Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics

Abstract

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.