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May 1, 2017 · Aristotle (384-322 BC) Teacher of Alexander the Great. Mainly concerned with tragedy, which was in his day, the most development form of poetry. But, he maintained, (good) art was neither useless nor dangerous, but rather natural and beneficial. Crucial to Aristotle’s defense of art is his.
- I. A Problem of Verification
- II. Mimesis
- III. Poetry, History, and Plot
- IV. “Probably Or Necessarily”
- V. Chance and Divine Intervention
- VI. The Tragic Hero
- VII. Reversal, Recognition, Andhamartia
- VIII. Pity and Fear
- IX. Simulation and The Problem of Verification
- X. Conclusion
Usually when we feel we have learned something from a novel or play, it is the story itself that strikes us as illuminating, and in a direct way that needs no help from an outside authority. Anna Kareninadoes not offer a mere conjecture about how dangerous it can be to fall in love, so that we now need to verify that suggestion by asking an expert....
In chapter 4 of the Poetics Aristotle says that mimesis—or imitation—“is natural to man from childhood,” that he “learns at first by imitation,” and that “it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation” (1448b5–9).7 These are commonsensical ideas. Infants mouth the way adults speak, presumably as part of the process of learning to spea...
In a famous passage in the Poetics Aristotle contrasts poetry with history, asserting that “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (1451b5–7). Aristotle points out that it is not that poetry is in verse that distingu...
It is the way the action of a good plot is tied together by relations of probability and necessity that gives the plot its power to reveal general truths about human behavior. Aristotle's account of how this happens centers on the fact that the individual actions of characters follow with probability or necessity from a combination of three factors...
In keeping with his view that the proper subject of a good plot is human action and that its sequence of events, being an imitation of action, should be rational and intelligible in human terms, Aristotle considers it a plot weakness, a lapse into the merely “episodic,” if the connection between one part of the plot and the next is merely sequentia...
Most of the apparatus of Aristotle's theory of poetry, including the requirement of probable and necessary connections between events in the plot, is ultimately concerned with the need for good poetry to make an appropriately forceful impact on the audience or reader. The reason why a good plot must be unified by a connected series of recognizably ...
If for Aristotle the first essential requirement of a good tragic plot is that it forms a unity of actions connected by probability or necessity, the second essential requirement is that it has a particular kind of complexity—one that incorporates certain crucial events. These include, notably, episodes of “reversal” (1452a22–23) and “recognition” ...
We have seen that for Aristotle a good tragic plot is structured in the way it is because that structure gives the play its power to move its audience to pity and fear. His remark in the Rhetoric that an observer will naturally feel pity for a person suffering in the way the observer “could imagine himself, or someone close to him, suffering” draws...
With these different elements of Aristotle's account of tragedy in mind, let us go back to the question of how we learn from fiction and to the special difficulties surrounding this question that I raised at the beginning. I argued that we learn from fiction not by relying on the writer's authority as an informant nor by confirming what is implicit...
I said in Section I that Aristotle's view of dramatic poetry provides the basis of a defense of cognitivism—the view that art has the capacity to teach us interesting things, and that, furthermore, it derives some of its value as art from this capacity. Using materials largely derived from Aristotle, I have offered an account of how we learn from l...
- Paul A. Taylor
- 2008
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Apr 25, 2019 · Aristotle (384–322 bce) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle’s interests, and his association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor to Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death in 323, the political climate in ...
Aristotle nowhere puts forward a developed aesthetic, nor even a complete theory of literary criticism. Yet despite the gaps and limitations of his discussion and the extreme obscurity of some of his ideas, he went further in his analysis of the aims and nature of poetry than any earlier writer. His defence of the usefulness of poetry provided ...
Aristotle: Poetics. The Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as Aristotle’s has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the story, and ...
Aristotle was the first theorist of theatre – so his Poetics is the origin and basis of all subsequent theatre criticism. His Poetics was written in the 4 th century BC, some time after 335 BC. The important thing is that when Aristotle’s writing his Poetics, Greek theatre was not in its heyday, but was already past its peak, and Aristotle ...
Summary. Analysis. 4.1 Definition. According to Aristotle, tragedy “is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude .”. Tragedy is written in “language made pleasurable” (meaning language that has rhythm and melody), and it can be separated into parts of verse or song. Tragedy is performed by actors, not ...
