Tragic Pleasures (ebook)

Argumento de Tragic Pleasures (ebook)

Elizabeth Belfiore offers a striking new interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics by situating the work within the Aristotelian corpus and in the context of Greek culture in general. In Aristotle's Rhetoric, the Politics, and the ethical, psychological, logical, physical, and biological works, Belfiore finds extremely important but largely neglected sources for understanding the elliptical statements in the Poetics. The author argues that these Aristotelian texts, and those of other ancient writers, call into question the traditional view that katharsis in the Poetics is a homeopathic process--one in which pity and fear affect emotions like themselves. She maintains, instead, that Aristotle considered katharsis to be an allopathic process in which pity and fear purge the soul of shameless, antisocial, and aggressive emotions. While exploring katharsis, Tragic Pleasures analyzes the closely related question of how the Poetics treats the issue of plot structure. In fact, Belfiore's wide-ranging work eventually discusses every central concept in the Poetics, including imitation, pity and fear, necessity and probability, character, and kinship relations.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.0Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 3 Pt. I The Greek Background 7 Ch. 1 The Gorgon at the Feast 9 Gorgon and Gorgoneion 11 Pindar 14 Eumenides 19 A Medicine to Produce Aidos 30 Pt. II Plot: The Soul of Tragedy 41 Ch. 2 Philia and Tragic Imitation 44 Imitation 45 Representation 48 Production: Tragedy Imitates Nature 53 Similarity 63 Theoria 66 Philia 70 Ch. 3 Plot and Character 83 The Plot-Character Distinction 83 Ethos 92 Ethos as Part of Tragedy 94 The Spoudaioi 100 Problems 103 Plot and Ethos in the Greek Tragedies 107 Ch. 4 Necessity, Probability, and Plausibility 111 Necessity and Probability 111 Plausibility, Plot, and Episode 119 Ch. 5 Parts and Wholes 132 The Parts of the Plot 132 Pathos 134 Peripeteia 141 Recognition 153 Good and Bad Plots 160 Poetics 13: Changes and Characters 161 Poetics 14: Pathos and Recognition 170 Pt. III Pity and Fear 177 Ch. 6 Fear, Pity, and Shame in Aristotle's Philosophy 181 Pity, Fear, and Physical Danger 181 Fear of Disgrace: Aidos and Aischune 189 Aristotle and the Greek Tradition 190 Rhetoric 192 Nicomachean Ethics 193 Eudemian Ethics 199 Aidos, Excellence, and Habituation 203 Kataplexis and Ekplexis 216 Summary 222 Ch. 7 Tragic Emotion 226 Pity and Pear in the Poetics 226 Aesthetic and Real-Life Emotion 238 Flight and Pursuit 238 Tragedy and Rhetoric 246 Pt. IV Katharsis 255 Ch. 8 Katharsis and the Critical Tradition 257 The Definition of Tragedy 257 The Homeopathic Prejudice 260 Homeopathy: Theoretical Problems 266 Homeopathy: The Ancient Evidence 278 Ch. 9 Katharsis in Aristotle's Philosophy 291 Overview 292 Physical Katharsis 300 Katharsis of the Katamenia 300 Medical Katharsis 306 Psychic Katharsis 314 Purity 315 Psychic and Physical Excellence 317 Politics 8 320 Iron and Wood 327 The Platonic Elenchus 331 Ch. 10 Tragic Katharsis 337 Glossary 361 Aristotelian Texts Used 363 Bibliography 365 Index of Passages Cited 381 General Index 405