Abstract:

'Micha Lazarus’ chapter delves into the critical stakes of how the Poetics was read by the Chicago School, examining how their ideological investment in the stability and conceptual unity of Aristotle’s meaning in the Poetics, on the one hand, led to a ‘legitimate point of methodological departure’, yet, on the other hand, also crystallized an influential methodological view that framed the 2,000-year fragmented history of the text as a history of error and deviation. While Baldassarre, Gehl and Markey detail the material conditions and bibliographical contexts of Weinberg’s analysis, Lazarus contextualizes Weinberg’s account as a particular episode in the reception history of the Poetics, as a ‘synthesis of a particular kind of reading at a particular time’. The essay provides a concise synthesis of the reception history of the Poetics and the text’s complex relationship with Aristotle’s Rhetoric, beginning with our oldest manuscript exemplar from the mid-tenth century – which re-emerged after the fall of Constantinople – through to the reception of the text on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Lazarus demonstrates, sententious readings of tragedy as a source from which to draw maxims – a practice that Weinberg and his colleagues in the Chicago School vociferously opposed – are already present in Aristotle’s own writing and cannot simply be viewed as a later distortion imposed by his Renaissance commentators. The chapter concludes with engaging reflections on our own critical moment, reminding us that ‘criticism and its society must be treated as symbiotic’, enjoining us to reflect on the effect that new forms of communication today might have on the fragmentation, commonplacing and even moral readings of literary texts, and the types of criticism that will emerge in future.' (Editor's introduction by Bryan Brazeau)