In this stimulating and wide-ranging 1979 study, André Green demonstrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to literary criticism.

In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."

Scholars have often focused on understanding Aristotle's poetic theory, and particularly the concept of catharsis in the Poetics, as a response to Plato's critique of pity in the Republic. However, this book shows that, while Greek thinkers all acknowledge pity and some form of fear as responses to tragedy, each assumes for the two emotions a different purpose, mode of presentation and, to a degree, understanding. This book reassesses expressions of the emotions within different tragedies and explores emotional responses to and discussions of the tragedies by contemporary philosophers, providing insights into the ethical and social implications of the emotions.

Ontology and the Art of Tragedy is a sustained reflection on the principles and criteria from which to guide one's approach to Aristotle's Poetics. Its scope is twofold: historical and systematic. In its historical aspect it develops an approach to Aristotle's Poetics, which brings his distinctive philosophy of being to bear on the reception of this text. In its systematic aspect it relates Aristotle's theory of art to the perennial desiderata of any theory of art, and particularly to Kandinsky's.

Tragic Effects: Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation confronts the peculiar fascination with Greek tragedy as it shapes the German intellectual tradition, with particular focus on the often controversial practice of translating the Greeks. Whereas the tradition of emulating classical ideals in German intellectual life has generally emerged from the impulse to identify with models, the challenge of translating the Greeks underscores the linguistic and historical discontinuities inherent in the recourse to ancient material and inscribes that experience of disruption as fundamental to modernity. Friedrich Hölderlin's translations are a case in point. Regarded in his own time as the work of a madman, his renditions of Sophoclean tragedy intensify dramatic effect with the unsettling experience of familiar language slipping its moorings. His attention to marking the distances between ancient source text and modern translation has granted his Oedipus and Antigone a distinct longevity as objects of discussion, adaptation, and even retranslation. Cited by Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Bertolt Brecht, and others, Hölderlin's Sophocles project follows a path both marked by various contexts and tinged by persistent quandaries of untranslatability. Tragedy has long functioned as a cornerstone for questions about ethical life. By placing emphasis on processes of translation and adaptation, however, Tragic Effects approaches the question of ethics from a perspective informed by recent discourse in translation studies. Reconstructing an ancient text in this context requires negotiating the difficult tension between comprehending the distant past and preserving its radical singularity.