Video and Podcast Resources On Aristotle's Poetics
14 lectures in video and podcast form on this early work of theory and criticism
Several years back, I produced a set of seven lectures on Aristotle’s Poetics for students enrolled in my Introduction to Humanities classes, where we read and discuss one important Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone, and then released them in video and podcast formats to the interested public. I recently decided to finish up the series of lectures to cover that entire work and produced another seven videos.
I’ve recently converted those final seven videos into podcast lectures, which I’m early-releasing to Patreon supporters and paid Substack subscribers as a perk. They will get released to the public a bit later on. That’s why this resource page is set, for the time being, to be just for paid Substack supporters.
We get some philosophical analysis and evaluation of poetry - epic, lyric, comedic, and tragic - earlier than Aristotle provided in Plato’s texts, for example in the Ion, the Symposium, and the Republic. And we know that already by Aristotle’s time, there were quite a few critics who preoccupied themselves with examining “problems” in poetic compositions (since Aristotle addresses them in his work). But the Poetics is really one of the earliest, relatively systematic, philosophical examinations of poetry we have.
It’s unfortunate that the second book, which is supposed to have been focused on comedy, has long been lost. But in the text as we do possess it, we get some very interesting and incisive discussions of tragic, and to a lesser extent epic poetry. If you have read another work of Aristotle’s the Art of Rhetoric, you’ll notice that there is also some overlap when it comes to the matters under discussion, in particular metaphor.
Here are the fourteen lectures, in both video and downloadable podcast formats, covering every major idea, distinction, and argument made within Aristotle’s Poetics:
Development Of Types Of Poetry | watch video | listen to podcast
Development Of Tragedy Over Time | watch video | listen to podcast
Three Distinctions In Mimesis | watch video | listen to podcast
Elements And Definitions Of Tragedy | watch video | listen to podcast
Plot, Structure, And Unity | watch video | listen to podcast
Reversal, Recognition, And Suffering | watch video | listen to podcast
Different Modes Of Recognition | watch video | listen to podcast
Character, Choice, And Tragedy | watch video | listen to podcast
Parts Of Diction (Lexis) | watch video | listen to podcast
Excellence In Diction (Lexis) | watch video | listen to podcast
Fear, Pity, And Tragedy | watch video | listen to podcast
Epic Poetry | watch video | listen to podcast
Problems And Solutions | watch video | listen to podcast
Is Tragedy Or Epic Superior? | watch video | listen to podcast
So, there you have them. All the video and podcast lectures covering this great early work of literary theory and criticism. I hope you find them a useful resource for studying this work!