Poetry and Poetics

30 January, 2009...5:23 pm
Daniel Javitch Seminars on Poetics; Trinity College Dublin, 28 April – 19 May 2009
Jump to Comments

Ads by Google
Structuralism Research
Online books, journals for academic research, plus bibliography tools.
www.Questia.com/Structuralism




Professor Javitch’s seminar will address the issue of “Aristotle’s Poetics and sixteenth century thinking about poetry and poetic genres.”
Seminars will be held at 10am-12 noon on Tuesdays April 28, May 5, May 12, Thursday May 14, and Tuesday May 19 2009. We will welcome colleagues from UCD and the wider Dublin area to Trinity’s audiovisual studio, Arts Block 3129.


The seminar will begin with a review of Aristotle’s Poetics, focusing on those aspects of the treatise that became particularly influential in sixteenth-century poetic discourse. It will then provide a brief history of the recovery and exegesis of Aristotle’s Poetics in Italy, from the 1530s to the 1560s, followed by a consideration of its assimilation in a representative text, G.B. Giraldi’s Discorso, on composing comedies and tragedies (1554, but composed earlier). Because the Italian assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics entailed a conflation with Horace’s precepts in the Ars poetica, we will spend a little time reviewing the main aspects of Horace’s verse epistle, which since the Middle Ages had been a canonical guide for composing poetry. In fact the entry of the Poetics into the mainstream of poetic criticism can be noted by the way Aristotle’s art of poetry is correlated, from the mid 1540s on, with Horace’s.

One of the “methodological” objectives of this seminar is to revise the notion of the “influence” of an authoritative ancient text, in this case Aristotle’s Poetics. When we discuss the assimilation of the Poetics in a text like Giraldi’s Discorso on comedies and tragedies, Professor Javitch will show that while Giraldi’s innovative genre-specific guidelines are indebted to Aristotle’s treatise, Giraldi’s desire to provide fuller definitions of vernacular comedy and tragedy is prompted by needs quite separate than that of reiterating Aristotle’s poetic theory. Professor Javitch willl make the students understand that the genre-specific poetic discourse and the generic codification that emerges from the 1540s to 1560s is unprecedented and NOT all due to the dissemination and impact of Aristotle’s Poetics. This is what Bernard Weinberg wanted us to believe in his monumental History of literary criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961), and his claims have been widely accepted. Actually, Weinberg did not really acknowledge the newness of the genre-specific poetics emerging in Italy just before mid-century. Intent as he was on revealing how indebted they were to Aristotle’s Poetics, he gave his readers the impression that these poetics were simply the continuation of a tradition established by Aristotle rather than an innovative development. One cannot deny that early genre theorists like Giraldi were quick to appropriate the newly recovered Poetics. Nor can one doubt that the Greek treatise had a discernible, and, in some cases, even a decisive impact on Italian thinking on genre in the mid-century. What has to be called into question is that the Greek treatise was the direct cause of the new theorizing. It was because of certain literary and cultural needs that genre-specific approaches to poetic art developed in Italy in the mid sixteenth century, and why new importance was granted Aristotle’s theory. In the course of examining the new codifications of tragedy and epic that were produced Professor Javitch will explain some of the cultural and literary needs that brought them about: e.g. the rediscovery of Greek tragedy and its prestige, and the need to reproduce this “lost” genre in the vernacular; a similar need to produce a modern Italian heroic poem that could rival the Greco-Roman legacy and that would avoid the artistic defects perceived in chivalric romance.

A characteristic of much generic codification in the latter half of the sixteenth century was to establish requisites for a genre by criticizing deviant modern practice. So, the codification of heroic poetry that emerged in the second half of the sixteenth century regularly entailed the disparagement of chivalric romance, including Ariosto’s bestselling Orlando Furioso. We will see this strategy at work in Tasso’s Discorsi on heroic poetry, but it is to be found in most of the theorizing about epic produced in the period. In the fourth class, devoted to the “politics of genre theory “Professor Javitch hopes to review (for those without Italian) Camillo Pellegrino’s (1584), which claimed that, in comparison to the Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata was a far superior epic poem, and Lionardo Salviati’s rebuttals to this treatise. Time permitting, Professor Javitch also wants to discuss in this session Guarini’s defence of tragicomedy. These works are at the heart of major debates about what constituted proper heroic and dramatic poetry. They were part of the cultural “politics” of the time because both theorists and poets were aware that there were more than merely theoretical disagreements involved in the definition of any genre. Important and pragmatic issues of exclusion and inclusion were at stake bearing not only on the status of one new poetic composition (e.g. Guarini’s Pastor Fido), but on the legitimacy of modern poetry generally. Conservative critics exploited the inherent selectivity in genre theory to exclude texts they sought to marginalize or to disqualify. Progressive critics fought back because they realized that what was at stake was the formation of a canon of modern texts, and they wanted to prevent that canon from being so narrow.

The impact of this extensive Italian discourse on poetry and on genres only becomes discernible in European poetics in the course of the seventeenth century. If the students attending these classes so desired, Professor Javitch will devote the last class to an assessment of that impact on French and English thinking about genre in the seventeenth century , focusing on Corneille’s and Dryden’s writings on the theatre. The alternative is to devote the last class to late sixteenth century English poetics, focusing on Sidney’s Apology for poetry. Elizabethan thinking about poetry was largely unaffected by the ascendancy of Aristotelian poetics that occurred in Italy. By considering the issues that preoccupied Sidney but that did not loom large in Aristotle– the status and legitimacy of poetic fiction , its non-referential representation, its didactic function and efficacy – the seminar would end with some fruitful discussion of the different mimetic orientations to be found in sixteenth century poetic theory.

Schedule and Readings:

Lesson 1 (10am-12noon, 28 April) Review of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Reading: Aristotle’s Poetics

Lesson 2 (10am-12noon, 5 May) Recovery and assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in first half of sixteenth century; conflation with Horace Ars poetica.
Reading: Horace, Ars poetica; Giraldi, Discorso on comedies and tragedies

Lesson 3 (10am-12noon, 12 May) Emergence of genre theory, and codification of genres (tragedy, epic poetry)
Reading: B. Weinberg “the Quarrel over Speroni’s Canace and Dramatic Poetry;” Tasso, Discorsi dell’arte poetica (Rhu translation)

Lesson 4 (10am-12noon, 14 May) The politics of genre theory,
Reading: Minturno (selection in Gilbert), Pellegrino, Il Carrafa; Guarini on tragicomedy (selection in Gilbert)

Lesson 5 (10am-12noon, 19 May) Unaristotelian orientation of late 16th century English poetics.
Reading: Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (in Gilbert)

Assigned texts:

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. R. Janko (Hackett)
Allen Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Wayne State U. Press)
Instructor will provide a Xerox Reader containing additional reading assignments in translation.

Professor Daniel JAVITCH is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Aside from regularly offering courses at NYU on the history of poetic theory before 1700, he has previously conducted seminars on early modern poetics at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, as well as at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. Publications bearing on the topic of his seminar include: “The Emergence of Poetic Genre Theory in the Sixteenth Century,” Modern Language Quarterly 59 (1998),139-69; “The Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in Sixteenth Century Italy,” and “Italian Epic Theory” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol.III ed. Glyn Norton (Cambridge University Press, 1999); “Lo spettro del romanzo nella teoria sull’epica del seidicesimo secolo” Rinascimento 43 (2003) [2004], 159-176.