Open Forum

The diagram looks like this. I was taught this diagram circa about 1992. But I've subsequently seen other teachers attempt to teach Antigone this way.

I'm on the trail to try to find the origin of the diagram. I asked an expert in Antigone, who was taught long before the 1990's and said they'd never seen it before.

I know some people might be embarrassed to be taught this diagram, and thus don't want to speak up, but I'm not out here joy riding other people's emotions, because I was also taught this diagram, but I knew it was wrong at the time, and have been trying to find the origin of who drew it this way since.

And before people jump on me... this is what I've tried so far:

• I read Poetics. It's not in there. Yes, the entire thing. Completely and carefully and then I mapped out what Aristotle said and quoted it to death.
• I looked at the history of theater discussion and diagramming from about Aristotle to discussions around Shakespeare to Aelius Donatus to Freytag (who was an A-hole because I read his entire treaties) to everyone I could possibly find in the 20th century. I've narrowed the field to likely 1980's-early 1990's. I know the origin of inciting incident exactly, the first person to diagram stories exactly. The first person to argue it as a line of emotion. And ALL of them are from the 19th-20th century forward and the reasons why.
• I found Syd Field. It's not Syd Field. The terms don't stabilize until about the 1970's -1980's.
• I found Brecht. It's not Brecht. He argues for a totally different story structure and his story driver is fun.
• I can't find a lot of the books from the 1980's.
• I also blind started asking universities, professors, and experts in the field. I also asked archive if they were willing to put up a reverse image search and they said no.
• I exhausted all of JSTOR and the university libraries (as in looking through the catalogues and asking university librarians from theaters) I can find for titles.
• I asked NYPL and stumped them. I found the first person to diagram Antigone with the line of emotion in the 1930's, but the diagram looks different and the terms are vastly different. I physically went to the central public library.
• I've asked Librarians for clues. Short of the Library of congress and going there myself to scour it, I'm stuck.

I've been solidly working on tracking this down for the last 2-3 years? But been curious for years on end, so been trying find the origin story since then. I know it seems obsessive and I have enough circumstantial evidence to debunk this diagram entirely, but if I can know the person who invented it and the reasons why they did, that would help me greatly. Any academic leads at all would help.

I know this diagram to be wrong for certain, but it's still up on the web as a "good way to teach Antigone." when all of the terms are not historically accurate to Aristotle at all. Denouement, alone, came from the French word Nouement, which was not an Aristotlean concept because French hadn't been invented yet.

The character-focused ideology is not Aristotle either, which is attributed to historians and sociologists to the rise of industrialization.

(BTW, conflict-centric is 1921 Percy Lubbock. I've memorized all the figures).

So I've done the footwork, and I'm running out of clues and I have only a time period and a rough estimate. Anyone have a possible lead forward of the time period, or remember being taught this (wrong) diagram? Hoping for a lead.

Also, if you have been taught this diagram and want to know what the historically accurate diagram is (i.e. there is none, but you can kinda guess from reading Poetics closely and remembering that the thesis statement is at the end of each section, not the beginning), and all of the work I put in, I did do that. You can ask, but don't be the person that takes the credit from me because I've visibly been working on this for years and after reading all of those structuralists that don't give credit to anything they say in a fit of mostly male privilege, I'd like to protect my interests (TT triangulation on who they were talking about was so difficult when they wouldn't cite anything, especially the freaking professors in the list. Kenneth Rowe, the AH who refused to cite anyone for his ideas.). But yeah, I basically have a thesis on my hands.

I studied theatre in college in the early 70s and remember learning this then. No idea of the origin but I'll look through my old texts to see if I can find any clues. And now I'm very interested in your thesis 😊. 

Cheers, Linda

Thanks I would really appreciate it. This would have been much easier if people cited things, but a lot of the scholars I read didn't cite anything, so here we are. If I can't find it, then I appreciate you giving the date.

If I can find an original name for the author of the idea, then finding out how it disseminated would be much easier and thus the total debunking becomes easier, thus I can finish the final argument. Sometimes people do read the whole of Poetics but then havie new ideas but argue them poorly, etc.

The least I can do is send it to my professor who taught it so she can correct course with the total argument why. If I get the final figure to argue around, and if you'd like a copy I can do that for you too.

Unfortunately it wasn't him. I read his entire treaties on plays. He's also really, really very much an AH in many ways. His idea on race, suck. His hatred of Polish people and wanting to genocide on them shows up. Yeah, I did not have fun reading him.

Of note, he argues the center of all plays are emotions, particularly contrasting emotions to create the height. He also equates his story structure to both male experience with sex and Christianity. People skip this part and the huge long tirades where he talks about how Germans are superior to everyone else on Earth, his blind worship of The Ring by Wagner, and think this is totally irrelevant for discussion of his treaties of story structure, but it definitely, definitely is important to understand to get how it all meshes together. His ego, though is unbelievable. In non-academic terms when he was saying he was superior to Shakespeare because he thought he could do Hamlet better than Shakespeare I was about to shout shut up. I read the entire thing.

The idea for inciting incident is there, but the coining of the term doesn't come until much later. The earliest I could find (With NYPL's help) as a term was from a Jew (Lieberman) who escaped Nazi Concentration camps and then from the evidence turned around to be racist himself. TT That's so painful. He wrote something really racist as upholding inciting incident. And then he quit as a principal of a school as soon as the ruling for integration went through the same academic school year. TT He hated Black people that much? Indigenous and Black people. Gotta be kidding me. The evidence isn't good or on his side. I was pulling for him to change his mind, but sometimes people don't change.

Yeah, so given that, no, it's not Freytag or I'd have quit with him. It's a pieced together thing.

The most pleasant reads so far have been Brecht and Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, I think. I feel for them since their treaties was misunderstood and warped at later dates to uphold things they never argued for and a lot of the credit for poor Whitcomb was erased too.

The most surprising bit I found was the Delphian Society on the people who were erased side. That was a lot of fun to find. I was never, ever taught about them, but they argued hard for literacy, women's place in the classrooms, and hired several people to compile a book.

The guy who championed for Confessional stories as a piece of Feminism was really interesting as a figure too. A feminist before 1960's feminism was a thing. I bought one of the magazines and it has some of his writing in it. Fascinating.

But it wasn't Gustav Freytag. His diagram looks like this:

Wrong diagrams on the internet abound because no one bothered the read the original source. He was a Jew hater and a Polish hater, but was buried in Poland. So he deserves his final fate so much. Poetic Justice sometimes does happen in real life. I call him a pre-Nazi for so many reasons.

But thank you for your input.

Thanks I found a google Books free version here:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Thirty_six_Dramatic_Situations/PF5ZAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Of note he doesn't use the word conflict once. So the Wikipedia page is inaccurate on that account.

For personal interest, he does come after Franz Boaz and cultural sensitivity ideas come up. So his notation on Chinese theater and his takes on it are interesting because he tries and attempts at cultural relativism. (A lot of early Anthropology was done in France too) I can taste some of the early structuralism in this work as well, but I wish he had given credit to which of the works of Gozzi he was referring to. I'm guessing 10 plays of which only 5 have been translated.

He's oddly succinct when it comes to the situations. And his attempts at cultural relativism amuse me, which makes him a lot less oppressive to read than Freytag. He does make a sideways mention at Freytag though. lol Something to the effect of We French and Polish have survived. Because Gustav Freytag went on a huge, huge rant about the inferiority of French theater and how Polish should be exterminated--he spent chapters on it and getting both Shakespeare and Aristotle wrong. So... I think that's justifiable. (Sometimes texts are in conversation with each other when you read the whole thing.) His conclusion is very energetic. This could be argued as early structuralism, but doesn't have enough ground work to argue it into dialogue with Antigone's diagram. The progenitor of conflict-centric Story driver remains the same, though he might have used this as a reference. It's quite clear that Polti was still a fan of the pluralism of the late 19th century. He just wanted some organization to think things through by his conclusion.

I have some suspects for who it might be... but I have to physically go to a university library to check.

The top two are: 

Goheen, Robert F. (Robert Francis). 1951. The Imagery of Sophocles' Antigone : A Study of Poetic Language and Structure  / by Robert F. Goheen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
YRL ; PA4413.A7 Z5g
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Goheen (Black and Indian solidarity)

Renunciation as a Tragic Focus: A Study of Five Plays (Minnesota Archive Editions) Paperback – September 1, 1954

by Eugene H. Falk (Author)

Goheen is a good candidate. Part PoC, politically active in trying to have solidarity with Black activists and trying to get people into Princeton so more likely to be erased from the record, 1951 for both of them. I'll try to go and see if my suspects are correct.

Goheen is an interesting figure as an academic. Fought sooo hard at the risk of being unpopular, etc and said, I don't care we're doing the right thing.

I'm thinking it's less likely to show up in a translation and more than likely to show up in an academic discourse.

I was taught this diagram in high school  and again in freshman English in college to use when analyzing short stories.  I have never heard of it being applied to Antigone  or any other play.

BTW, Not Gustav Freytag.
His Diagram looks like this. The correct one. The wrong ones online are a result of people not bothering to read the original text.

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Yoonmi Kim
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I found the three sources at the local University Library from 1951. Goheen, was a bust, but it kind of argues to me, given the scholarship that the person I'm looking for is between 1951- and the early 70's? 20 years of scholarship.

Goheen made some references to Freytag, but didn't give him credit for any of his ideas, which is a running theme thusfar, I think.

I did scan the other Antigone books and what I found interesting is that the earlier books from the 19th century often listed the Greek text and were strictly by the book, so to speak. But after roughly 1920's, there was a split in the scholarship between three ends of the Antigone scholarship-Historicism angle-so what did Aristotle really think, the readercism model (which would be Goheen) and then the conservative on the plot model which leaned on Historicism, but still leaned on character as being important, patently ignoring Aristotle's Poetics. (Robert Fagles is of this nature). The split in the scholarship this way poses some interesting questions, I think.

Scanning from 1951- 1975 forward I can't find a lot of those books... I wonder if they even exist. Finding other scholarship to connect this rumored diagram is more difficult than I bargained for.