The Purgation and the Presence: A Narrative Review of Catharsis and Aesthetic Experience, from Aristotle's Poetics to the Distancing--Embracing Model
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Catharsis and aesthetic experience are the two great names for what art does to its audience: the tragedy's purgation of pity and fear, the later theories' describing of a distinctive experience of attention and value. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of those names. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the catharsis's interpretations, in which Aristotle's Poetics, Bernays's medical reading, Else's and Lucas's philological syntheses, and Halliwell's poetics reconstructed the term's sense; the aesthetic experience's theory and its critics, in which Bullough's psychical distance, Beardsley's aesthetics, Dickie's institutional attack, Gadamer's hermeneutics, and Dufrenne's phenomenology defined and disputed the experience's existence; and the empirical turn, in which Oliver and Bartsch's appreciation studies and Menninghaus's distancing--embracing model measured the enjoyment of negative emotions---catharsis's laboratory afterlife. It is concluded that the two literatures tell one story: from the purgation's metaphor through the experience's phenomenology to the psychology of how art's distances make the painful pleasurable---the audience's transformation as aesthetics' permanent subject.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Topic: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204827459