Essays on Aristotle's Poetics

by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

Overview

Aimed at deepening our understanding of the Poetics, this collection places Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in its larger philosophical context. In these twenty-one essays, philosophers and classicists explore the corpus of Aristotle's work in order to link the Poetics to the rest of his views on psychology and on history, ethics, and politics. The essays address such topics as catharsis, pity and fear, pleasure, character and the unity of action, and the modality of dramatic action. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Elizabeth Belfiore, Rdiger Bittner, Mary Whitlock Blundell, Wayne Booth, Dorothea Frede, Cynthia Freeland, Leon Golden, Stephen Halliwell, Richard Janko, Aryeh Kosman, Jonathan Lear, Alexander Nehamas, Martha C. Nussbaum, Deborah Roberts, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Nancy Sherman, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Stephen A. White, and Paul Woodruff.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691014982
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	08/30/1992
Series:	Princeton Paperbacks Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

359

	List of Contributors
	Acknowledgments
	The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy	1
	Aristotle on History and Poetry	23
	Myth and Tragedy	33
	Acting: Drama as the Mimesis of Praxis	51
	Aristotle on Mimesis	73
	One Action	97
	Plot Imitates Action: Aesthetic Evaluation and Moral Realism in Aristotle's Poetics	111
	Outside the Drama: The Limits of Tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics	133
	Ethos and Dianoia Reconsidered	155
	Hamartia and Virtue	177
	Necessity, Chance, and "What Happens for the Most Part" in Aristotle's Poetics	197
	Aristotle's Favorite Tragedies	221
	Pleasure, Understanding, and Emotion in Aristotle's Poetics	241
	Tragedy and Self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity	261
	Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and the Poetics	291
	Katharsis	315
	From Catharsis to the Aristotelian Mean	341
	Aristotle and Iphigenia
	Aristotle on the Pleasure of Comedy	379
	The Poetics for a Practical Critic	387
	Epilogue: The Poetics and its Interpreters	409
	Selected Bibliography	425