Guest Speaker: “Deconstructing Narratives About Aristotle’s Poetics“, Guillaume Navaud (Lycée Henri-IV)
Kaplan Hall 348Abstract: Aristotle’s Poetics, which provides the earliest Western theory of fictional narrative (muthos), has in turn become an object of fiction for contemporary novelists (Borges, Eco). But the story of the Poetics goes back earlier: Aristotle as poetician was chosen as the subject of a painting by Rembrandt, and since the Renaissance, his poetical theories have been embroidered into conflicting critical metanarratives about its place and effect in the history of aesthetics. Does such a proliferation of narratives simply make a case for skeptical relativism towards this “mythical object”? or can these narratives in turn become the object of a critical...