Abstract

Reviews Mats Malm, The Soul of Poetry Redefined: Vacillations of Mimesis from Aristotle to Romanticism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012. 238 pp. ISBN 9788763537421 The Soul ofPoetry Redefined is a book that may be of interest to students of poetry and rhetoric, especially those invested in Aristotle's Poetics. Its central claim is that Aristotle is ambiguous in his conceptualization of mimesis, the "soul [psuche] of tragedy" (Poetics, quoted p. 12), if not of poetry in general. Malm presents the ambiguity in this way: When someone—be it Aristotle or any interpreter of his—says that poetry is mimesis or imitation of characters, actions, passions, etc., what is meant by "imitation"? Is it that actions and passions are composed, in the sense of construing [i.e., constructing?] a story, similar to how the historian arranges his account but with the freedom of invention, or that they are represented through words, just like the painter represents things and persons through colours? (Pp. 12-13) In Malm's account, this tension between content and form—muthos and lexis— gives rise to various adaptations of the Poetics over time, from Averroès in the twelfth century to Charles Batteux and Johann Adolph Schlegel in the eighteenth. From Averroès onward, Malm finds mimesis-as-representation stres­ sed over mimesis-as-plot-composition. The soul of poetry thus becomes visual imagery (p. 19) and metaphor (p. 45). Exceptional, in Malm's account, are Corneille and Racine: "The French classicists focus not on mimesisrepresentation but on mimesis-composition, so the 'verisimilar' here comes close to that of Aristotle" (p. 103). Yet this strikes me as unsurprising, given that Corneille and Racine were writing and theorizing on tragedy, just as Aristotle was, while Averroès and those who he influenced through Latin translation in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance addressed literature, and the arts, more generally. There are several basic problems with Malm's study of mimesis and its reception. First, with respect to Aristotle's Poetics, it is not clear to me that "mimesis-representation" and "mimesis-composition" are conceptually separable: I would think, rather, that composition involves representation, and vice versa. Second, I am not sure what's at stake in Malm's study. Could anyone disagree that some poetic theorists have stressed content over Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 3, pp. 324-335. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.20l6.34.3.324. Reviews 325 form, or form ox er content? Malm's work is not really situated in relation to extant criticism on Aristotle and his reception, despite the eighteen pages on which the eminent Classics scholar Stephen Halliwell is cited. In the end, I have no clear sense of either Halliwell's arguments or how Malm's account of mimesis may or may not relate to them. Other scholars are cited with still greater opacity: for example, in a not uninteresting excursion on the sublime and its relation to visualization (phantasia), we are told, "The evolution of aes­ thetics can be tied to the ev olution of a new kind of social subject, as Peter de Bolla has demonstrated" (p. 139). No explanation follows. To my' mind, the best chapter of The Soul of Poetry Redefined is its tenth and last, "Emotions and the system of genres" (pp. 171-85). Here Malm advances, however tentatively, a real argument with explanatory force. Addressing the question of whv Aristotle stresses content over style and dra­ matic poetry over lyric, Malm writes that in the Poetics, "The pleasure of poetry. . .comes mainiv from understanding, and from pity and fear which are means of understanding. In this way, Aristotle distances poetry consider­ able' from the Platonic critique of linguistic voluptuousness and decadence. . . . Defining the soul of poetrv as lexis, mimesis-representation would have been to subject it to Plato's critique of rhetoric and representation. The soul of poetrv being muthos, content and structure, poetry...