Gregory A. Staley, Seneca and the idea of tragedy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiii, 185 p.
- $74.00.
- ISBN 9780195387438.
Recension par Christoph Kugelmeier (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.10.59.
Extraits en ligne sur books.google.
Présentation de l'éditeur:
As both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the verybeginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Platofamously banned tragedians from his ideal community because he believedthat their representations of vicious behavior could deform minds.Aristotle set out to answer Plato's objections, arguing that fictionoffers a faithful image of the truth and that it promotes emotionalhealth through the mechanism of catharsis. Aristotle's definition oftragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itselfbut on later Latin literature, beginning with the tragedies of theRoman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC - AD 65). Scholarshipover the last fifty years, however, has increasingly sought to identifyin Seneca's prose writings a Platonic poetics which is antagonistictoward tragedy and which might therefore explain why Seneca's playsseem so often to present the failure of Stoicism. As Gregory Staleyargues in this book, when Senecan tragedy fails to stage virtue weshould see in this not the failure of Stoicism but a Stoic conceptionof tragedy as the right vehicle for imaging Seneca's familiar world ofmadmen and fools. Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle's conception of thegenre as a vivid image of the truth and treats tragedy as a naturalvenue in which to explore the human soul. Staley's reading of Seneca'splays draws on current scholarship about Stoicism as well as on thewritings of Renaissance authors like Sir Philip Sidney, who borrowedfrom Seneca the word "idea" to designate what we would now label as a"theory" of tragedy. Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy will appeal broadly to students and scholars of classics, ancient philosophy, and English literature.
Gregory Staley is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland at College Park.