Narration and drama in Aristotle

Abstract

Aristotle devotes a great part of his Poetics to the comparison of tragic poetry and epic poetry, and to the defense of the superiority of the fi rst to the second. One of the comparative elements is the fact that, in tragic poetry, we are witnesses of the very action of the characters, that is: we directly see people acting, while in epic poetry the storyteller frequently locates himself between the hearer and the narrated facts. That distinction has direct infl uence upon the reaction of the spectator – or the hearer – to poetry, because it tends to produce, in each case, an intensifi cation or an attenuation of the presented actions. This work tries to investigate in which measure the poetic arts, as well as other mimetic arts like painting and sculpture, are capable of producing a double movement of approximating and distancing the spectators from the contents of the work of art. Having that in view, we will take as a reference the observations found in the fourth chapter of the Poetics, as well as some passages found in the Rhetoric that are directly related to this subject.