Introduction: Plato’s Challenge

Abstract

For centuries, tragedy has been the source of debate and speculation. To evaluate tragedy’s effect on the audience is itself predicated upon beliefs regarding the genre’s composition, including by whom, and for what purpose, the tragedy in question is composed. It is a debate regarding the relationship of mimetic art (in this case, poetry in general and tragedy in particular) to knowledge, emotions, and truth—what Socrates described to his interlocutors as an age old “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato, [1935] 2006: 465). Contemporary vocabularies and academic scholarship tend to reduce tragedy to a literary genre. For the Greeks, however, to interrogate the value of tragedy was not merely a question of aesthetic pleasure, but whether such representations could benefit the polis (city-state) and “all the life of man.” To examine the significance of tragedy then is not a topic limited to the realm of literary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics (though these fields are integral to the genre). It is a sociological issue concerning what constitutes a tragedy, how tragedy is constructed, and the consequences of representing tragedy in society.

If the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell… And we would allow her advocates who are not poets but lovers of poetry to plead her cause in prose without meter, and show that she is not only delightful but beneficial to orderly government and all the life of man. And we shall listen benevolently, for it will be clear gain for us if it can be shown that she bestows not only pleasure but benefit. (Plato, [1935] 2006: 467)

And since learning and admiring are pleasant, all things connected with them must also be pleasant; for instance, a work of representation, such as painting, sculpture, poetry, and all that is well represented, even if the object of representation is not pleasant; for it is not this that causes pleasure or the reverse, but the inference that the representation and the object represented are identical, so the result is that we learn something. (Aristotle, [1926] 2006: 126 [emphasis added])