Poetics Today, été 2007

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.


Vol. 28, no 2 (été 2007)


ARTICLES

Jonathan Lavery
Philosophical Genres and Literary Forms: A Mildly Polemical Introduction

Jonathan Lavery
Plato's Protagoras and the Frontier of Genre Research: A Reconnaissance Report from the Field
After a review of some general issues surrounding the interpretationof Plato's dialogues, I consider in detail the reception ofPlato's Protagoras in English scholarship since 1956, that is,during the last half century. That scholarship falls into threeperiods. At first (1956-82) there was a sharp division betweenanalytic philosophy commentators and other commentators, butnear-unanimity in adopting a "Democritean" conception of thetext as composed of discrete, separable parts. In the secondperiod (1983-92), an "Aristotelian" conception of the text,in which functionally distinct parts coordinate with each otherwithin a whole, became a serious rival to the Democritean one.Since 1992, several Aristotelian strategies have been developed.I diagnose these trends as an indication of growing sensitivityto the unity of Protagoras and its integration of literatureand theory. I use this review to draw some morals about exegesisand scholarly specialization.

Han Baltussen
From Polemic to Exegesis: The Ancient Philosophical Commentary
Commentary was an important vehicle for philosophical debatein late antiquity. Its antecedents lie in the rise of rationalargumentation, polemical rivalry, literacy, and the canonizationof texts. This essay aims to give a historical and typologicaloutline of philosophical exegesis in antiquity, from the earliestallegorizing readings of Homer to the full-blown "running commentary"in the Platonic tradition (fourth to sixth centuries CE). Runningcommentaries are mostly on authoritative thinkers such as Platoand Aristotle. Yet they are never mere scholarly enterprisesbut, rather, springboards for syncretistic clarification, elaboration,and creative interpretation. Two case studies (Galen 129-219CE, Simplicius ca. 530 CE) will illustrate the range of exegeticaltools available at the end of a long tradition in medical scienceand in reading Aristotle through Neoplatonic eyes, respectively.

Gareth B. Matthews
Inner Dialogue in Augustine and Anselm
In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates propose that thinkingis a discussion the soul has with itself. But Plato never wrotea philosophical work in the form of an inner dialogue. Augustine'sSoliloquies is the first such work. Writing in this form, Augustineis inspired to treat what can be expressed by "I exist" as aphilosophically significant piece of knowledge and to entertainBerkeleyan idealism as a serious hypothesis. He also presentstwo philosophical perplexities concerning prayer, which he leavesunresolved. Anselm's Proslogion, which is both a prayer andan inner dialogue, offers a robust response to perplexitiesof the sort that troubled Augustine.

Eileen C. Sweeney
Abelard's Historia Calamitatum and Letters: Self as Search and Struggle
In this essay, I offer an interpretation of Abelard's HistoriaCalamitatum and letters exchanged with Heloise, arguing thatboth are informed by the attempt to look below the surfacesof language, self, and action to a reality beneath and to achieveauthenticity, by which I mean coherence between surface anddepth. This reading shows an emerging sense of self and self-knowledgebased on the relationship between external act and internalintention. While using traditional medieval narrative forms,I argue, Abelard gives his story a modern-sounding autobiographicaltwist: that its moral is about matching outer to inner self.While the project is never complete, the search itself becomesan identity; Abelard achieves authenticity in his rejectionof all the models of it that were available to him. This isnot done to unmask a self without place or parallel but to makethe case for a new way of life in a new community for the innerself who is truly seeking God. Thus, like Augustine before andRousseau after him, Abelard writes about his own life with aphilosophical aim: to display the nature of what it is to behuman and to make claims about how human life ought to be lived.