Poetics by Aristotle

Author:Aristotle [Aristotle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, Ancient & Classical, Philosophy, Classics
ISBN: 9780140446364
Google: gG7GFipheDgC
Amazon: 0199608369
Goodreads: 13270
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1995-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

13. Further reading

This introduction began by mentioning some of the problems which the Poetics poses to its interpreters; it scarcely needs to be said, therefore, that there are many and very diverse alternatives available to the account which I have sketched in the body of the introduction.

Among other translations which might be compared and contrasted with mine, I would recommend in particular those by Margaret Hubbard, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1972); Richard Janko’s Aristotle: Poetics (Hackett, 1987); and Stephen Halliwell’s The Poetics of Aristotle (Duckworth, 1987). Janko’s version, which ‘attempts to follow the original Greek closely, with minimal alterations for the sake of natural English’, is especially suitable for close study, and has extensive notes on points of detail.28 Halliwell’s translation is equipped with a more discursive commentary.

Halliwell has also published an English translation with facing Greek text in the Loeb Classical Library (1995). R. Dupont-Roc’s and J. Lallot’s Aristote: La Poétique (Éditions du Seuil, 1980) contains an introduction, the Greek text with facing French translation, and a commentary. The edition I have worked from is R. Kassel’s Oxford Classical Text (Oxford, 1965; reprinted with a commentary by D. W Lucas, Oxford, 1968); but with such a difficult text there is often great uncertainty as to what Aristotle wrote, and I have freely departed from the readings printed by Kassel where this seemed appropriate.

Humphrey House in Aristotle’s Poetics (Hart-Davis, 1956) gives a short and accessible, though now somewhat dated, overview. The only full-length systematic study in English is Stephen Halliwell’s Aristotle’s Poetics (Duckworth, 1986; this is not the same as his commentary, mentioned above); chapter 10 provides a good starting-point for exploration of the history of interpretations of the Poetics and of its influence. Halliwell’s book has a very different vision of Aristotle’s project from mine; but it tends (as one reviewer put it) to ‘float at an Olympian distance from the text’, and the style makes it harder than it should be to get to grips with his arguments. By contrast, Elizabeth Belfiore’s Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on plot and emotion (Princeton, 1992), a book full of fresh ideas to think about and argue with, is lucid and exceptionally stimulating. Anyone who has read this book and Leon Golden’s Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis (Scholar Press, 1992) will appreciate how radically contemporary experts can disagree on the interpretation of even the most fundamental concepts of the Poetics. The excellent collection Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by A. O. Rorty (Princeton, 1992), also illustrates the diversity of approaches to the text currently on offer.

For a short general introduction to Aristotle’s philosophy see J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (Oxford, 1981) or Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle (Oxford, 1982); at greater length, W K. C. Guthrie, Aristotle: an Encounter, the sixth volume of Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1981). Jonathan Lear’s Aristotle: the desire to understand (Cambridge, 1988) offers a philosophically challenging approach to Aristotle’s thought; the introductory chapter, which explains the book’s subtitle, is particularly relevant to this introduction’s starting-point.

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