A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, (...) and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

The first book to offer an integrated reading of ancient Greek attitudes to laughter. Taking material from various genres and contexts, the book analyses both the theory and the practice of laughter as a revealing expression of Greek values and mentalities. Greek society developed distinctive institutions for the celebration of laughter as a capacity which could bridge the gap between humans and gods; but it also feared laughter for its power to expose individuals and groups to shame and even violence. (...) Caught between ideas of pleasure and pain, friendship and enmity, laughter became a theme of recurrent interest in various contexts. Employing a sophisticated model of cultural history, Stephen Halliwell traces elaborations of the theme in a series of important texts: ranging far beyond modern accounts of 'humour', he shows how perceptions of laughter helped to shape Greek conceptions of the body, the mind and the meaning of life. (shrink)

The basis of this article is a reconsideration of some old and familiar problems about Aristophanes' early career. In the course of trying to supply firm solutions to these problems I hope also to present evidence for an early and inconspicuous stage in Aristophanes' development as a comic dramatist, and as a reflection on the resulting picture I shall make some general observations on ou understanding of the relationship between the various activities involved in the creation of a comic production (...) in the fifth-century theatre. Practically all the material I shall deal with comes from the plays themselves, and I should state at the start that I both work with and hope to justify the principle that Aristophai disingenuousness does not normally operate where hard facts of chronology, law and theatrical conditions are concerned. (shrink)

The proposition that man is the only animal capable of laughter is at least as old as Aristotle . In a strictly physical sense, this is probably false; but it is undoubtedly true that as a psychologically expressive and socially potent means of communication, laughter is a distinctively human phenomenon. Any attempt to study sets of cultural attitudes towards laughter, or the particular types of personal conduct which these attitudes shape and influence, must certainly adopt a wider perspective than a (...) narrowly physical definition of laughter will allow. Throughout this paper, which will attempt to establish part of the framework of such a cultural analysis for the Greek world of, broadly speaking, the archaic and classical periods, ‘laughter’ must be taken, by a convenient synecdoche, to encompass the many behavioural and affective patterns which are associated with, or which characteristically give scope for, uses of laughter in the literal sense of the word. My concern, then, is with a whole network of feelings, concepts and actions; and my argument will try to elucidate the practices within which laughter fulfils a recognizable function in Greek societies, as well as the dominant ideas and values which Greek thought brings to bear upon these practices. The results of the enquiry will, I believe, give us some reason to accept a rapprochement between the universalist assumption for which my epigraph from Johnson speaks and the recognition of cultural specificity in laughter's uses for which many anthropologists would argue, as emphatically asserted, from a Marxizing point of view, in the quotation from Vladimir Propp. (shrink)

Interest in νομαστìκωμδєȋν began early. Even before the compilation of prosopo-graphical κωμδούμєνο in the second century B.C., Hellenistic study of Aristophanes had devoted attention to the interpretation of personal satire. The surviving scholia contain references to Alexandrian scholars such as Euphronius, Eratosthenes and Callistratus which show that in their commentaries and monographs these men had dealt with issues of νομαστì κωμδєȋν Much material from Hellenistic work on Old Comedy was transmitted by later scholars, particularly by Didymus and Symmachus in their (...) variorum editions, and was eventually embodied in the scholia, though of course in an abridged and sometimes distorted form. Many of our fragments of Old Comedy, preserved in the scholia or in medieval works of reference as parallels to passages in Aristophanes, are direct evidence of the long ancient tradition of interest in the genre's large element of personal satire. What we find in the scholia should not therefore be treated as representative only of the latest and most derivative stages of ancient scholarship. It is the purpose of this article to argue that the scholia on Aristophanes allow us to see that in matters of νομαστì κωμδєȋν certain assumptions about the nature of this type of comic material were persistently made by ancient scholars, and that certain interpretative habits were consequently developed from them. It is my further aim to suggest that this pattern of interpretation has been widely but unjustifiably perpetuated in later work on Aristophanes. (shrink)

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and 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's 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 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. Readership: Scholars and students of Greek literature, Greek poetics, and literary theory and criticism. (shrink)

The proposition that man is the only animal capable of laughter is at least as old as Aristotle. In a strictly physical sense, this is probably false; but it is undoubtedly true that as a psychologically expressive and socially potent means of communication, laughter is a distinctively human phenomenon. Any attempt to study sets of cultural attitudes towards laughter, or the particular types of personal conduct which these attitudes shape and influence, must certainly adopt a wider perspective than a narrowly (...) physical definition of laughter will allow. Throughout this paper, which will attempt to establish part of the framework of such a cultural analysis for the Greek world of, broadly speaking, the archaic and classical periods, ‘laughter’ must be taken, by a convenient synecdoche, to encompass the many behavioural and affective patterns which are associated with, or which characteristically give scope for, uses of laughter in the literal sense of the word. My concern, then, is with a whole network of feelings, concepts and actions; and my argument will try to elucidate the practices within which laughter fulfils a recognizable function in Greek societies, as well as the dominant ideas and values which Greek thought brings to bear upon these practices. The results of the enquiry will, I believe, give us some reason to accept a rapprochement between the universalist assumption for which my epigraph from Johnson speaks and the recognition of cultural specificity in laughter's uses for which many anthropologists would argue, as emphatically asserted, from a Marxizing point of view, in the quotation from Vladimir Propp. (shrink)

‘There is surely more than geography involved in the extraordinary stress laid in the play on the importance of the branching road.’ So writes the latest editor of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, R. D. Dawe, who proceeds to mention the ‘sexual significance … ’ which ‘people tell us’ is to be discerned behind the references to the cross-roads where Oedipus met and killed his father. Dawe finds it difficult to make up his mind whether quasi-Freudian symbolism is properly to be attributed (...) to Sophocles, and in adopting an equivocal position he cites only one further factor, that ‘the imagery of crossroads is common enough representing a point where a crucial decision has to be made’. (shrink)

Résumé — Cet article défend une interprétation de la catharsis qui intègre la psychologie, l’éthique et l’esthétique. Un réexamen attentif de la référence à la catharsis musicopoétique en Politique VIIImontre que, contrairement à l’opinion reçue, la catharsis n’est pas ici séparée de la conception aristotélicienne de l’importance éthique des réactions émotionnelles face aux formes d’art mimétique. Politique VIII donne également une raison de supposer que la catharsis est associée au plaisir, mais pas identifiée à lui. La catharsis tragique se comprend (...) mieux comme un profit retiré de la transformation des émotions pénibles en émotions agréables dans la contemplation de l’art mimétique. Cette lecture permet d’harmoniser catharsis et psychologie morale d’Aristote dans son ensemble : une réactivité émotionnelle intense aux objets esthétiques peut contribuer à l’entraînement approprié de dispositions éthiques. La catharsis n’est pas seulement le résultat final du spectacle de la tragédie ; elle vient couronner une expérience tout entière, à la fois cognitive et morale.— This paper argues for an interpretation of catharsis that integrates psychology, ethics and aesthetics. A careful reexamination of the reference to musico-poetic catharsis in Politics 8 shows that, contrary to received opinion, catharsis is not there divorced from Aristotle’s view of the ethical significance of emotional responses to mimetic art-forms. Politics 8 also supplies reason to suppose that catharsis is closely associated with, but not identical to, pleasure. Tragic catharsis is best understood as the benefit accruing from the transformation of painful into pleasurable emotions within the contemplation of mimetic art. This reading allows catharsis to be harmonised with Aristotle’s moral psychology as a whole : intense emotional responsiveness to « aesthetic » objects can contribute to the appropriate exercise of ethically attuned dispositions. Catharsis is not just the end-result of watching a tragedy ; it supervenes on the entire cognitive-cum-emotional experience. (shrink)