Arts of Connection

Poetry, History, Epochality

Karen S. Feldman

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783110630589
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110630947
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new series presents original scholarly and essayistic work addressing the central status of literature in and for the human sciences. At stake in the monographs and essay collections are paradigms of literary forms for thinking the human sciences: the knowledge involved in a literary work; how modes of reading and writing shape and depend on an epoch or area of thinking; literature's affinities and points of resistance to what we call the humanities and the sciences. In other words, the series examines how literature works with and upon philosophy, rhetoric, technology, anthropology, sociology, statistics, economics, history, experimental science, mathematics etc. Paradigms is primarily concerned with German letters, but also includes its European and comparative literary contexts.
All volumes will be published in English and are first reviewed by the series editors followed by a peer review from two academics in the particular area of specialization. Two to four volumes are planned annually.

Editors
Rüdiger Campe (Yale University)
Karen S. Feldman (University of California, Berkeley)

Editorial Board
Paul Fleming (Cornell University)
Eva Geulen (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London)
Barbara Hahn (Vanderbilt University)
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University)
Helmut Müller-Sievers (University of Colorado at Boulder)
William Rasch (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Joseph Vogl (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Elisabeth Weber (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Submission Format
The series accepts monographs and edited volumes, if they systematically approach a specific topic and show a high level of coherence and focus.
Please submit an abstract and table of contents with narrative description of each chapter (4–5 pages total, single-spaced) as well as a CV along with the complete manuscript.
Only complete manuscripts can be evaluated. In exceptional cases, abstracts or outlines can be submitted to discuss the general fit of a book with the series' editors. Please understand that a final commitment for publication can only be reached on the basis of a complete manuscript.
Manuscripts should have a minimum length of circa 200 pages (approximately 500,000 characters including spaces).
Please submit your abstract, table of contents, and CV as one file; the complete manuscript as a second file to Dr. Myrto Aspioti: [email protected].

Part I: Poetry: Necessity and Plot in Aristotle and Eighteenth-Century German Criticism

1 Unexpected Yet Connected: On Aristotle’s Poetics and its Heterodox Receptions

The prescriptions in Aristotle’s Poetics for the connection between tragic events shape the canon of literary criticism, albeit in disparate ways. The Poetics famously states that of all the components of tragedy, the arrangement of events [τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις] is the most important (1450a15).¹ That arrangement, the plot [μῦθος], structures the tragic incidents so that they form a cohesive unity. Aristotle notes that the intrinsic integrity of tragedy stands in contrast to the adventitious composite that is history. In a historical account, the recounted events need be connected only by virtue of occupying the same span of time:

[Tragedy’s] structures should not be like histories, which require an exposition not of a single action but of a single period, with all the events (in their contingent [ἀνάγκη οὐχὶ] relationships) that happened to one person or more during it. (1459a20–22)²

Unlike history, tragedy involves the exposition of an action that is unified and complete in itself (1459a16). The plot or arrangement of incidents is what ensures, from the inside, as it were, that they compose a whole incident, a complete event. The particularities of plot form one side of the dynamic that stands at the center of this book: the oscillation between the operations of overarching structural emplotment and the one-by-one connections of events.

What precisely is it, however, that renders a series of events a unitary and complete action? Aristotle describes historical narratives as portraying events whose relationships to each other are only “contingent,” “casual,” or, translated more literally, “not necessary.” The contours of those relationships are defined by a central personage or the designated limits of certain periods of time, rather than by any intrinsic connection. The historian’s job therefore is to report events “whether or not the events exhibit explanatory coherence.”³ The events of a history need display no constitutive unity, no principle of essential connection, no intrinsic coherence. Tragedy, in contrast, should not be structured in this contingent fashion. It should instead portray necessarily related incidents that cohere and thereby form a unity. The tragic incidents must be tightly connected, each one to the next. Aristotle writes that the moments of recognition and reversal that are a hallmark of tragedy “should emerge from the very structure of the plot, so that they ensue from the preceding events by necessity or probability” (1452a18). No matter how sad or regrettable they may be, accidental and unrelated events are not tragic; the necessary connection between the incidents is what is definitive of tragic plot.

Aristotle’s prescriptions for complete action, plot, and intrinsically connected events have been assigned different orders of significance in the history of literary theory. Canonical views of the value and purpose of tragedy claim variously that the requisite tragic elements in their proper connection purge the emotions of fear and pity, render us more sensitive to suffering, give us insight into human finitude, or teach universal truths. These views of tragedy have shaped a range of views of the purpose of literature in general and its value for knowledge and human existence. It is the goal of this chapter, however, to investigate several lower-stakes interpretations of the significance of plot in the Poetics. In their divergences from the above-mentioned “high stakes” interpretations, they illuminate heterodox interpretative possibilities for understanding the Poetics’ prescriptions for the connection of tragic events. They also undermine canonical philosophical, humanistic, and aesthetic values that are said to derive from Aristotle’s text. While the interpretations of the Poetics that we will consider deflate some of the loftier and better-known claims made about the purpose and value of tragedy, it is not the goal of this chapter to adjudicate their philological plausibility and fidelity to Aristotle. Rather, the very fact of such interpretative disparities is the interest here. In this approach, our argument follows Peter Szondi’s assertion that “the history of modern poetics is the history of [the Poetics’] reception and influence,” including its “adoption, expansion, and systematization, as well as misunderstanding and critique.”⁴ Whether or not they are believed to be faithful to Aristotle or are accepted by humanists in general, the following deflationary interpretations of plot and of the principle of connection between events in the Poetics produce implications for literary theory as a whole, unsettling claims about the value of literature and the arc of literary history.

Universals and tragic plot

If we want to make large-scale claims for literature, and for the difference between literature and historiography, the Poetics’ reference to poetry and universals is an attractive starting point. Aristotle writes that “Poetry […] is more philosophical and more elevated than history, for poetry relates more of the universal [τὰ καθόλου], while history relates particulars” (1451b1–3). Jonathan Lear articulates a canonical position on these lines, namely that “[t]he universality Aristotle has in mind when he talks about the universality of poetry […] is aiming at the universality of the human condition.”⁵ Similarly, Aristotle’s references to universals have been widely interpreted to mean that tragedy deals with broader, wider-reaching truths than other kinds of writing. William Faulkner expresses as much in his speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, which in the context of what he calls “[o]ur tragedy today” demanded that writers include in their stories “the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.”⁶

We find a much more modest philosophical yield from tragedy in J.M. Armstrong’s little-known interpretation of universals in the Poetics. Armstrong rejects the notion that the universals with which tragedy is engaged are universal truths or the human condition.⁷ Instead, Armstrong translates Poetics 1451b8–ll as explaining that

[a] universal is the sorts [sic] of thing that a certain sort of person happens to say or do according to likelihood or necessity, which is what poetry aims at, although names [of characters] are added.⁸

Armstrong thus interprets universals simply as types of actions, i.e., as generic plot structures. In this interpretation, if there is learning from tragedy, what is learned is not a universal truth. More modestly, tragedy teaches us about the relation between human characteristics “and the actions which those traits tend to produce.”⁹ In other words, tragedy is a matter of portraying connections between events, actions, and the type of people who perform such actions. This is “universal” in that tragedy abstracts from particulars to types and to the connections that follow accordingly.

As further evidence in support of his interpretation, Armstrong examines Aristotle’s brief attempt to clarify what he means by universals and particulars. Aristotle contrasts the universal to a particular set of incidents, citing as an example of the latter “what Alcibiades did and what he experienced” (1451b11).¹⁰ Armstrong rejects a standard interpretation in which this passage is read as claiming that universals refers to human beings in general, as opposed to particular individuals. Armstrong argues that the particular to which Aristotle refers here is not Alcibiades but instead the particular events and incidents that Alcibiades experienced – an interpretation of the passage that some translations, including Halliwell’s, support.¹¹ Armstrong’s interpretation of “universal,” however, ascribes to it no large-scale significance. He takes it to refer merely to a genre or type of action when it comes to forming a generic plotline to be peopled with particular characters, deeds, and incidents.¹² Accordingly, tragedy’s universal element does not refer to the conditions of human existence per se. Rather, universality is a matter of the generic structure of tragedy and of the connections between actions and the characters most likely to perform such actions. A “type of action” is, in this reading, “universal” because it involves a generic structure that can be repeated in many contexts with the insertion of different particular incidents and characters – as long as those characters are of types likely to perform the requisite actions.

If, as Armstrong claims, the universal is merely the generic plotline with likely characters, rather than a matter of a higher truth, then why does Aristotle declare that poetry is “more philosophical” than history – a statement that has lent credence to many claims for the edifying nature of poetry? In Armstrong’s interpretation, it is not the tragedy that is philosophical, nor does it produce philosophical effects on the audience. Aristotle means that what is philosophical is the poet’s understanding, by means of which the poet “discern[s] the structure” of the appropriate type of action.¹³ The poet’s task of constructing the work is therefore “more philosophical” because it “involv[es] more understanding,” namely of different generic plots and characters and the appropriate connections to make among them.¹⁴ Aristotle’s references to the difference between knowledge and skill vs. mere experience in the Metaphysics are significant here. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes that knowledge and skill involve an understanding that results from encounters of similar particulars (981a5–6).¹⁵ In a similar way, for Armstrong the poet must understand the universal – the type of action, the type of character, and the generic plot that arranges the events – in order properly to compose his tragedy. The “universality” of the generic action takes proper connection as the crux of traged...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Plot and the One-by-One
• Part I: Poetry: Necessity and Plot in Aristotle and Eighteenth-Century German Criticism
• Part II: History: Aesthetic Connection in Historical Knowledge and Historical Composition
• Part III: Epochality: On Phenomenology’s Appeals to a Disconnected Past
• Conclusion: Wholeness and its Sabotage
• Bibliography
• Index