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‘Empathic understanding’: emotion and cognition in classical dramatic audience-response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Ismene Lada
Ismene Lada
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
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Extract

In the closing chapter of his Greek tragedy in action Oliver Taplin writes:

Understanding, reason, learning, moral discrimination – these things are not, in my experience, incompatible with emotion (nor presumably in the experience of Gorgias and Aristotle): what is incompatible is cold insensibility […] our emotions in the theatre, far from driving out thought and meaning, are indivisible from them: they are simultaneous and mutually dependent.

On the other hand, Malcolm Heath's work inveighs against Taplin's suggestion of a balance between reason and emotion, and proposes

a third possibility: intense but ordered emotion, controlled not by intellectual interests, but by the coherence of the whole simply as an emotional experience, by the aesthetic satisfaction which the audience receives through its experience of the emotions as an ordered sequence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 39 , 1994 , pp. 94 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1994

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