Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 11:49:19 -0500 (EST)
Subject: BHA: Else/Aristotle



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            27-Jan-1998 11:43am EST
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: Else/Aristotle

Carroll,

You're right about Else's rejection of psychological (or
medical--the explanation from Bernays in the 19th, the chap
who was Freud's father-in-law) accounts of catharsis.  But
the catharsis is accomplished in the action, viz., the play
as a whole, not the protagonist.  Nor is this Else's
personal crotchet.  Goethe thought much the same, and the
whole McKeonite tradition of interpretation (not R. S. Crane
and his epigoni, but McKeon's own students like Elder
Olson and Kenneth Telford) takes the same view that the
catharsis, on the account in the Poetics, is a property of
the plot.  Pity and fear are catharted from it, not the
audience.

The point is well argued by Telford in his translation of
the Poetics, and has been put somewhat less starkly but
still firmly recently by Alexander Nehamas.

Catharsis may occur in the audience, of course, but this is
not something about which poetics, as a science of artificial
things, pronounces on.  To the extent that tragic drama has
a social or psychological function, it would have to be considered
in another science--politics, ethics, psychology.  Tragedy
can also serve a social function in the art of rhetoric.

Michael Sprinker


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