Description This book revolutionizes the 1000-year old tradition that stems from the first commentaries on the Poetics by the Arabic scholars.
(No commentary exists from antiquity or Byzantine times.
) Starting with those scholars, Aristotle's treatise has always been thought to be about poetic-literary theory, with tragedy being its paradigm.
Scott demonstrates, however, that Aristotle (c.
384-322 BCE) employs poiesis not in the way universally assumed until now, as poetry, which the sophist Gorgias only coined in 415 BCE.
Rather, Aristotle follows Diotima, who in the Symposium of Plato (c.
424-347) explains poiesis as mousike kai metra (typically 'music' and verses).
One reason Aristotle employs the Diotiman and not the Gorgian sense of poiesis is that not one poem exists in the so-called Poetics; another reason is that the definition of tragedy includes music.
Scott subsequently demonstrates that Aristotle considers tragedy not to be a species of literature but one of dramatic musical theater that also requires dance and spectacle.
Chapter 2 includes a revised version of Scott's The Poetics of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
The book also supplements his arguments of Purging the Poetics (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2003), reprinted here as Chapter 5, providing the additional reasons why Aristotle could not have written the clause with the words catharsis, pity, and fear in the definition of tragedy, as a number of internationally known ancient Greek specialists have already been accepting.
As part of his reasons, Scott shows that, despite their recent, very admirable paleography, Leonardo Tar n and Dmitri Gutas too often mangle the philosophical interpretations and even some of the philology regarding the musical terms, especially when they try to sweep the problems of catharsis under the rug.
Also, Tar n and Gutas never even recognize the Diotiman sense of poiesis that Aristotle uses, nor do they recognize the philosophical co.
Existenceps Aristotle on dramatic musical composition: the real role of literature, catharsis, music and dance in the poetics, paperback/gregory l. scott
