Description: To be used in tandem with any reasonable translation or with the ancient Greek, this book is designed for students. It demonstrates that the so-called POETICS, which has not one poem, is about ancient musical theater and that the words catharsis, pity and fear in tragedy's definition were wrongly interpolated by an editor after Aristotle.
Review Quotes:
What some specialists in ancient Greek philosophy have said about the 2 articles that form the foundation of the PRIMER, "The Poetics of Performance" (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and "Purging the Poetics" (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2003:
"...the definition's phrase about catharsis is not Aristotle's language at all but a later insertion that scholars should excise (Petrusevski 1954; Scott 2003; Veloso 2007)... Omitting a difficult passage from ancient texts must be a last resort. But one must recall the long unsatisfying history of attempts to make sense of catharsis. The debates over catharsis might be as intractable as they are, and textual support so indirect, because the task is impossible. The time of the last resort might have arrived." --NICKOLAS PAPPAS, Professor of Philosophy at the City College/Graduate Center of New York, "Aristotle," in Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., 2013.
"My favourite articles in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy this year are two in volume XXV: one by Gregory Scott, who cuts one Gordian knot of Aristotelian scholarship by athetizing the clause that introduces katharsis into Aristotle's definition in the Poetics..." --GEORGE BOYS-STONES, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Durham University (U.K.), "Subject Reviews," Greece & Rome, The Classical Association, 2005.
"There is no room for katharsis in the definition of tragedy as it occurs in chapter 6 of Aristotle's Poetics. The passage is corrupt. At least three scholars--Petrusevski, Freire, and Scott--have shown that intervention in the text is justified and necessary... " --CLAUDIO WILLIAM VELOSO, "Aristotle's Poetics without Katharsis, Fear, or Pity," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2007. Veloso is the author also of Pourquoi la Poétique d'Aristote? DIAGOGE [Why the Poetics of Aristotle? Intellectual Enjoyment] (2018, Vrin).
"It is tempting for modern readers to infer that the Poetics is a work of literary criticism divorced from concerns about performance. But...Aristotle's account of tragedy refers to features that tragic plays can have only in performance. So we should resist the temptation to think of the Poetics as concerned with literature narrowly conceived." --PAUL WOODRUFF, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin, "Aristotle's Poetics: The Aim of Tragedy," A Companion to Aristotle, 2009.
In discussing directly the views of Veloso (and indirectly of Scott), and before giving his own solution to the illegitimacy of katharsis in Poetics 6, Marwan Rashed writes about the Greek manuscripts: "Aristote ne peut avoir écrit le texte que nous avons sous les yeux" ("Aristotle could not have written the text that we have before our eyes"). -- MARWAN RASHED, Professor of Ancient Greek Philosophy, Université Paris-Sorbonne "Katharsis versus mimèsis: simulation des émotions et définition aristotélicienne de la tragédie," Littérature, 2016.
"For some good arguments to the conclusion that Aristotle does not downgrade performance as an aspect of tragedy, see [Gregory Scott, 'The Poetics of Performance...']." --ANGELA CURRAN, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics, 2016.