We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
FILM AND SOCIETY I53
We did not always take our pleasures so seriously. I am reminded that the criticism of the Greeks, for instance, was of a severely practical kind. Aristotle's Poetics is primarily a guide to playwriting ; the effects of drama on the audience, which seem so important to us today, occupy only a very small proportion of his treatise. It was indeed not until the coming of the European Renaissance that men began to feel the need to abuse, to justify, and to explain the arts. Stephen Gosson issued The School of Abuse in 1579, and Sir Philip Sidney's reply, An Apologie for Poetrie, has been described, with good reason, as the first serious work of critical theory in the English language.
Both The School of Abuse and Sidney's Apologie can, if we choose, be seen against the larger picture of a doubting, wondering, exploratory time. After the Renaissance, the artist was no longer a member of a community united by a common faith. More and more, art and literature began to reflect the disintegration of the social unit, and by the nineteenth century the situation was such that all but a few of our poets and novelists and painters had lost contact with wide stretches of human experience. Inevitably, appreciation of art became a pleasure for the few and a mystery to the many.
So the trend has continued up to the present time, and today as we are constantly being reminded — art and culture are practically the monopoly of the bourgeois. Critical opinion has, of course, not been unaware of this, and in the last fifty years persistent attempts to relate art and society have been made from many quarters, but with special energy by Catholics and Marxists. We may not approve of either Maritain's Art and Scholasticism or Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, but both made their vehement rejection of the doctrine of art for art's sake which was the endproduct of a culture that had no roots in the life and feeling of the majority of the people.