ABSTRACT
Making and seeing become a matter of performance, something for poet and reader, playwright and audience, the ancient oral ways of reading more a matter of silent, private reading for the modern reader. In discussing mimesis and related matters, this chapter examines it mainly in terms of two commentators, who examine Plato and Aristotle more as philosophers than as literary theorists or critics. In Poetics, Aristotle wants to see how the poet makes and how the characters he makes, as in Attic tragedy, come to see in a form or anagnorisis or recognition. The chapter explores theatre and world, using Shakespeare, for instance, as a world-making playwright, who helps us to see the world through the theatre and the theatre through the world. It discusses many cultures and periods but can make only suggestions for understanding making and seeing in modern literature.
