Dr. Cynthia Freeland, University of Houston Seminar in Philosophy of Art, Spring 2003

Aristotle’s Poetics: Selected Bibliography

Essays on the Poetics

Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Recommended articles:

• Amelie Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” pp. 1-22.
• Cynthia Freeland, “Plot Imitates Action: Aesthetic Evaluation and Moral Realism in Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 111-32.
• Martha Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity,” pp. 261-290.
• Alexander Nehamas, “Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and the Poetics,” pp. 291-314.
• Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis,” pp. 315-40.

General Resources on the Poetics

Elizabeth Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics, London, 1996. Also, Chicago 1999.

Malcolm Heath, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/resources/poetics/poetbib.htm Aristotle’s Poetics, a Bibliography.

Joe Sachs, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/aris-poe.htm, The Poetics, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Omert J. Schrier, http://www.brill.nl/product.asp?ID=1462 The Poetics of Aristotle and the Tractatus Coislinianus Mnemosyne, Supplements, 184, a Bibliography from about 900 till 1996.

Feminist Discussions of Tragedy and the Poetics

Angela Curran, “Feminism and the Narrative Structures of the Poetics”, in Cynthia Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, Penn State Press, 1998.

Cynthia Freeland (see selection from Rorty, above).

Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, Cambridge: Harvard, 1987.

Froma I. Zeitlin and Catharine R. Stimpson, Playing the Other: Essays on Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Women in Culture and Society), Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995.

Philosophical Readings of Greek Tragedy

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, updated edition 2001.

General Books on Greek Tragedy

Peter D. Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge, 1986.

H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (London, 1961 [repr. 1981]).

E. Segal (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1983)[may simply be called "Readings in Greek Tragedy]".

J.J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton, 1960).

Later Philosophical Works

Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music. London: Penguin, 1995.

Susan Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” in Arguing about Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York et al: McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 204-218.

Stacie Friend, University of Michigan, “The Pleasures of Documentary Tragedy,” ASA Program, Miami, 2002.

David Hume. “Of Tragedy.” Essay 22 in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, Vol 1, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 258-65. Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964. Also in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. Miller, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. Also in Arguing About Art, pp. 198 – 204.

Alex Neill, “On a Paradox of the Heart,” Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 53-65.

Tragedy. In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 363-73. London: Routledge, 2002.

Mark Packer, “Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4 (1989): 211ff.

James Shelley, Auburn University “Tragic Pleasure,” ASA Program, Miami, 2002.

Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.