Midterm - Flowchart

Here is a link to the atrocious flowchart I created: https://www.lucidchart.com/invitations/accept/83133dc4-4437-4314-974b-507f449c34a0




I kind of went all over the place with this flowchart. I was interested in categorizing each theorist by their respected lines of criticism. For example, I wanted to have all of the medieval and classical theorists connected together, and all of the Marxian theorists connected as one group. In addition to this, I tried to make connections between groups of thinkers who were influenced by one another. This was extraordinarily difficult to do; for one, many of the connections I made were slightly arbitrary. By this, I mean that some of the connections I tried to make between theorists from separate groups were based on whether one theorist utilized another's ideas (accurately or inaccurately), or if one theorist seemed to resemble another theorist in any sort of way. For example, I connected Coleridge to Eliot, because Eliot suggests that poetry is synthetically composed by past traditions, and this way of thinking sounds reminiscent of Coleridge's secondary imagination, in which the ideas and truths from the primary imagination are interpreted in a synthetic manner in order to generate one complete understanding of the primary imagination.


A few of the connections I made turned out to be mere guesses so that I could connect them to someone else on the chart. For the most part, I found that Kant, Plato, and Wordsworth seemed to be the most influential figures to other theorists, and I think this is because they each were the first in line in their respected groups of criticism.