Aristotle Poetics: Editio Maior of the Greek Text with Historial Introductions and Philological Commentaries. Edited by Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas. Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 338. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xiii + 536. $226, €162.

Garrod, Smith and the contributors of the volume envisage the longue durée poetics of an early modern genre. They interpret its poetics alongside its various epistemic agenda and make a case for the literary status of natural history.

When Giovanni Boccaccio undertook to compile the myths of Greco-Roman antiquity in the mid-fourteenth century, he was working within a long tradition of medieval commentaries on Ovid's mythological works and mythographical compendia, such as Alberic of London's De deis gentium. His Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, on which he worked until the final years of his life, also falls within the traditions of biblical exegesis and of philosophical commentary on texts, such as Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Virgil's Aeneid. The complex (...) and eclectic nature of Boccaccio's learning, however, along with the antimodern organizational structure of the treatise, has led to the underestimation of its importance in the history of medieval and Renaissance approaches to ancient myth. As Charles Osgood's partial translation of the work demonstrates, the focus of critics has been limited to the final two books of the treatise, in which Boccaccio defends both poetry and his work from detractors. The fourteenth and fifteenth books of the Genealogie have been by far the most long-lived sections of the work. The straightforward defense of poetry through recourse to the topos of the poeta theologus places the work in a historical continuum that leads from Albertino Mussato and Francesco Petrarca to Coluccio Salutati, Marsilio Ficino, and Angelo Poliziano, not to mention the poetic theorists of the English Renaissance, such as Sir Philip Sidney. (shrink)

This paper, therefore, ploughs the furrow of postcolonial history, memory and the poetic imagination deploying the poetry of the Nigerian poet Joe Ushie.In particular, the paper negotiates the Rwandan genocide as a tragic foreground of the imperial process through its indulgent, artificial fixing of boundaries to accomplish its empire-building project in Africa. But beyond the colonial mediation in, and onslaught on, the cultures of others, the paper argues that African societies have also been complicit in their agonistic and violent (...) history as the Rwandan genocide amply demonstrates. The paper concludes that a martial culture reminiscent of Civan, the warmonger, which manifests itself in private and especially public domains will only entrench intolerance, ethnocentrism, communal wars and violent death on the continent. (shrink)

Wilhelm Bousset, a leading member of the religionsgeschichtliche school and author of a seminal work on early Christology, Kyrios Christos, is typically regarded by reviewers of his work as a classic nineteenth-century liberal who sought a secure foundation for faith in the historical Jesus. However, this view of Bousset fails to appreciate the significant development of his theological perspective on the relationship between faith and history, a perspective that underwent a profound shift due to the influence of the English (...) historian Thomas Carlyle and the Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries. It is the influence of these two figures that enables Bousset to justify a full-scale flight from history and to seek faith's foundation elsewhere, in the poetic symbol of Jesus Christ. The resulting solution to the problem of faith and history represents a unique and compelling alternative to the solutions of the leading theologians and New Testament scholars of the early twentieth century. (shrink)

The scene of origin -- Anterior theater.

Porphyry‘s “On the Cave of the Nymphs” inaugurates a style of philosophicoallegorical interpretation of literary texts that flourished in antiquity and finds analogues in criticism down to the present. It is distinguished by its use of literary interpretation to think through speculative problems of philosophy and theology. Although it became suspect in terms of Enlightenment philological principles prescribing interpretation of the text “on its own terms,” this kind of criticism reveals the originally philosophical motives and purpose of literary criticism and (...) restores to literature the vocation of disclosing a properly poetic truth higher than that of fact or history. The history of this type of speculative criticism stemming from Porphyry‘s reading of Homer is traced forward through Latin allegorical readings of epic revolving around Virgil. This itinerary highlights the perennial and inevitable tensions between philological and philosophical approaches to interpreting literature as a revelation of truth. (shrink)

As a field of study, literature and science has gradually expanded to encompass both the impact of science on literary culture and the literary‐linguistic practices intrinsic to the production of scientific knowledge. Such transformations both reinforce and fundamentally recalibrate the detailed attention focused on scientific practice by historians of science since the 1980s. As a result, this essay and the Focus section it introduces suggest that history of science and literature and science are, in fact, interdependent fields. Attention to (...) their convergences will yield better understanding of the performative dimensions of scientific practices and thence of science itself as a form of making of knowledge of things and events in the world of nature. Science as a form of making involves the convergence of things, material practices, and a panoply of meaningful artifacts—instruments of thought and action—that refuse any simple dichotomy between “text” and “action.” -/- . (shrink)

This chapter will examine Smith’s views on poetics with particular attention to their relationship to his broader social theoretical concerns with conjectural history. I argue that history and poetics cannot be clearly separated in Smith’s system, and therefore that Smith’s poetics must be approached through his understanding of history and historiography and their reliance on fact as he conceives it as part of the science of man. Poetry becomes an interesting anomaly within this system (...) in that Smith harbours some anxiety over poetry’s capability, based on its form, to relate the facts of the science of human nature to its readers and thus provide them with moral education. (shrink)

This paper reads Carlos Soto Román’s “Chile Project: [Re-classified],” a documentary poem that remediates declassified state documents as an ambivalent form of witnessing bureaucracy and state viol...

For Hegel, modern selfhood is an implicitly poetic, normative capacity for actions that could not be empirically explained. Thus it eludes the “clarification” offered by classical tragedy, but modernity’s apparent loss of tragedy conceals the dialectical refinement of tragic into comic form that most defines modern selfhood. If Aristotle contrasted poetry and history, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit derives a modern, comic ethical poetics from the form of historical contingency itself. Focusing on Hegel’s reading of Antigone, I solicit (...) Gillian Rose and Dieter Henrich to defend this account against tragic assessments of modern selfhood by J. M. Bernstein, Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, and Judith Butler. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, (...) Hallyn investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

Poetic Interaction presents an original approach to the history of philosophy in order to elaborate a fresh theory that accounts for the place freedom in the Western philosophical tradition. In his thorough analysis of the aesthetic theories of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant, John McCumber shows that the interactionist perspective recently put forth by Jürgen Habermas was in fact already present in some form in the German Enlightenment and in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. McCumber's historical placement of the interactionist perspective runs (...) counter to both Habermas's own views and to those of scholars who would locate the origin of these developments in American pragmatism. From the metaphysical approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the interactionist approaches of Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, McCumber provides an original narrative of the history of philosophy that focuses on the ways that each thinker has formulated the relationships between language, truth, and freedom. Finally, McCumber presents his critical demarcation of various forms of freedom to reveal that the interactionist approach has to be expanded and enlarged to include all that is understood by "poetic interaction." For McCumber, freedom is inherently pluralistic. Poetic Interaction will be invaluable to political philosophers, historians of philosophy, philosophers of language, and scholars of legal criticism. (shrink)

Aristotle’s statement that — in terms of philosophy — poetry is superior to history can be understood better, when analysed in the context of the Stagirite’s epistemology, ontology, and eudaimonic ethics. Both poetry and history deal with numerous contingent and chaotic events, but while history is only reconstructive, poetry reworks its matter more thoroughly. History attempts to recount all events and does it in accord with their contingent and chaotic nature, whereas poetry implies certain choices. By (...) doing so, it introduces uniformity and coherence thus providing a different ontic status than the one that reigned originally. Consequently, the cognitive result of poetry can be compared to the beatific value of conceptual knowledge in philosophy. (shrink)

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating (...) on the particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

History, according to Aristotle, relates "things that happen ; whereas poetry's function is to relate the kinds of things that happen—that is, are possible in terms of probability or necessity."1 A generic clause, expressing "the kinds of things that happen" to certain kinds of agents, distinguishes the task of the poet from that of the historian.2 History speaks of "particulars," whereas poetry speaks more of "universals." A historian might assert, for example, that Alcibiades urged the Athenians to invade (...) Sicily, or that he was later exiled, and finally murdered; whereas a poet would use Alcibiades's story to show the kind of person to whom things of that kind are likely or bound to... (shrink)

The philosopher René Descartes is usually associated with cold reason rather than with feeling, to the extent that Rousseau charged his philosophy had "slashed poetry's throat." Andrea Gadberry argues, on the contrary, that Descartes' thought was crucially enabled by early modern poetry and rhetoric. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of disembodied reason, Gadberry points to Descartes's own impassioned and poetic negotiations with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Gadberry's approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent (...) for the twenty-first: What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Her book reveals an implicit poetics in Descartes' texts, from the puzzling forms of riddle, emblem, and anagram to the antecedents of more familiar, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry in love lyric and elegy. Gadberry's argument is grounded in the rich poetic culture of Descartes' time, even as it traces a biography of thinking. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic shape. This book will be the first volume published in the new Thinking Literature series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Poetry: the roots of a problem; 2. A radical solution: Plato's Republic; 3. The natural history of poetry: Aristotle; 4. Ways to find truth in falsehood; 5. The marriage of Homer and Plato.

Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Hölderlin are central to Heidegger's later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of Hölderlin's poetry. Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hölderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, she argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat.In the context of Hölderlin's poetics (...) of alienation, exile, and wandering, Gosetti-Ferencei draws a different model of poetic subjectivity, which engages Heidegger's later philosophy of Gelassenheit, calmness, or letting be. In so doing, she is able to pose a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a "new poetics of Dasein," or being there. (shrink)

Combining literary and philosophical analysis, this study defends an utterly innovative reading of the early history of poetics. It is the first to argue that there is a distinctively Socratic view of poetry and the first to connect the Socratic view of poetry with earlier literary tradition.Literary theory is usually said to begin with Plato's famous critique of poetry in the Republic. Grace Ledbetter challenges this entrenched assumption by arguing that Plato's earlier dialogues Ion, Protagoras, and Apology introduce (...) a distinctively Socratic theory of poetry that responds polemically to traditional poets as rival theorists. Ledbetter tracks the sources of this Socratic response by introducing separate readings of the poetics implicit in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar. Examining these poets' theories from a new angle that uncovers their literary, rhetorical, and political aims, she demonstrates their decisive influence on Socratic thinking about poetry.The Socratic poetics Ledbetter elucidates focuses not on censorship, but on the interpretation of poetry as a source of moral wisdom. This philosophical approach to interpreting poetry stands at odds with the poets' own theories--and with the Sophists' treatment of poetry. Unlike the Republic's focus on exposing and banishing poetry's irrational and unavoidably corrupting influence, Socrates' theory includes poetry as subject matter for philosophical inquiry within an examined life.Reaching back into what has too long been considered literary theory's prehistory, Ledbetter advances arguments that will redefine how classicists, philosophers, and literary theorists think about Plato's poetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in ContextPeter E. KnoxKathryn J. Gutzwiller. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp.Cloth, $45.The publication of Alan Camerons The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes in 1993 set a coronis upon one stage in the efforts of modern scholars to sort out the untidy garden that we know as ancient Greek epigram. We now (...) know as much about the history of this corpus as we are likely to discover without the introduction of new evidence, and scholarly attention might logically be expected to return to the interpretation and criticism of these poems. Transmitted for the most part in the socalled Palatine Anthology and filtered through the agency of anthologists ancient and medieval, the epigrams of the ancient practitioners of this minor genre have tended to be studied individually, [End Page 628] like gemstones dislodged from their original settings. The luster of each piece may be easily admired, but what has been lost is the color and clarity that is imparted by the contrast with its neighbors. The ambitious task that Kathryn Gutzwiller has set herself in this closely argued and learned book is no less than to recover from the collecta membra of the Palatine Anthology the contours of the epigram books of nine poets from the early Hellenistic period to Meleager in the first century B.C.E.The opening chapter provides an introduction, which, taken together with the following chapter ("Hellenistic Epigram Books"), lays the foundation for the remainder of the work and establishes its basic premise, that all the Hellenistic epigrammatists composed their work for "publication" in carefully constructed books, arranged on principles which Gutzwiller can recover. This is the basis for what she terms "a new interpretative strategy" in the criticism of Hellenistic epigrams, "to read them as if"—her emphasis—"we knew their place in historical collections" (7). The remainder of the book is occupied by her reconstructions of the epigram books of Anyte, Nossis, Leonidas of Tarentum, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Hedylus, Callimachus, Antipater of Sidon, and Meleager. Readers who are convinced by her arguments in these opening chapters will be swept along by her hypothetical arrangements, which she supports with close readings of individual poems set in their new contexts. Others, myself included, will remain suspicious of the solidity of the foundations of this edifice, while still finding much to admire in her sophisticated interpretations of individual poems.Much of Gutzwiller's theoretical underpinning depends upon rather strict adherence to the orthodox view of what she characterizes as the "Callimachean aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented" (4). The Hellenistic epigram books that she posits correspond neatly with Callimachean aesthetics so described. She rejects out of hand Cameron's arguments for the social role of epigram in a sympotic setting, in favor of the bookish background described by (e.g.) Peter Bing. The hypothesis of a neat and well– ordered world of Hellenistic poetry books, as outlined by some modern scholars, is not undisputed, but readers will not hear much about that here. Gutzwiller sweeps aside skeptical challenges to this picture, and the possibility, for example, that Callimachus produced a collected edition of his poetry, advanced only as a hypothesis by Rudolf Pfeiffer, is here (19) represented as "the probability... that Callimachus published his complete oeuvre, ordered and divided into books." Her summary of the papyrus evidence paints a far more stable picture of the situation of books in the manuscript culture of the Hellenistic world than the evidence safely allows. For Gutzwiller, any references to the of a poet "indicate an authorially compiled epigram book" (20). This naïve extension of Pfeiffer's theory of the composition of a "Collected Works" of Callimachus, and unswerving allegiance to the communis opinio of Callimachean aesthetics, are recurring themes in Gutzwiller's reconstructions of ancient epigram books. Having settled upon the essential aesthetic that determines the [End Page 629] configuration of the book, it remains only to attach the surviving poems to this framework. Not surprisingly, the reconstructed books then offer further confirmation of the underlying assumptions. On this shaky foundation, for example, Gutzwiller... (shrink)

This paper reflects on affect and emotion as they relate to poetics — her/histories — in twenty-first century museums. Using specific examples, it considers the ways in which collections of material culture hold diverse meanings and how ideas are communicated to audiences over time and space but might also be challenged through imaginative activity. Key objects, exhibitions and activities discussed highlight masculinities at work in museums and include the temporary art installations by Yinka Shonibare and Fred Wilson in the (...) Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Norfolk House Music Room in 2007; the portrait in oils of the Jamaican scholar Francis Williams, painted by an anonymous artist around 1745; and a contemporary oral commentary by Benjamin Zephaniah in the V&A British Galleries, which are considered through a feminist lens of poetics. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turningpoint in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. FernandHallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science orastronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. Thesenew representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of"genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn investigates the problem of (...) how new scientific hypothesesare actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected tosupport a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentallydifferent from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must beexamined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to beinseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of bothneoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Departmentof French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, first published by Yale University Press in 1979, has been the single most influential work in the history of academic science-fiction studies. As Veronica Hollinger observed: “Metamorphoses is the significant forerunner of all the major examinations of the genre”. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint make more or less the same point: “Disagreeing with him [Suvin] is a considerable part of SF scholarship—he... set... the terms by which SF has subsequently been studied”. Perhaps not (...) quite so significant for utopian studies, Metamorphoses was nonetheless a crucially important text here too. For the fundamental novelty of its argument lies in the... (shrink)

This book investigates the relationship between poetry and ontology in the works of Martin Heidegger. It explains the way in which Heidegger’s dialogue with poetry forms an essential step on the path of overcoming metaphysics and thinking the openness of presence. Heidegger’s engagement with poetry is an important moment in the development of his philosophy—or rather thinking of Being. Being speaks itself poetically in his view. Rather than a logician or a thinker, Being is the first poet.