Sobre el concepto de ‘espectáculo’ en el arte poética de Aristóteles

Abstract

The problem posed by the dramatic genre for the relation between literature and theatre isas old as literary theory itself: it appears for the first time in Aristotle's Poetics. He tackles the problem by differentiating the mode of tragedy from that of epic poetry: dramatic presentation from narration. This mode, the Greek author claims, makes itself evident in the part of tragedy he labels ´spectacle' (opsis). He astonishingly bestows this part the last place in the hierarchy of the parts on the grounds that it is the less related to the poetic art, since the force of the tragic efect is present even in the act of reading a tragedy.
Taking into account several ideas present in Aristole's text, the author of this paper differentiates the theatrical spectacle from the visibility emerging directly from the act of reading a text using the dramatic mode, and he claims that the theatrical spectacle is firmly grounded by Aristotle on the textual visibility produced by an essential quality of dramatic discourse, achieving in this way an enhancement of the value of the concept of spectacle.



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Este trabajo fue leído en el Segundo Seminario Nacional de Estudios Literarios, Sochel, Santiago, abril de 1983. Para esta publicación su texto se ha modificado y se han agregado las notas.