On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

One of the earliest works of literary aesthetics—the study of literature’s form and how its form affects readers as an aesthetic experience—was Aristotle’s Poetics. In Poetics, Aristotle introduces the notion of literature’s cathartic effect, an idea that has had widespread influence, referring to the way literature trains emotions by arousing and then resolving them through the structure of a well-crafted plot, the element of literature that Aristotle identifies as the most important. Aristotle’s emphasis on plot also bears fruitful insights into character. This is because plot, according to Paul Taylor in his essay “Sympathy and Insight in Aristotle’s Poetics,” “centers on the fact that the individual actions of characters follow with probability or necessity from a combination of three factors: the characters’ humanity, their individual personalities, and their involvement in the circumstances depicted in the plot.”14 In other words, plot reveals character. And the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character.