Between ecstasy and truth : interpretations of Greek poetics from Homer to Longinus / Stephen Halliwell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Halliwell, Stephen.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Greek poetry--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Greek poetry.

Poetics.

Physical Description:

xii, 419 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.

Summary:

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory arid criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus' On the Sublime.

The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of 'ecstasy') and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective-casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology, of poetic experience-including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge-in the life of their culture. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Setting the Scene: Questions of Poetic Value in Greek Culture 1

2 Is there a Poetics in Homer? 36

Contexts, Effects, arid Desires in Homeric Images of Song 36

The Muses' Divine Perspective: Transmuting Suffering into Beauty 55

Odysseus' Tears and the Paradoxical Need for Song 77

3 Aristophanes' Frogs and the Failure of Criticism 93

A Comic Lesson in Tragic Poetics? 93

Euripides, 'Close Reading', and the Audience of Frogs 106

Analysis, Evaluation, and Incommensurability 115

Dionysus as Lover-cum-Critic: Embodying the Problem of Poetics 132

4 To Banish or Not to Banish? Plato's Unanswered Question about Poetry 155

Interrogating Poetry's Meaning: the Apology and Ion 155

The Philosophical (Ex-)Lover of Poetry 179

5 Aristotle and the Experience of Tragic Emotion 208

Emotional Understanding in the Poetics 208

The Aesthetic and Moral Psychology of Catharsis 236

Appendix: Is the Catharsis Clause in the Poetics an Interpolation? 260

6 Poetry in the Light of Prose: Gorgias, Isocrates, Philodemus 266

Gorgias and the Seductive Power of Logos 266

Isocrates and the Narrowed Vision of a Pragmatist 285

Philodemus and the Enigmas of Poetic Value 304

7 The Mind's Infinity: Longinus and the Psychology of the Sublime 327

Thunderbolts and Echoes: The Ecstasy of the Sublime 327

Metaphysics, Realism, Imagination: The Complex Truth of the Sublime 343.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [368]-399) and indexes.

ISBN:

9780199570560

0199570566

OCLC:

781451018