Atti Accademia Pontaniana, Napoli - Supplemento N.S., Vol. LXI (2012), pp. 25-40 The reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the domains of literary and aesthetic theo- ry since the Renaissance has passed through a complex series of intellectual and cultural phases. Attitudes to the work have ranged from canonisation, via ambiva- lence and partial resistance, to outright opposition. Where, then, does that leave «us» now as modern or even post-modern readers of the treatise? Part of my own answer to that question is that at this late stage of cultural history any sophisticated approach to the Poetics is bound to be entangled in a peculiar dialectic. The heavy burden of the past which the Poetics carries with it makes it hard for anyone to be straightforwardly Aristotelian any longer. Yet the work has exercised such a wide- spread influence (even on those who have never read it) that its traces lurk almost everywhere in our ways of thinking. To put the point piquantly, if we choose to con- tinue arguing with Aristotle, we are likely to find that at some level we are arguing with part of ourselves 1 . It is in that spirit that I want here to reconsider one of the most fundamental elements in the theoretical framework of the Poetics. By «fundamental» I mean not only basic to Aristotle’s own cast of thought but also of a kind which, like so much else in the treatise, has had very intricate ramifications in the theory of poetry and of other artforms too. Although those ramifications cannot be analysed in detail here, I shall provide a pair of illustrative examples, one of which takes a striking and sur- prising contemporary form, at the end of my paper. The chief issue which concerns me can be stated with deceptive simplicity: why does poetic unity matter so much * I would like to thank my host Dr Alfred Dunshirn and an audience in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna for lively discussion of a version of this paper in Decem- ber 2009. 1 My own perspective on the complex legacy of the Poetics remains substantially that of S. Halliwell, «Epilogue: the Poetics and its interpreters», in A. Rorty (Ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, Princeton 1992, pp. 409-424. Unity of Art without Unity of Life? A Question about Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy* STEPHEN HALLIWELL