ABSTRACT

As catharsis has a long history of critical discussion, Chapter 8 first explains the dominant conceptions of it in both the Renaissance and modern eras. It then distils the central emerging scholarly opinion, that catharsis involves the clarification and habituation of the emotions aroused in an audience by their cognition of the complex plot. Plato had used the term “catharsis” to describe the intellectual clarification that results from philosophical dialogue, and Aristotle acknowledges this when he identifies “learning and inference” as the source of the pleasure we derive from literary mimesis. But unlike Plato, Aristotle (in Politics and Rhetoric) insists that the emotions are a part of and contribute to this process of learning, an assertion reinforced by his whole account of the complex plot’s ability to arouse emotion through cognition. While contemporary classicists largely focus on tragic catharsis, this process is equally present in comedy, and it includes both laughter and the realization of the nature and bounds of indignation.