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Name:-Joshi Tejasvi A
Paper No:-03
Aristotle Poetics
Roll No:-24
Sem:-01
Assignment topic:-Aristotle Poetics
Submitted to
Department of English
Q: Aristotle’s Poetics
Introduction
Plato was a great poet, a mystic and a philosopher. Aristotle- the most distinguished disciple of
Plato- was a critic, scholar, logician and practical philosopher. The master
was an inspired genius every way greater than the disciple except in logic,
analysis and common sense. He is known for his critical treatise: (1) The
poetics and (2) The Rhetoric, dealing with art of poetry and art of speaking,
resp.
For centuries during Roman age in Europe and after renaissance,
Aristotle was honoured as a law-giver and legislator. Even today, his critical
theories remain largely relevant, and for this, he certainly deserves our
admiration and esteem.
Aristotle’s
poetics
Aristotle’s
main concern appears to be tragedy, which in his day was considered to be the
most developed from of poetry. Another part of poetics deals with comedy, but
it is unfortunately lost. In his observation on the nature and function of
poetry, he has replied the charges of Plato against poetry, wherein he partly
agrees and partly disagrees with his teacher.
How does Aristotle differentiate
various forms of art?
A
poem should be judged on how it is written rather than what it is written
about. While there are several different types of poems, all are forms of
imitation. What determines one type of a poem from another is how the subject
of the poem is presented to the audience. In fact, music is a form of imitation
as well, but uses harmony and rhythm as opposed to language and voice.
Classification
of various art forms: tragedy, comedy and epic: medium and manner of imitation
decides type of poetry.
Object
David Daiches writes explaining the classification of poetry according
to the aspect of life and the kinds of characters that are represented or
imitated. “We can classify poetry according to the kinds of people it
represents- they are either better than they are in real life, or worse, or the
same. Tragedy deals with men on a heroic scale, men better than they are in
everyday life, where as human nature, with characters ‘worse’ than they are in
real life.”
Medium
The
types of literature, says Aristotle, can, again, be distinguished according to
the medium of representation. The deference of medium between a poet and a
painter is clear; one uses words with their denotative, the other uses forms
and colours. Likewise tragedy writer may make use of one kind of metre, and the
comedy writer of another.
Manner
The third difference in artistic imitation is defined by Aristotle as
‘manner’, meaning the narrative form of a work takes while the other two
elements remain constant. Using the three differences: the medium, the objects,
and the manner which he has defined up to this point, he them uses them to
compare and contrast different artists based on how they have utilized these
imitative qualities fragment in their works. Due to this classification,
certain areas lay claim to the creation of tragedy, comedy, or both because of
the way in which their native poets have demonstrated various forms of the
three differences.
The kind of literature can be distinguished and determined also
according to the techniques they employ. David Daiches: “the poet can tell a
story in narrative form and partly through the speeches of the characters, or
it can all be done in third person narrative, or the story can be presented
dramatically, with no use of third person narrative at all”.
·
Action comprises of all human
activities including deeds, thoughts and feelings. So, Soliloquies, Chorus etc
is also action. In book v serves to
distinguish the boundaries between tragic, comic and epic poetry. Comedy is
considered to be a “lower form” of tragedy, and is not accompanied by the same
degree of history due to its previous lack of seriousness. Although there are
differences between epic and tragic poetry, tragic poetry contains all the same
elements as epic, but tragic holds elements that epic poetry does not. The
writer of ‘Tragedy’ seeks to imitate the serious side of life just as a writer
of ‘Comedy’ seeks to imitate only the shallow and superficial side.
·
Tragedy as “an imitation of an
action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude,” written as
action rather than as narrative, and which “through pity and fear effecting the
proper purgation of these emotions, because tragedy is an imitation of action
and because the emotionally powerful reversal and recognition scenes are part
of the plot, Aristotle assigns this the “first principle” of tragedy.
·
The tragic section presented on
the stage in a drama should be complete or self contained with a beginning,
middle and an end. A beginning is that before which the audience or the reader
does not need to be told anything to understand the story. If something more is
required to understand the story than the beginning gives, it is
unsatisfactory. From it follow the middle. In their turn the events from the
middle lead to the end. Thus the story becomes a compact & self sufficient
one. It must not leave the impression that even after the end the action
continues or that before the action starts certain things remain to be known.
·
It must have close-knit unit
with nothing that is superfluous or unnecessary. Every episode, every character
and a dialogue in the play must carry step the action that is set into motion
to its logical denouement. It must give the impression of wholeness at the end.
Its manner of imitation should be action, not narration as in epic, for it is
meant to be a dramatic representation, not a mere story-telling. The acceptable
sense of the statement that a story must have a beginning would seem to be that
the story must start more or less where its antecedents may be taken for
granted, that is, where they are generic rather than specifically
relevant.
One may add-for it is an idea
which readily follows that these stories have the advantage of getting off to a
fast start. A comic poet of Aristotle’s time complained:
“Your tragedian is altogether the
most fortunate of poets.” First his plot is familiar to the audience before a
line is uttered-he need only give a reminder. If I just say “Oedipus.” They
know all the rest: his father was Louis, his mother. Jocasta, fragment the
names of his sons and daughters. What he has done and what will happen to
him...Us comic playwrights have no such resources.
·
The plot should be unified,
meaning that every elements of the plot should tie in to the rest of the plot,
leaving no loose ends. This kind of unity allows tragedy to express universal
themes powerfully, which makes it superior to history, which can only talk
about particular events. Episodic plots are bad because there is no necessarily
to the sequence of events. The best kind of plot contains suprises, but
surprises that, in retrospect, fit logically into the sequence of events. The
best kinds of surprises are brought about by peripeteia, or reversal of fortune
and discovery. A good plot progresses like a knot that is tied up with
increasingly greater complexity until the moment of peripeteia, at which point
the knot is gradually untied until it reaches a completely unknotted
conclusion.
For a tragedy to
arouse pity and fear, we must observe a hero who is relatively noble going from
happiness to misery as a result of error on the part of the hero. Our pity and
fear is aroused most when it is family members who harm one another rather than
enemies or strangers. In the best kind of plot one character narrowly avoids
killing a family member unwittingly thanks to discovery that reveals the family
connection. Since both the character of the hero and the plot must have logical
consistency, Aristotle concludes that the untying of the plot must follow as a
necessary consequence of the plot and not from stage artifice, like dues ex Machina.
Aristotle
discusses thought and diction and then moves on to address epic poetry. Whereas
tragedy consists of actions presented in a dramatic form, epic poetry consists
of verse presented in a narrative form. Tragedy and epic poetry have many
common qualities most notably the unity of plot and similar subject matter. However,
epic poetry can be longer than tragedy, and because it is not performed, it can
deal with more fantastic action with a much wider scope. By contrast, tragedy
can be more focused and takes advantage of the devices of music and spectacle
epic poetry and tragedy are also written in deferent meters. After defending
poetry against changes that it deals with improbable or impossible events. The
poet is superior to the historian because the poet talks about universal truths
while the historian simply regurgitates events of the past.
Conclusion
Closing his defence of poetry, Aristotle
considers which art is higher: epic poetry or tragedy specifically, he claims
that tragedy is the higher form. Thus, Aristotle concludes that since tragedy
is superior to epic poetry in these respects and fulfils its specific function
better. Tragedy is the higher art and also weighing tragedy against epic poetry
and determining that tragedy is on the while superior.
.
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