Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics

This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.

“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University

“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University

“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin

Se trata de la introducción de la tesis doctoral (2004).

Este trabajo de investigación tiene como origen una "certeza" a acerca del bien que trae consigo el Arte, incluyendo en esta categoría cualquier manifestación artística o expresión comunicativa orientada por un claro predominio de la dimensión poética. Con este punto de partida, abordé una tarea de estudio que se ha convertido, con el tiempo y el trabajo, en el sentido de mi investigación principal, así como en la inspiración y la base de su docencia, centrada, esta última en el ámbito de la Epistemología de la Comunicación, de la teoría de la Representación y de la Escritura de ficción. Estos prolegómenos explican en buena medida por qué la tarea que inicié durante el doctorado es más que un proyecto limitado a un objeto de estudio. Cómo se verá, se trata de una apuesta fuerte de vida por el humanismo cristiano que anda muy lejos de concluir. Desde luego todavía están por ver muchos de los frutos sapienciales del estudio de esta tradición poética, aplicada al área de lo audiovisual y divergente, en esencia, de la asentada por los Estudios culturales, con los que intenta dialogar todo lo que puede. Por otro lado, la razón que comparte el humanismo cristiano con la corriente crítica es noble: estudiar las representaciones audiovisuales, los productos culturales, como expresión contemporánea de las preocupaciones más íntimas y radicales del hombre actual. En primer lugar, el estudio de la ficción, alumbrado por las lecciones que da Aristóteles en su Poética, conlleva aceptar que los asuntos humanos escapan a una explicación cabal ofrecida por la lógica.

The paper studies visual rhetoric as an important part of Hellenistic art in close connection with the poetics of “recognition and changes” developed by Aristotle in terms of plot development in drama. A person of rhetorical culture could read a work of art doubly: assessing its individual performance and, first and foremost, a «message» that meant to be widely comprehensible. The poetics of recognition of common topics that referred a viewer to well familiar meanings, gave the image contemplation process a pleasure with a gush of senses, a peculiar catharsis. A skilful play with visual rhetorical figures that, in particular, was shown by an easel painting on the subject of Achilles Discovered on Scyros of the Greek master Athenion of Maronea which reached us in several replicas in Pompeii, raises expressiveness of the picturesque composition to the same level as the one in a tragedy of “complex plot”, enriching it with effective visual credibility. The core of the collision is composed of antisymmetry and gender change (substitution), the mankind’s natural division into male and female halves, which in its turn enables us to carry out a work of art analysis in context of gender studies. The rhetoric of pair portraits turns this natural distinction into opposition and complementarity of contrast types so that the artistic image as a whole receives a sharpness and internal dynamics (the so-called tondo of the Two Brothers from Cairo). The rhetoric of contrast continues to live under transfigured, inly alerted forms in some pair images of the subsequent times within the Rhetorical Era, e. g. in the Apostolados of El Greco.

Автор рассматривает античную изобразительную риторику как значимую технологию художественного творчества эллинистической эпохи в тесной связи с поэтикой «узнавания и переломов», предписанной Аристотелем развитию сюжета в трагедии «сплетенного действия». В основу конкретной коллизии в картине греческого мастера Афиниона «Ахилл на острове Скирос» положены антисимметрия и перемена (подмена) гендера, естественное разделение человечества на мужскую и женскую половины, что и делает возможным анализ произведений искусства в контексте гендерного подхода. Риторика парного портрета превращает это природное различие в противопоставление и взаимодополнение контрастных типов, придавая художественному образу в целом остроту и внутреннюю динамику. В преображенном, снятом, виде эта риторика контраста продолжает жить в парных изображениях последующих времен в рамках риторической эпохи.

The short title of this work: Autobiography, Time, and Narrative in Philosophy and Psychology, expresses the principal topics discussed. The temporal dispersion of an individual's actions throughout life, makes their unification and stability in purpose challenging, as such temporal separation of human actions makes it difficult to view the effects and significance of particular acts, and their long-term impact. Fortunately, narrative self-understanding and autobiographical thinking in orienting the whole human life, resolves the challenge posed by temporal dispersion. In this work, Ogunyemi explores the relationship between the anthropological theories of the dynamics of temporality with narrative self-understanding that are developed from an Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recent theories in psychology and neurosciences, through her reading and interpretation of contemporary authors. She presents scientific observations related to habit formation and self-improvements that are congruent with philosophy. MacIntyre as well as other philosophers often analyzed the validity of psychology's methods and frameworks and Ogunyemi contributes to this dialogue by pointing out similarities between autobiographical temporality seen in disparate fields. She explores concepts of narrative philosophy from the first-person perspective, and makes a synthesis of elements of autobiographical temporality which could form an anthro-pological framework for observations made from research in different subspecialties of contemporary psychology and neurosciences. Her interdisciplinary approach highlights prospects of mutual enrichment between different fields. The need for interdisciplinary studies, such as this one, is ever increasing and urgent since the development of particular sciences, that promote human flourishing today, requires a deeper understanding of the human being in his totality. Omowumi Ogunyemi obtained her first degree in medicine and surgery. She has worked as a medical practitioner in various hospitals in Nigeria including The Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Lagos, where she managed patients with substance induced disorders. She holds a licentiate degree and a doctorate in philosophy from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome.

This Foreword, about robots, written in both poetry as well as prose, introduces the edited collection _Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society_, edited by Steven J. Thompson (IGI Global, 2018). The link on the thumbnail cover at
https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222 will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access. The attached PDF, sent directly to me from IGI-Global to use here, is presented with written permission of the publisher.

At the beginning of Book III of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that the emotions (pathê) are praised and blamed when they are voluntary (hekousion). However, Aristotle does not elaborate on how an emotion can be voluntary. In this paper I try to provide an account of what Aristotle might have meant by this claim. I consider both reasons to deny this claim and the dominant qualified reinterpretation of this claim, an interpretation I call the 'derivative approach,' which maintains that we are to be praised or blamed for emotions only if they are consequences of our voluntarily acquired characters. I argue that 1) Aristotle was sincere when he said that there are voluntary pathê and 2) the derivative approach to accepting Aristotle's claim is motivated by misunderstandings of Aristotle's notion of the voluntary. In conclusion, I argue that Aristotle's notion of the voluntary is sufficiently broad to include pathê non-derivatively.

Since Antiquity, Gorgias has been linked with some figures of style, named after him γοργίεια σχήματα.
But ancient testimonies are, on that matter, far less unanimous than modern ones. This paper deals
with two main problems : why do some ancient testimonies ascribe to Gorgias the invention of those
figures ? How was the phrase γοργίεια σχήματα created ? The criticism of excess in the use of
antithesis, parisosis and paromoiosis (which are the main Gorgianic figures) can be traced back to
Peripatetic and Stoic attacks against the Isocratic period. This criticism is first essentially focused on
Isocrates. It is only during the Quarrel between Atticists and Asianists that Gorgias' name became more
than an mere exemple, i. e. the paradigm of excess. The phrase γοργίεια σχήματα was probably forged
by Denys of Halicarnassus for that purpose. Therefore one should be cautious when considering
γοργίεια σχήματα as characteristic of Gorgias' style : it is an anachronistic (and rather isocratic) point of
view, based on criterias inherited from Atticism.

En cualquier caso, nuestro interés se centra en la apertura del sentido, e
igual que Monaco, adelantamos que la clasifcación que proponemos es una
mera construcción teórica, y que sus fronteras son imprecisas. Partimos de
todas formas con cierta ventaja con respecto a Monaco, ya que intentamos
defnir niveles de sentido y no elementos individuales dotados de sentido
icónico, simbólico o indicial. En este sentido nuestra investigación corre
paralela a perspectiva del análisis fílmico multimodal (Multimodal Film
Analysis) propuesta por Bateman y Schmidt: “Our Approach, to be refned
as we proceed, is the essentially to divide the process of interpretation into
several related layers of description” (2012), y desarrollada más recientemente por Wildfeuer (2016).
Para describir los niveles de sentido partiremos de Jean Mitry y su texto,
Esthétique el Psychologie du Cinéma. Tomo I (Les structures) (1963), que es
también el punto de partida utilizado por Christian Metz en su artículo,
“Une étape dans la réfexion sur le cinema” (1964).

In questo saggio dedicato alla teoria della comunicazione teatrale, Elena Marino (Università di Trento) riprende in considerazione il rapporto tra testo e rappresentazione, attarversamento un ripensamento della Poetica di Aristotele e delle forme di composizione e fruizione delle opere teatrali. Il testo teatrale nasce in simbiosi con la comunicazione visuale e solo in seguito trova una riduzione a testo scritto destinato alla lattura: un fatto, questo, che ha indebitamente sminuito la rilevanza dell'opsis, e che spesso ha portato a non comprendere nella giusta prospettiva le indicazioni di Aristotele sul teatro.

There is a long history of the uses of the term 'catharsis'. Nowadays the term usually designates a process by which the production of strong emotions by adequate representations (literature, cinema, videogames, etc.) or by real events frees the subject (the reader, the spectator, the gamer, etc.) of those very emotions. Freud also had a specific understanding of what catharsis means, and he used the word to designate what would later become the “psychoanalytic method”. However, there is a long way between those modern understandings of catharsis and the original meaning Aristotle gave to the term in his ‘Poetics’. According to Aristotle, the catharsis produced by tragedy is linked to the emotions of pity and fear. Although pity and fear are two opposite affects depending on the position of the subject relatively to an event, the spectator of the tragedy is bound to experience both of them simultaneously because of the ethical similarity the playwright must keep between him and the tragic hero. But pity and fear are also two opposite affects on the physiological level: pity is a warm affect, fear a cold one. Catharsis is then a physiological balancing of pity by fear, of warmth by cold, and reciprocally, and this continuous suppression of excesses of temperature through the tragic imitation, while bringing a feeling of relief and pleasure, rids the spectator of all excessive affects. This physiological process of catharsis, as Aristotle understood it, has little to do with the current acceptions of the notion.

Arthur Kok (red.) Bewegen en bewogen worden Retorisch handelen in taal, beeld en muziek Volgens Aristoteles is de kern van retorica, als de kunst van het overtuigen, dat de ziel erdoor in beweging wordt gebracht. Daarbij gaat het niet alleen om argumentatie (logos) maar ook om waarden (ethos) en gevoel (pathos). De retorica van Aristoteles richt zich op de totale mens, niet slechts op diens talige vermogen. In deze bundel nemen wij daarom niet de taal maar het overtuigend handelen tot uitgangspunt van de retorica. Daarbij kan het ook gaan om beeldend of muzikaal handelen. Dit gegeven is van actueel belang. Het publieke domein is in de afgelopen decennia onherkenbaar veranderd. Met name door de opkomst van nieuwe media is er een andere context ontstaan waarbinnen we onze overtuigingen, wensen en verhalen zijn gaan vormgeven. Een op feiten gebaseerd verhaal volstaat niet meer. Er lijkt sprake van een verschuiving in de richting van het beeld en ook de muziek. Succesvolle series zoals When they see us, talentenshows als The voice of Holland en de verontrustende drillrap richten zich met visuele en auditieve overtuigingsmiddelen tot het publiek. De traditie van de retorica heeft veel te bieden als het erom gaat deze nieuwe fenomenen beter te begrijpen. De bijdragen in deze bundel zijn van Gabriël van den Brink, Emanuel Rutten, Heidi de Mare en Arthur Kok. Zij bespreken de retorica achtereenvolgens vanuit het gezichtspunt van de handeling, de taal, de beeldende kunst en de muziek. • ISBN 978 90 5625 528-2 • Omvang 256 blz. (incl. beeldkatern) • Formaat 12 x 20,5 cm • Uitvoering paperback • NUR 694 • Prijs €19,50 N.B. Deze titel is leverbaar vanaf februari 2021: https://valkhofpers.nl/bewegen

Il faut sauver la tragédie grecque de toute la gnose philosophique et tragique qui l'accable depuis près de trois siècles. Il faut la sauver de notre conception moderne de la littérature et du théâtre. Il faut la sauver de nous-mêmes pour la retrouver ailleurs, très loin, dans les lieux les plus improbables : le nô japonais, la messe catholique, la psychanalyse freudienne… À moins qu'elle ne soit déjà plus nulle part.
Car la tragédie est aussi introuvable que le tombeau d’Œdipe, ce tombeau que Sophocle prit pour thème de sa pièce ultime, laquelle est également la dernière tragédie grecque connue.
Avec Œdipe à Colone pour fil conducteur, ce livre raconte l’histoire édifiante d’une incompréhension à laquelle nous sommes voués. Il révèle les incroyables trahisons et mutilations dont ces chefs-d’oeuvre furent les victimes et propose en retour quelques thèses - ou hérésies – susceptibles de bouleverser non seulement notre vision de la tragédie, mais notre conception même de la littérature et de ses pouvoirs – sur les lieux, les corps et les dieux.
Nul détour n’est aujourd’hui si troublant ni si salutaire.

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Captain Ahab is no exception. Forget for a second Ahab's villainous qualities and look instead to the classical tradition. Shakespeare's Macbeth was not a very nice guy. Neither was Milton's Satan. Still, we find qualities within these antagonists that conform to ancient ideas of the epic and tragedy. Let us, then, look at Ahab in this same light. Ahab may be a monomaniac, but we still adore him despite all of his faults. Therefore, this essay explores the heroic qualities of Ahab which have made him into the American lit icon he is today.

This volume presents a lecture course delivered by Heidegger in Summer Semester 1924 at the University of Marburg in which he examines a variety of Aristotelian texts, elucidating key concepts and exploring how these concepts are rooted in the Greek experience of the world.

The rhetorical device commonly called the seven circumstances enjoys a long history that is rooted in philosophy, but was eventually adopted by rhetoricians in the classical age, by literary commentators in the medieval era, and even today finds expression as the all-important “five W’s (and one H)” for journalism.  This article will not venture into the schema’s efficacy for medieval or modern writers, but rather focuses on its origin and the effects of its prior misattribution.  Classics scholars have heretofore located this rhetorical schema as originating from Hermagoras; however, this article will demonstrate that Aristotle and not Hermagoras is responsible for the first enunciation of the seven circumstances.  What Hermagoras, as witnessed by Augustine, referred to as the seven circumstances (quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis)  were actually first listed by Aristotle in book three of his Nicomachean Ethics.  This article then examines some implications of this discovery, such as how it may affect our understanding of Cicero's stasis theory.  Cicero in particular was indebted to Aristotle’s presentation of this schema, a point treated below, and thus even simple assumptions about Cicero’s employment of stasis theory within his De Inventione are worthy of review.

This article reflects on the notion of good and bad characters in a fictional world. The study is done from a humanistic perspective and considers the poetic proposals of Juan José García-Noblejas (1982) and Paul Ricoeur (1987). The paper suggests that a character is good as long as it serves the world of fiction in which it is, whereas the world of fiction is good—in the sense of complete—insofar as it is able to "do justice" to the aspect of human life it represents.

Recensione di Aristotele, Retorica. Introduzione, traduzione e commento di S. GASTALDI («Classici» 36), Carocci Editore, Roma 2014, pp. 637, «ΠΗΓΗ / FONS. Revista de estudios sobre la civilización clásica y su recepción» I (2016), pp. 164-169.

In examining the notion of entelechy – defined by Aristotle as the ‘final cause’ in drama – Zornitsa Dimitrova shows that depictions of ‘unsavoury’ content are only justified insofar as they are part of larger networks of aesthetic codification. The unsavoury cannot be an end in itself; neither can it function as an aesthetic category in its own right. Rather, it is a means related to pathos, or suffering, in Greek tragedy and bībhatsa, the ‘odious sentiment’ of the Sanskrit drama. Within such networks of codification, the purpose of the unsavoury is to carry forward the drama to an emotionally uplifting end: katharsis in the Poetics and ananda in Nāṭyaśāstra. This purposiveness – already visible in the entelechial nature of the dramatic plot – relates to a concept of mimesis implicitly understood as a term actional and interactionist in character. But only with the emergence of postdramatic theatre and the dissolution of plot does the unsavoury begin to function as an aesthetic category in its own right.

In the literary tradition covering more than two and a half thousand years, philosophy has been frequently mentioned in close proximity to literature, often as different ways of engaging more or less the same activity. We shall look at this matter briefly in the paper. What is not often said, even though many would probably not object to the idea is that literary criticism is a philosophical, rather than a scientific discipline, insofar as it is exercised by the need to understand, lacking the means to explain the phenomenon it is faced with. Three things really are at issue here: literature, literary studies/criticism, and philosophy. There are interrelationships among them, which is why some of the most important works relevant to the study of literary phenomena are by philosophers, normally the very greatest ones among them. We will not be exploring this history in detail, but only the engendering of literary criticism as a result of the philosophical interest in the literary, of which Plato and Aristotle were apparently the first to devote to it sustained attention. But we shall find that evolution and change within the history of criticism have been by following, sometimes without a conscious decision, the methods of reflection inaugurated in Aristotelian metaphysics in which philosophy is established as the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes.

Aristotle’s account of emotions in the second book of Rhetoric has long been considered a shallow and contradictory analysis by many scholars, according to whom there is (or should be) no room for the elicitation of passions in the rational debate. The aim of the article is to reflect critically upon the most recent and influential studies of Aristotle’s work in order to refute these prejudices, arguing that the treatise reflects a coherent cognitive view of emotions, whose role in rational persuasion follows from their connection with someone’s beliefs. In the first section, I discuss the most relevant readings on the coherence of the Rhetoric, arguing that its approach to passions has an internal consistency. The second section seeks to show that the analysis of emotions in the Rhetoric is a reliable account of Aristotle’s own considered view on this matter, and not only a set of popular clichés. As a result, the essay identifies in the reflection on the correct use of emotions in public discussion the major heritage of the Aristotelian work.

Although current discussions of linguistic relativity tend to concen- trate on obligatory grammatical categories, the original architects of this school of thought, including Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, all argued strongly for the role of vocabulary in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged situations of everyday life. Taking the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk languages of northwestern California as a case study, this article demonstrates the im- portance of vocabulary in conveying pervasive cultural ideologies, such as those associated with mythology, religion, folklore, or geographical systems of spatial orientation.Although current discussions of linguistic relativity tend to concen- trate on obligatory grammatical categories, the original architects of this school of thought, including Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, all argued strongly for the role of vocabulary in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged situations of everyday life. Taking the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk languages of northwestern California as a case study, this article demonstrates the im- portance of vocabulary in conveying pervasive cultural ideologies, such as those associated with mythology, religion, folklore, or geographical systems of spatial orientation.

The paper is about Vedic culture of Namboothiri society. Culture is ordinary; every human society has its own shapes, its own meanings, and its own purposes. Cultural studies are interested in lifestyle because the lifestyle is about everyday life defines identity, influences social relations and bestows meaning and value to artifacts in a culture. The Brahmanas of Kerala are known as Namboothiris. Historical evidence, as well as their own traditions, suggest that they came from North India and settle down in Kerala, migrating along the west coast. In fact, one sees this tradition all along the WestCoast from Sourashtra on; and the Brahmanical traditions in the Canarese (Karnataka) and Malabar Coasts are nearly identical to one another. Rigveda is a collection of poems, hymns, and invocation of deities, reflecting myths, rites, battles and insights of many kinds. Texts are procedures for rituals and rites of Brahmanas are generally derived from it. In yagam, Hothan through a chant of Rigveda manthrams invokes the God into the yajnavedi and their divine virtues into our souls(minds). The Vedic culture in Kerala is unique and self-contained. The Ghats, with an average elevation of 5,000ft; and roughly parallel to the west coast, some 30 km from the sea in the northern and about 60 km in the southern part of Kerala. There is one main gap, through which most east-west communication takes place. There is one main gap, the Pallakad gap, through which most east-west communication takes place. The Namboothiri are probably unique to have a sub-caste of Brahmanas who are excluded from vedams. A.D. Devoted to their rituals, tantric as well as Vedic, from which outsiders are excluded, they were relatively unaffected by modern education. Most Namboothiri's have been settled as peaceful villagers, country aristocrats, small landowners, connoisseurs of literature and the traditional arts (like Kathakali) scholars and gentlemen. The most conspicuous characteristics of Namboothiri are simplicity and exclusiveness, obviously, the former predicate does not extend to their rituals.

In these essays Peter Dronke looks at some of the relations between sacred and profane ideas and images, and Christian and pagan motifs, particularly in the early Middle Ages. The first two parts of the book dwell on aspects of (in the widest sense) Christian Platonism, the one part focussing on themes, the other on some of the greatest thinkers in the Latin world, from Boethius in the sixth century to Thierry of Chartres in the twelfth. The emphasis throughout is on transformations and syncretisms far more than disjunctions. The final group of essays is concerned with poetic texts, Latin and vernacular, in which non-sacred elements make their way into the sacred, the biblical and the saintly realms. A brief Epilogue glances at early medieval profane poetry outside as well as within Europe.

Several of the concepts describing the plot in Aristotle's Poetics is ambiguous, and several contradictions are unresolved in current popular interpretations. This is an attempt to solve these problems, by finding an interpretation where the parts fit together, that resolve the contradiction and make sense in the real world.

This paper has become a chapter in the ebook Untying Aristotle's Poetics for Storytellers, available here: http://a.co/eUgTyjM