12: Confucius

The twelfth episode of A History of Literary Criticism, a podcast about the history of literary criticism. For today’s episode we’re going back to the fifth century BC to discuss Confucius’ work. We’ll start with Confucius’ biography, social and literary context, then focus on two main themes from Confucius’ Analects—the first is Confucius’ own literary criticism, that is, parts of Analects when he directly analyses poetry; the second is his theory of language as outlined in Analects. I’ll then situate Confucius’ thought within the context of Abrams’ triangle.