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Literary Decorum of Criticism

Decorum refers to the appropriateness of style to subject in classical rhetoric, poetry, and theatrical theory. Aristotle and Horace both discussed how style should match the subject, such as using a tragic style for tragic subjects and a comic style for comic subjects. In literature, decorum means rendering characters, actions, speeches, and scenes appropriately. Over time, styles were divided into high, middle, and low, with certain vocabularies and diction considered fitting for each level. With Christianity, concepts of decorum also involved distinguishing the sacred from the profane. By the Renaissance, mixing classical mythology and Christian subjects was debated in terms of decorum. Modernist writers then aggressively attacked and deconstructed traditional concepts of decorum.

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462 views2 pages

Literary Decorum of Criticism

Decorum refers to the appropriateness of style to subject in classical rhetoric, poetry, and theatrical theory. Aristotle and Horace both discussed how style should match the subject, such as using a tragic style for tragic subjects and a comic style for comic subjects. In literature, decorum means rendering characters, actions, speeches, and scenes appropriately. Over time, styles were divided into high, middle, and low, with certain vocabularies and diction considered fitting for each level. With Christianity, concepts of decorum also involved distinguishing the sacred from the profane. By the Renaissance, mixing classical mythology and Christian subjects was debated in terms of decorum. Modernist writers then aggressively attacked and deconstructed traditional concepts of decorum.

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Dhisa Ayu
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Literary Decorum of criticism

Decorum (from the Latin: "right, proper") was a principle of classical


rhetoric, poetry and theatrical theory that was about the fitness or otherwise
of a style to a theatrical subject. The concept of decorum is also applied to
prescribed limits of appropriate social behavior within set situations.
Decorum, in literary style, the appropriate rendering of a character, action,
speech, or scene. The concept of literary propriety, in its simplest stage of
development, was outlined by Aristotle. In later classical criticism, the
Roman poet Horace maintained that to retain its unity, a work of art must
be consistent in every aspect: the subject or theme must be dealt with in the
proper diction, metre, form, and tone. Farcical characters should speak in a
manner befitting their social position; kings should intone with the elegance
and dignity commensurate with their rank.
In classical rhetoric and poetic theory, decorum designates the
appropriateness of style to subject. Both Aristotle (in, for example, his
Poetics) and Horace (in his Ars Poetica) discussed the importance of
appropriate style in epic, tragedy, comedy, etc. Horace says, for example: "A
comic subject is not susceptible of treatment in a tragic style, and similarly
the banquet of Thyestes cannot be fitly described in the strains of everyday
life or in those that approach the tone of comedy. Let each of these styles be
kept to the role properly allotted to it."
Hellenistic and Latin rhetors divided style into: the grand style, the middle
style and the low (or plain) style; certain types of vocabulary and diction
were considered appropriate for each stylistic level. A discussion of this
division of styles was set out in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad
Herennium. Modeled on Virgil's three-part literary career (Bucolics,
Georgics, Aeneid), ancient, medieval and Renaissance theorists often linked
each style to a specific genre: epic (high style), didactic (middle style) and
pastoral (plain style). In the Middle Ages, this concept was called "Virgil's
wheel". For stylistic purists, the mixing of styles within a work was
considered inappropriate, and a consistent use of the high style was
mandated for the epic. However, stylistic diversity had been a hallmark of
classical epic (as seen in the inclusion of comic and/or erotic scenes in the
epics of Virgil or Homer). Poetry, perhaps more than any other literary form,
usually expressed words or phrases that were not current in ordinary
conversation, characterized as poetic diction.
With the arrival of Christianity, concepts of decorum became involved with
those of the sacred and profane in a different way from in the previous
classical religions. Although in the Middle Ages religious subjects were often
treated with broad humour in a "low" manner, especially in medieval drama,
the churches policed carefully the treatment in more permanent art forms,
insisting on a consistent "high style". By the Renaissance the mixture of
revived classical mythology and Christian subjects was also considered to
fall under the heading of decorum, as was the increasing habit of mixing
religious subjects in art with lively genre painting or portraiture of the
fashionable. The Catholic Council of Trent specifically forbade, among other
things, the "indecorous" in religious art.
Concepts of decorum, increasingly sensed as inhibitive and stultifying, were
aggressively attacked and deconstructed by writers of the Modernist
movement, with the result that readers' expectations were no longer based
on decorum, and in consequence the violations of decorum that underlie the
wit of mock-heroic, of literary burlesque, and even a sense of bathos, were
dulled in the twentieth-century reader.

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