Aristotle’s Poetics

Some questions / issues

1. Is Poetics in dialogue with Plato? How does Aristotle respond to Plato’s poetics and ontology?
2. What are the linguistic ambiguities in the text and how have these informed interpretation?
3. How does Aristotle’s rigorous categorisation shape The Poetics and its reception? How does
the draft / lecture format sit with his own stated intentions for the work and his relationship
to the audience?

Text, audience and genre:

1. Didactic text, to instruct artists on their craft (ποίησις poiēsis)
2. Manual for audiences to better appreciate art / poetry (and their pleasure in it)
3. Personal appraisal, evaluation of the arts; aetiology of the development of poetry and its
criticism; political / hierarchical categorisation of genres [A] [D]

General theory of literature  Relationship between tragedy & epic  focus on tragedy
6 categories for tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. (D)
Diction – The Rhetoric – The New Critics vs the ‘rhetorical turn’
Tragic antihero – hubris, hamartia, peripeteia – influence on the novel
Characters should be ‘good’

Mimesis: Imitation / Representation

1. Poetry arose because humans are born naturally imitative: this is borne out of a fundamental
desire to known and understand the world.
2. We take intrinsic pleasure in the process of recognition – even if distressing
3. But re: Plato / Aristotle’s Politics – we must be careful – we need the right role models
4. Catharsis: only used once – fails to explain what is meant by it [B]; post-Freudian reading of
catharsis as ‘purging’.
5. Objects of imitation? Aristotle’s Categories and the ‘substances’ – poetry and the ‘universal’

Influence
Narratology: plot & narrative as most important, Renaissance v Modern [D]
Concludes that tragedy is the noblest form; political implications [E] genre theory – shift from epic to
tragedy paves way for discussion of the movement from the epic to the novel [F]
The Formalists, Structuralists, New Criticism – “the affective fallacy” - a structured, close reading of
a text
 Augustine’s Confessions

1. How effective is the tonal shift in Augustine’s confessions?

2. Who is Augustine writing for? How does Augustine use his audience as a literary conceit?
How does the structure of the text relate to the project of conversion?
3. How does the text engage with the ideas of the Neoplatonists?

Summary
Confessions of past life: youth, sex, living with a woman unmarried and their son, embrace of the
Manichean religion, stealing pears “just to steal.” Faith in Catholicism, the development of his soul;
how his experiences influenced his views on marriage and original sin.

Books I-IX: autobiographical; religious quest

X-XIII: Confessional; metatext; autobiography; ontotheology: Memory / time / nature of god

Audience & Text

- Omniscient God? Young men like himself? Augustine’s mind?
- Highly personal but also rhetorical, Socratic method throughout (A)

BOOK X

The nature of memory

- Vast, like a storehouse: able to capture more than itself (B)
- Memory is the ‘belly of the mind’. Recognition must take place in the memory (C)

Remembering objects, events

- Does memory consist of things in themselves?
- Not the thing itself but an image of the thing (D)

Remembering ideas: how can a new idea be self-evidently true?

- In other cases, we do seem to contain the things themselves
- Does this mean a mental act that is both remembering and forgetting?
o Re Book I of On Christian Teaching: ‘nothing’ must be a sign in itself – but it is
difficult to see what it is a sign of
- Self-knowledge = an immaterial mind knowing itself.

Do we have an innate human knowledge of happiness? (E)

- How can we seek God if we don’t already know what he looks like? Some trace of him must
remain.
- God is immaterial: the ultimate reality is good and beautiful and transcendent
- Relationship to the Neoplatonists and the Platonic Forms
 Extracts: Poetics

A Poetry was split up according to their particular characters: the grander people represented
fine actions, i.e. those of fine persons; the more ordinary people represented those of inferior
ones, at first composing invectives, just as the others composed hymns and praise-poems.

Aristotle Poetics (NATC)

B Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in

embellished speech, with each of its elements used separately in the various parts of the play;
represented by people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror
the catharsis of such emotions.
Aristotle Poetics 90 NATC

C Some people illogically make some prior assumption, and judging it right themselves make
inferences from it.
Aristotle Poetics 61b1

D Plot is the origin and soul of tragedy and the character is secondary. It is very similar in the
case of painting too: if someone daubed a surface with the finest pigments indiscriminately,
he would not give the same enjoyment as if he had sketched an image in black and white.

Aristotle Poetics 90 NATC

E By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres,
Aristotle – even if this was not his intention, redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the
classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an
orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and
manners when speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a
monarchical paradigm.

Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 17-18

F The very concept of [poetic discourse] – in the course of historical formulation form Aristotle
– to the present day has been oriented towards the specific “official” genres and connected
with specific historical tendencies in verbal ideological life. Thus a whole series of phenomena
remained beyond its conceptual horizon.
Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel NATC 1197
 Extracts: Confessions

A But why let others overhear my testimony, as if they could treat my symptoms? People
want a transgressive knowledge of others’ lives, but are blissfully ignorant of what might
change their own. Why, anyway, should they care to hear from me about my own condition
if they will not hear from you about theirs? If they hear me describing myself, how can they
know whether I am telling the truth?…I shall risk testifying to you, Lord, in such a way that,
even though I cannot be the one to make my own testimony credible to others, the love
with which they listen will lend it credit.
(Book 10)

“It is to you in your mercy that I speak, not to a man, who would simply laugh at me”
(Book 6)

B “When I spoke of all these things, my eyes were not seeing them, though I could not have
spoken unless my memory was seeing them internally, and on the same huge scale on
which they were seen externally—not only the mountains and seas, the rivers and stars
which I have seen myself, but also the ocean, whose existence I can take only on trust. I did
not engorge the things I saw, the things themselves are not inside me, but their
representations are—and I can tell through which sense each one came.”
(Book 10)

C “The memory must, instead, be a kind of mental belly, where happiness and sorrow are like
sweet and sour food, which—once they are digested—are retained but no longer tasted.
The analogy is admittedly undignified, but not without a partial basis.”
(Book 10)

D “In memory alone there are uncountable expanses, hollows, caverns uncountably filled with
uncountable things of all types—some of them representations, like those of sensible
objects; some present without need for representation, like the tenets of the liberal arts;
while others are there by some mysterious registration process, like the mind’s reactions,
which the memory retains though the mind is no longer experiencing those reactions—
still, if in the memory, how not in the mind? ”
(Book 10)

E “We must have known some prior happiness…Can it be that we have an idea of happiness
from memories of our own joyful experiences?...There is a ‘joy not given sinners,’ one given
those who freely seek you, who find you are their joy. This is true happiness in life, to take
joy in you, for you, because of you—this, nothing else, is happiness. Those who do not
know this pursue their joy elsewhere, and though it is no true one, yet they cannot wrench
their desire entirely free from some representation of that joy.”
)Book 10)