TERM PAPER

Aristotle’s  Poetics

Submitted by:Uvais                       Submitted to :Dr. Shalini                                                                                                                     

           

                              DATED ON : 12/11/2015

Introduction

“With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.” 
                                                                                       ― Aristotle, Poetics

Poetics is the monumental work of  Philosophy, dramatic theory and  literary theory  in which Aristotle speaks about poetry, drama, comedy, tragedy, satyr play, lyric poetry and epic poetry. It played a vital role in the literary tradition of the western world but unfortunately it was lost and later  reproduced from  latin with the help of Arabic translation of it by Averroes for the days of middle age and the renaissance. Composed  around  330 BCE, it was mostly preserved like the  student’s lecture notes. Most importantly, in many parts of it he gives  responses  to his teacher, Plato, who has said that art is mere representation of   many appearances and it’s a waste of time as it thus misleading and morally suspect. Analysing things quite scientifically, Aristotle takes a different approach from that of his  teacher  by attempting to describe art’s social function , ethical utility and features of each “species” of the text. Any way we could say that any work of  literature  must  be  subjected to aristotlian views and Aristotle was  a man of letters who became a popular subject for many critics.

It is inevitably declared that the study  of  literary criticism and theory must be started from the poetics of Aristotle. It is a long text which contains 24 chapters. Trough this paper I would be dealing with a simple analysing of poetics.

Content

 Dealing with aristotle’s poetics is little bit complex , though, for the general understanding of  criticism it is by all means necessary. Before  going deeply to the text, I give short summary of each chapters. Aristotle comes to define the purpose of poetry as imitation, that is mimesis,in the first chapter where  he speaks about the tragedy and the comedy in the second chapter as he says that the aim of  this  imitation is representation of humanity in good and evil; it will cover the good people of  merit, the virtues of  superior men. Its kind is the tragedy. Representing mistreated  poor  people and their vices. Its kind is the laughable and the  ugly : the comedy. Trough the third chapter he describes two ways of  telling , namely, 1)  story , imitate by telling , 2)  theatre, imitating all the characters with all the characters as acting, as in act. In the next chapter it is  said  that the  poetry as the literary production by imitation and it differentiates between animals and humans. He  described the epic, tragedy and comedy trough the later chapters; The epic is a story that is not limited in time and  the tragedy should long as long as “a revolution of the sun”, or one day. The 6^th chapter defines the  tragedy is precisely  as “the imitation  of an action of high character and complete a certain extent,  in a language statement seasoning of a  particular species according to the various parties, imitation that is made by characters in action, not a story, and, arousing  pity and fear, operates  purgation  [catharsis] specific to such emotions.” Later he says that   imitation of the action is “history”  as  it arranges  of the facts  of the characters.  The seventh chapter deals with  the story ; mythos  must be in order. Tragedy is an imitation of an action  got to an end and must be fully adjusted with. It needs a good start, a good middle and  a good end where in chapter eight he makes a unit of  imitation , namely, the story cannot be changed, which  we call today the  global economy of history. In the ninth  chapter, he differentiates between historian and the poet as the historians describes the latest events where poet would say what could happen and happens in general.

In chapter ten, he simply tells simple  and  complex  plots. Then it talks about catharsis; pity and fear, reversal and recognition. The various parts of  tragedy are described in  the chapter twelve  where he reminds of the pitfalls to avoid in producing  various arts forms in the thirteenth chapter. The theory of  knotting that is the arrangement of  situations are spoken in the next chapter. Then everything related to the character is detailed in the fifteenth chapter. Goodness in the words and actions , the truth of character in the representation of character, the similiarity in the appearance of the character and the consistency of the characters are  the main characters of the character.

 Types of recognition, node and outcome, poetic style, the pronunciation and the sound, few elements in the rhetoric , appropriateness of common names and the vocabulary in the tragedy, the epic wants to be like tragedy and the tragedy is superior to epic are respectively discussed in certain chapters.

 1. Poetry as Mimesis

The first discussed topic  in the Poetics is the initial recognition  of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation. The  poet as creator, and is  offended  that he might be merely some sort of  device. The  painter  teaches us how to look and shows us what we never saw, the dramatist presents things that never imagined until he imagined them, and makes us  feel worlds we could never have found  Aristotle does not  diminish the poet, and  says  that poetry is more philosophic than history. According to Aristotle, imitation  does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that resembles the sound of frogs. He is speaking of the imitation of action, and by action he does not mean  the real happenings.

Action refers only to what is chosen for finding completion in the achievement of any purpose. Young  children  and animals  do not act in this sense, though  action is not the life of any . The poet should look  for the arrival  of action in  life, and a sense  which deserves worth attention . A feeling, intelligent, shaping human mind must find them. At the same time, the action of the drama  is not on the stage. It’s form is in the imagination of every spectator. The actors move and speak and gesture, but it is the poet speaks through them, to produce to us the thing that he has done. The imitation is by all the meaning  the thing that is re-produced for our life  by his art. The imitation would  be a powerful kind of manly communication, and the imitated thing  is what defines the human standing. Without the  power to imitate action, life will be washing  over us without leaving any model.

 Mimics those are skilled can imitate people we are related, by gesture, voice, and so on, and here already we must contact   imagination and intelligence and   together. The dramatist imitates things more remote from the eye and ear than familiar people. “Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and forgiveness, true instances of action in Aristotle's sense of the word, and we need all the human powers to recognize what these poets put before us. So the mere phrase imitation of an action is packed with meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how the image of such a thing might be perceived”

Aristotle presents   tragedy as a raise and development out of the kid's mimicry of animal voices, but in the same way that he perceives philosophy as a raise out of the enjoyment of sight-seeing.  Everythin

 g  of these raisings there was a vast number of possible interconnected stages, but how philosophy is the ultimate result and form of the desire to study, like that  tragedy is considered by Aristotle the ultimate result and  form of our innate enjoyment and delight in imitation. Homer got and achieved the important features and possibilities of the imitation of action, but the tragedians who, intensified the imitation, and achieved its perfection.

2. The style of Tragedy

 Only if a work arouses pity and fears it becomes tragedy was the opinion  of Aristotle. He uses a word which  means passions (toiouta), but many of critics   think that he  only  “indicate that pity and fear are not themselves things subject to identification with pin-point precision, but that each refers to a range of feeling.”  The another question aroused by many of  critics was why he told two states of mind. Aristotle justifies that it is the sign “of an educated person to know what needs explanation and what doesn't.” Further, he does not try to prove that there are two states of mind. But he says that those two states are helpful to be more inquired about the work and it’s consequences.

 The theater is just a platform  for the manipulation of  interests and passions in  so many  ways that are joyous and pleasant in the short run and at least longest and  reckless to continue  repeatedly. By all means, the drama could be seen as kind of many additions, which  produce the solutions  for everything.

Tragedy always  involves  finding the limits and weakness of  human. This would not be a combination of mere of intense feeling, but a

  More artistic discovering of  powers to bear  the image of the worldly representation. Aristotle is right that “the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity and fear”. Nobody can say that the artists throughout the world only try to raise pity and fear but the feelings they arouse are substituted and subordinated to another feelings and effect. “Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis. The word is used by Aristotle only the once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy.”

3.  Catharsis from the Tragedy                                                             

     Tragic catharsis is a purgation. Fear is the only one thing that can make human’s life to be anxious about something. In horror movies, they redirect our fears toward something  grotesque, external and finally ridiculous, in order to  clean and puncture them. Fear is something different, though it hid anything , feel us purgated if it is joined by the desire for thrill.

This purgation,is what we mean when we call cathartic. Making a drama more cathartic nothing matters like beauty and truth but the artistic reality.

 In Greek catharsis means purification. Purging means getting rid of it, purifying s means getting rid of the baser parts of it. Tragedy purifies the feelings of fear and pity. It happens variously in our lives too. Perhaps the poet teaches the power of imagination, sensibilities and our powers to feel by refining them in the artistic ways. “The poetic imagination is limited only by its skill, and can turn any object into a focus for any feeling. Some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. It has been argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are all about, but it doesn't match up with experience.”

conclusion

“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 then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it. Aristotle himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the Iliad for his student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric (III, xvi, 9), Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively from the intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly uses the adverb logikôs, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with phusikôs, naturally or appropriately, to describe arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own. Those who take the trouble to look at thePoetics closely will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker”.

Bibliography :
  The Norton Antghology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch B Vincent. New York: W.W Norton and Company Ltd. 2001. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1983. Print.