Chapter 2 : Aristotle's Tragedy Flashcards
What is the historical significance of Aristotle’s Poetics?
What does its systematic approach signify?
The first sustained exposition of ars poetica, in wester thought and remains a CANONICAL TEXT in LITERARY THEORY.
It has been the starting point for many boldly INNOVATIVE REVISIONS of tragic theory and practice over the centuries.
Aristotle’s systematic approach of the treatment of poetry proves de facto that Aristotle considers poetry to be a complicated affair.
What does Aristotle cover in his Poetics?
How does it compare to Plato’s understanding of poetry?
Considers that the best poetry requires great skill and differentiates between good and bad poetry based on aesthetic standards he lays out.
Accepts Plato’s idea that emotions are central to poetry’s mechanisms but rejects the conclusions that poetry is bad and Plato’s distrust of the emotions :
In fact, to the contrary, Aristotle believes it is through emotional catharsis (purgation, purification, and clarification) that poetry is able to do good - bring a positive end (telos) to people. (Because good poetry through emotions, can evoke pity and terror in reader/audience.
What is mimesis to Aristotle versus to Plato?
ARISTOTLE : mimesis is generally the arts, categorized as MUSIC, POETRY, PAINTING, & DANCE.
Within POETRY, he categorizes : EPIC , TRAGEDY, and COMEDY. Epic being narration and tragedy/comedy being dramatic enactment.
PLATO : uses mimesis to refer to the world of our senses, which is a copy of the ideal world of forms, the world of BEING. Literature and poetry is a mimesis of a mimesis and therefore dangerous and highly suspect. Only literary theory (accessed by P.Kings/Queens), aka philosophy, can be proximal to ideal world of Forms.
For Aristotle versus Plato, what is the difference between literary theory and philosophy and poetry?
Aristotle believes that literary theory and philosophy and poetry have a rapprochement, a harmony between them and believes that literary theory also behaves as a mimesis (ie, Plato’s dialogues). However, just because literature is a mimesis, this does not mean there is not a value in it. Good poetry through catharsis, provides a good to the individual.
Plato believes they are separate and oppositional (because poetry stirs the emotions) – he considers his own work not to be mimesis and to be in the category of literary theory/philosophy therefore adjacent to the ideal. Aristotle, believes the contrary – that Plato’s dialogues are themselves also a mimesis.
What is Aristotle’s positive appraisal of mimesis?
(i) Representation is natural to human beings from childhood bc man learns his first lessons through representation.
(ii) Everyone delights in representation because learning is pleasurable and enjoyable, and not just for philosophers.
Essentially, representation is a tool humans use to learn, and humans enjoy learning.
Describe Aristotle’s definition of poetry.
How does he classify and categorize it into subspecies?
Mimesis using the different media of RHYTHM, SPEECH, AND MELODY.
(broader than our own understanding)
Can be classified and divided into subspecies through;
- rhythm, speech, and melody
- represents people as worse than, better than, or equal to reality
- either narration (epic) or dramatic enactment (tragedy/comedy)
What is Aristotle’s definition of tragedy?
It is a REPRESENTATION of a SERIOUS AND COMPLETE action with magnitude, which is characterized by embellished speech (rhythm and melody), which ACCOMPLISHES THROUGH EMOTION (PITY AND TERROR), CATHARSIS of such emotions.
Aristotle argues that the essence of epic poetry is also this, thus encapsulates his generalized theory of poetry.
Tragedies have six parts :
PLOT ; CHARACTERS ; DICTION ; SONG ; REASONING ; SPECTACLE
Out of these, Plot is most important.
Describe the UNITY OF ACTION in Aristotle’s conceptualization of tragedy.
Unity of action is VITAL.
A (good) tragedy has a beginning, which flows into the middle, which flows into the end in one single and complete action, such that each element relates to other elements and no element can be removed or transposed without disrupting or disturbing the WHOLE.
(Something which explains nothing else is not part of the whole.)
Tragedies Vs. Histories
What can we learn about Aristotle’s comparison of the two about Poet vs. Historian, Art vs. Life, Poetry vs. History?
Plots cannot just follow a single individual’s story because an infinite number of things occur to an individual. Instead, we focus on a single and complete action.
In contrast, the poet goes to past events and myths in order to extract out of the mass of details a single, complete action by SELECTING, SYNTHESIZING, and INVENTING, all at once.
The Historian relates what happened ; the Poet represents the significant and essential CORE of events.
(This can be seen as Aristotle drawing the first distinction between ART and LIFE.)
In contrast to Plato, he raises poetry alongside philosophy on the plane of the UNIVERSAL, conveying general truths and essences. (In Aristotle’s eyes, poetry is more philosophical and serious than history.)
Acc. to Aristotle’s Poetics, what are the three components of PLOT?
Reversal, Suffering, Recognition
Reversal of fortune; destructive or painful action; recognition
According to Aristotle, what should characterize the plots of the FINEST tragedies?
They should not be simple but COMPLEX.
Finest plot consists of
- SINGLE COMPLETE ACTION
- CHANGE FROM GOOD FORTUNE TO BAD not because of flaw in character, but because of ERROR
- For this plot to effect a sense of pity and terror in the audience, the characters have to be perceived as GOOD. (we have to be able to relate to the characters - they can neither be completely good or irrevocably bad)
According to Aristotle, what does pity and terror require?
- undeserved suffering
- hero’s vulnerability to luck
- his/her reversal of fortune from good to bad (their fall)
(also the assumption that the character is not totally good or bad)
Something that was tested in Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’ubervilles.
According to Aristotle, when are tragedy and poetry their most effective with respect to the poet?
Tragedy and poetry are most effective when a poet is able to experience emotions directly himself because he is able to access them most accurately and truthfully and thus is able to conjure these same feelings in the audience or reader most effectively. The poet lives the emotions he represents.
For this reason, Aristotle believes the best poets to be either geniuses (adaptable) or madmen (can step outside themselves).
Similar to Plato, he believes poetry to be a divine possession or madness, but sees the ABILITY of the writer to SYMPATHETICALLY IDENTIFY with his character’s emotions as the mechanism by which he can express them most TRUTHFULLY ; thereby, increasing ART’S POWER to express UNIVERSAL TRUTH.
Aristotle’s Poetics gave rise to a number of questions.
What does Hayden White (1978) comment on the matter in “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” and is reiterated by Raymond Williams (Modern Tragedy, 1966) and Eagleton with regards to the distinction between HISTORY and POETRY?
HAYDEN WHITE finds that Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry obscures as much as it illuminates about both.
He asks us to consider the MIMETIC aspect of historical narratives (key word narrative), and therefore cannot be considered purely objective.
Historians also practice emplotment, like tragedians, by selecting, ordering, synthesizing, and prioritizing, a kind of invention.
RAYMOND WILLIAMS’S plea is not to cut off tragedy as a literary genre from real life tragedy and historical catastrophe. Universalism runs the risk of bracketing off history. (Aristotle’s account of tragic and poetic form is DEHISTORICIZED and DEPOLITICIZED (leading to assumption that Aristotle’s Poetics is a formalist one).
In the 20th century and contemporary literary theory, there is a divide between INTRINSIC criticism of formalists, and EXTRINSIC criticism of reader response theorists.
How is Aristotle’s Poetics classified by Eagleton, Steiner, and Goulimari?
Eagleton calls Poetics an early example of “reception theory”, studying the effects of tragedy on the audience.
Steiner, calls it a formal theory.
Goulimari posits that Aristotle is both a formalist and reader-response critic. We should combine the two ideas above.
