The article, entitled “My Own Worst Enemy: Translating Hamartia in Sixteenth-Century Italy” looks at how Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (the tragic flaw that leads to the protagonist’s downfall) was translated and interpreted in early modern commentaries on the Poetics. A number of commentators often used a term that implied “sin” rather than “fault” but this appears to have been an attempt to domesticate Aristotle’s text for an early modern Christian audience rather than a distortion of the Poetics through a particular moral or religious lens.

While this article in particular is focused on the reception of the Poetics through the lens of translation theory, Bryan’s reflection on internal faults/errors and how they are perceived in narrative informs the teaching in his module IP304 - Posthumous Geographies I: Underworlds. One problem that students explore in this module is how we tell stories about our own psychological underworlds and the paradoxical limits of autobiography.

https://0-jps-library-utoronto-ca.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/renref/article/view/32449

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/schoolforcross-facultystudies/liberalarts/currentstudents/modules/options/underworlds/