Status Updates From Le Tombeau d'Œdipe

"...according to [the Ancients], tragedy was 'nothing to do with Dionysus.' The phrase was said to go back to the distant era when the poets Phrynichus and Aeschylus were the first to devote their writings to a wide variety of mythological figures, heroes, and divinities,... It had since become a saying, applied to anyone talking about what they did not know." do people still say this?? I'm going to start saying this

god this reminds me of that time I was helping a friend with a Shakespeare paper and she told me, the English major and fiction writer, to my face, "But literature doesn't really MATTER, Shakespeare doesn't save anyone!" and I felt like she'd smashed my ribs in with a cinderblock. thanks, Aristotelian philosophy, this is very, as the kids might say, validating.

"...there are considerable implications to the idea that the catharsis effect can result from a simple reading of the tragic text,... This means that a piece of literature,... a bare text, could have an effect on the body, could modify it and even - O miracle! - heal it. Today we struggle to associate these properties with the lone idea of literature."

"Given that Aristotle mentions catharsis in the Politics,... it seems that the only reason to go after catharsis, among all other concepts, is because contemporary critics and philosophers are reluctant to accept that tragedy has effects other than an intellectual process. As referred to by catharsis, the body has now become truly inconceivable:..."

70 pages into a book literally named after and constantly evoking Oedipus is a hell of a time to remember that you, a holder of a BA in English who graduated summa cum laude, has never actually................... read any of the Oedipus plays. whoops