the relationship between ancient and modern criticism, for all the shifts in sensibility which underlie it, can and should be read dialectically as embracing both likeness and difference, challengingly entangled in complex structures of thought.