Strausbaugh,Derek's Midterm Diagram

     In this diagram, I started at the very beginning, with Plato, because his work interacts with all other critics we have examined. Plato leads directly to Aristotle, who expands and refutes Plato's ideas. The next generation of philosophers, Augustine, Sidney, and Maimonides deal with different aspects of text than Aristotle, but seem to be out of the same critical tradition. I loosely connect Maimonides with Schleiermacher because they both deal with hermeneutics. Emerson also deals directly with Schleiermacher's Ideas.

     Hegel and Kant wind up side by side because they both represent huge influential ways that changed the way people though, Hegel with the dialectic and Kant centering goodness around the human being. This leads directly into Hume's ideas of taste, which Eliot runs with. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Emerson all draw from Hume and his idea of taste, and expand upon that with ideas of how the poet should compose works, and how inspiration works. Marx and Engels splinter off from the romantics, rebelling from the notion that all humanity believes in the same ideals of art, and posit that taste is manufactured in society by those who control production. Horheimer, Adorno, and Althusser expand upon Marx and Engels by getting more specific as to how the society creates its own norms. Similarly, Wollstonecraft rebels against previous notions of taste stating that Gender has been a factor in the past. Pizan is linked to Wollstonecraft in her ideas. Freud is another rebellion from humanity having an innate sense of beauty. He puts for the idea that our psychology and experiences determine what we deem tasteful. Lacan and Nietzsche both draw from Freud, moving his theories into different arenas and expanding upon them. Lacan uses the Idea of the sign in order to accentuate language as a system of symbols. De Saussure take that idea and expand upon it. Wimsatt and Beardsly take that idea to the next level saying that the text is the only thing that matters, because everything that there is to know about a text is in the signs.