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 interpretation of Plato's dialogues, I consider in detail the reception of Plato's Protagoras in English scholarship since 1956, that is, during the last half century. That scholarship falls into three periods. At first (1956-82) there was a sharp division between analytic philosophy commentators and other commentators, but near-unanimity in adopting a "Democritean" conception of the text as composed of discrete, separable parts. In the second period (1983-92), an "Aristotelian" conception of the text, in which functionally distinct parts coordinate with each other within 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 sensitivity to the unity of Protagoras and its integration of literature and theory. I use this review to draw some morals about exegesis and scholarly specialization.
Han Baltussen
From Polemic to Exegesis: The Ancient Philosophical Commentary
Commentary was an important vehicle for philosophical debate in late antiquity. Its antecedents lie in the rise of rational argumentation, polemical rivalry, literacy, and the canonization of texts. This essay aims to give a historical and typological outline of philosophical exegesis in antiquity, from the earliest allegorizing readings of Homer to the full-blown "running commentary" in the Platonic tradition (fourth to sixth centuries CE). Running commentaries are mostly on authoritative thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. Yet they are never mere scholarly enterprises but, rather, springboards for syncretistic clarification, elaboration, and creative interpretation. Two case studies (Galen 129-219 CE, Simplicius ca. 530 CE) will illustrate the range of exegetical tools available at the end of a long tradition in medical science and in reading Aristotle through Neoplatonic eyes, respectively.
Gareth B. Matthews
Inner Dialogue in Augustine and Anselm
In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates propose that thinking is a discussion the soul has with itself. But Plato never wrote a philosophical work in the form of an inner dialogue. Augustine's Soliloquies is the first such work. Writing in this form, Augustine is inspired to treat what can be expressed by "I exist" as a philosophically significant piece of knowledge and to entertain Berkeleyan idealism as a serious hypothesis. He also presents two philosophical perplexities concerning prayer, which he leaves unresolved. Anselm's Proslogion, which is both a prayer and an inner dialogue, offers a robust response to perplexities of 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 Historia Calamitatum and letters exchanged with Heloise, arguing that both are informed by the attempt to look below the surfaces of language, self, and action to a reality beneath and to achieve authenticity, by which I mean coherence between surface and depth. This reading shows an emerging sense of self and self-knowledge based on the relationship between external act and internal intention. While using traditional medieval narrative forms, I argue, Abelard gives his story a modern-sounding autobiographical twist: that its moral is about matching outer to inner self. While the project is never complete, the search itself becomes an identity; Abelard achieves authenticity in his rejection of all the models of it that were available to him. This is not done to unmask a self without place or parallel but to make the case for a new way of life in a new community for the inner self who is truly seeking God. Thus, like Augustine before and Rousseau after him, Abelard writes about his own life with a philosophical aim: to display the nature of what it is to be human and to make claims about how human life ought to be lived.