The Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) 
Email: joe.sachs@sjc.edu Well then, lets consider the opposite experiment, in which a drama arouses fear in a powerful way, but arouses little or no pity. There is some truth in that, but it misses what is wonderful or wondrous about wonder. But are there really no wonders that are ugly? 26).
The poet must have an eye for the emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the actions that are worth paying attention to. But at the end of the poem, Achilles has lost interest in glory.
Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy.
He tells us that on this voyage, when so much seemed lost, every traveller found himself When no man was his own (V, i, 206-13). The monstrosities that used to be exhibited in circus side-shows are wonders too, are they not? There are potentially as many kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions. In Book XVIII, Achilles has realized what mattered most to him when it is too late. For those of us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. In the one case the tension built up along the way is released within the experience of the work itself; in the other it passes off as we leave the theater, and readjust our feelings to the fact that it was, after all, only make-believe.
Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear. There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, or in some way equivalent to, what they dealt out. It is not so strange that we learn the worth of something by losing it; what is astonishing is what the tragedians are able to achieve by making use of that common experience.
Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly uses the adverb logiks, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with phusiks, naturally or appropriately, to describe arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own. This is again a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or in a recent fashion, the mad-slasher movie. They lift it up into a state of wonder. The beautiful always produces wonder, if it is seen as beautiful, and the sense of wonder always sees beauty. By following Aristotles lead, we have now found five marks of tragedy: (1) it imitates an action, (2) it arouses pity and fear, (3) it displays the human image as such, (4) it ends in wonder, and (5) it is inherently beautiful.
It is possible that tragedy purifies the feelings themselves of fear and pity. Aristotle does understand tragedy as a development out of the childs mimicry of animal noises, but that is in the same way that he understands philosophy as a development out of our enjoyment of sight-seeing (Metaphysics I, 1).
They are not present in the world in such a way that a video camera could detect them. I will not consider here what is depicted on the shield of Achilles, but only the meaning in the poem of the shield itself. There is a chain of effects from Gloucesters adultery to his mutilation, but it is not a sequence that reveals the true cause of that horror. La verdad que la dinmica del curso de excel me permiti mejorar mi manejo de las planillas de clculo. Fear can obviously be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with anxiety. There is always pleasure in strong emotion, and the theater is a harmless place to indulge it. Sophocles is not training my feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder. ), or Macbeth protesting to his wife I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none (I, vii, 47-8), or Oedipus taunting Teiresias with the fact that divine art was of no use against the Sphinx, but only Oedipus own human ingenuity (Oed. Why does he single out these two passions? The passion of the Iliad moves from anger through pity and fear to wonder. Sophocles does make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch the Oedipus Tyrannus, but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery that they belong to a surprising object. The feeling in this moment out of time is fragile, and Achilles feels it threatened by tragic fear. That suggests that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation of passions in ways that are pleasant in the short run and at least reckless to pursue repeatedly. Would that I had the power to hide him far away from death and the sounds of grief when grim fate comes to him, but I can see that beautiful armor surrounds him, of such a kind that many people, one after another, who look on it, will wonder (463-67). 
Some interpreters think he means them only as examplespity and fear and other passions like thatbut I am not among those loose constructionists. He is speaking of the imitation of action, and by action he does not mean mere happenings. Al finalizar, podrs acceder a la certificacin de FUNDAES y a la certificacin Universitaria.
His beloved Homer saw and achieved the most important possibilities of the imitation of human action, but it was the tragedians who, refined and intensified the form of that imitation, and discovered its perfection. Finally, there is the perception of that of which the sensible qualities are attributes, the thingthe son of Diares, for example; it is this that we ordinarily mean by perception, and while its object always has an image in the imagination, it can only be distinguished by intellect, nos (III,4).
El Profesor Juan Capora estuvo siempre a disposicin y me permiti consolidar mis conocimientos a travs de prcticas y ejemplos 100% reales. On the other hand, fear might have a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear.
And if we did not feel that they were genuine individuals, they would have no power to engage our emotions. I could add more examples of this kind by the dozen, and your memories will supply others. The character Alonso, in the power of the magician Prospero, spends the length of the play in the illusion that his son has drowned.
We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions in a destructive way, and we could add others.
Aristotle does use a word that means passions of that sort (toiouta), but I think he does so only to 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. But Stephano is not like the holiday fools who pay to see monstrosities like two-headed calves or exotic sights like wild men of Borneo. They see the beauty in two men who have lost almost everything. Let us take counsel from the honest old councilor Gonzalo, who always has the clearest sight in the play. He does not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or such a thing as motion, though some people deny both. He describes himself truly as a most poor man, made tame to fortunes blows, Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, Am pregnant to good pity (IV, vi, 217-19). People came casually up to its tank, were startled, made noises of disgust, and turned away. There is a way of missing the mark that is opposite to condescension, and that is the excess of pity called sentimentality.
Tragedy is about central and indispensable human attributes, disclosed to us by the pity that draws us toward them and the fear that makes us recoil from what threatens them. Ingresa a nuestra tienda e inscrbete en el curso seleccionando una de las 2 modalidades online: 100% a tu ritmo o con clases en vivo.
Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some purpose. The feelings they arouse are subordinated to another effect. This is all the more remarkable, since Achilles has for days been repeatedly trying to take out his raging grief on Hectors dead body. (Incidentally, there is an excellent small book called Woe or Wonder, the Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy, by J. V. Cunningham, that demonstrates the continuity of the traditional understanding of tragedy from Aristotle to Shakespeare.) But between Edgars moralizing and her gushing there is a range of appropriate pity. St. Johns College Why shouldnt some tragedy arouse pity and joy, say, and another fear and cruelty? Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does not give way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make us wallow mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he arouses in us shows us what is precious in us, in the act of its being violated in another. Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. Certificados con aplicaciones internacionales y validez en LinkedIn. Like Alonso in the Tempest, Achilles ultimately finds himself.
What is wrong with that? I am not trying to make a paradox, but to describe a marvel. 9 Now tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also of objects of fear and pity, and these arise most of all when events happen contrary to expectation but in consequence of one another; for in this way they will have more wonder in them than if they happened by chance or by fortune, since even among things that happen by chance, the greatest sense of wonder is from those that seem to have happened by design. Those last words also mean I have killed him. In his desolation, Achilles has at last chosen to act. This is exactly what a tragedy does to us, and exactly what we experience in looking at Achilles. How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be understood in this way?
Within our small group of exemplary poetic works, there are two that do not have the tragic form, and hence do not concentrate all their power into putting us in a state of wonder, but also depict the state of wonder among their characters and contain speeches that reflect on it. Of the two, Achilles is the closer model of the spectator of a tragedy, because Alonso plunges deep into remorse before he is brought back into the shared world.
The answer is everything. Are we like Iago, who has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about himself (Oth. In the strange fusion of this scene, what Achilles fears is himself; dont irritate me any longer now, old man, he says when Priam tries to hurry along the return of Hectors body, dont stir up my heart in its griefs any more now, lest I not spare even you yourself (560, 568-9). If Priam is like Achilles father, then Hector must come to seem to Achilles to be like a brother, or to be like himself. Tyr. And while the tearjerker gives us an illusion of compassionate delicacy, the unrestrained shock-drama obviously has the effect of coarsening feeling.
All his old longings for glory and revenge fall away, since they have no place in the sight in which he is now absorbed. Achilles and Priam cry together, each for his own grief, as each has cried so often before, but this time a miracle happens. Chs.
First, let us consider what tragic pity consists in.
But he has already been there for three hours in his imagination; he says earlier my son i th ooze is bedded; and Ill seek him deeper than eer plummet sounded And with him there lie mudded (III, iii, 100-2).
The horror movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged, temporarily, by being fed. We, however, can see better why he starts there by trying out a few simple alternatives. As Aristotle says, in a tragedy, a happy ending doesnt make us happy. The wonder of this sight takes Achilles out of his self-pity, but back into himself as a son and as a sharer of human misery itself.
On virtually every page of the Tempest, the word wonder appears, or else some synonym for it. Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and forgiveness, true instances of action in Aristotles sense of the word, and we need all the human powers to recognize what these poets put before us. When, in Book XVIII, Achilles had accepted his doom (115), it was part of a bargain; I will lie still when I am dead, he had said, but now I must win splendid glory (121). When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling us what a strange thing a human being is, that passes beyond all boundaries (lines 332 ff. Ch. Let us shift our attention for a moment to the Tempest.
In De Anima, he distinguishes three kinds of perception (II, 6; III, 3). They are Homers Iliad and Shakespeares Tempest. Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no fear at all. Let us look at other things it might mean.
In his loss, we pity him.
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. Imagine a well written, well made play or movie that depicts the losing struggle of a likable central character.
J. V. Cunningham describes it in the book I mentioned as the shocked limit of all feeling, in which fear, sorrow, and joy can all merge. It belongs to pity itself to be two-sided, since any feeling of empathy can be given a perverse twist by the recognition that it is not oneself but another with whom one is feeling a shared pain. This is no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of what is human as such. Chs. Genuine human pity could not co-exist with the so-called graphic effects these films use to keep scaring us. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a tear-jerker. 
But the mere mention of these names makes it obvious that they are not generalized characters, but altogether particular. Alonsos grief is aroused by an illusion, an imitation of an action, but his repentance is real, and is slowly transforming him into a different man.
In the grip of wonder they do not see enemies. They see a son a father should be proud of and a father a son should revere. To have him alive again, Alonso says, I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies (V, i, 150-2). In our mounting fear that Oedipus will come to know the truth about himself, we feel that something of our own is threatened.
Aristotle is insistent that a tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way can it be beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over epic poetry to its greater unity and concentration (ch. The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation.
The Greeks are driven back to their ships, as Achilles had prayed they would be, and know that they are lost without him. All tragedies are beautiful. People speak of watching football, or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. 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. This is a successful dramatic formula, arousing in us destructive desires that are fun to feel, along with the self-righteous illusion that we are really superior to the character who displays them. A revelation, as the word indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, that produces either friendship or hatred in people marked out for good or bad fortune. But the Iliad is, as Aristotle says, the prototype of tragedy; it is not a poem that aims at conferring glory but a poem that bestows the gift of wonder.
The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and Homer, who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which he composed, but shares with them the things that matter most.
Our souls are so many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two really are opposite.
Cursos online desarrollados por lderes de la industria. Aristotles use of the word catharsis is not a technical reference to purgation or purification but a beautiful metaphor for the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling of being washed or cleansed. From the beginning of Book XVIII (23, 27, 33), Achilles hands are referred to over and over and over, as he uses them to pour dirt on his head, to tear his hair, and to kill every Trojan he can get his hands on. The first poem in our literary heritage, and Shakespeares last play, both belong to a conversation of which Aristotles Poetics is the most prominent part. The word pity tends to have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of condescension that diminishes its object. But what pleasure is this to me now, he says to his mother, when my beloved friend is dead, Patroclus, whom I cherished beyond all friends, as the equal of my own soul; I am bereft of him (80-82). Again, as with the tear-jerker, it doesnt much matter whether it ends happily or with uneasiness, or even with one last shock, so indeterminate is its form. Because that thing he makes has the form of an action, it has to be seen and held together just as actively and attentively by us as by him.
The word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because the word wonder, to rhaumaston, replaces it, first in chapter 9, where Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does, and finally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges. The closest thing I know to the feeling at the end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful.
Who is this new man? Achilles cannot be brought to such a reflection by reasoning, nor do the feelings in which he has been embroiled take him in that direction. The playwright who makes us feel that way will probably be popular, but he is a menace. 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. Ven a FUNDAES Instituto de Capacitacin y preparate para dar el prximo paso. Quers formar parte de nuestro cuerpo docente?
It has been argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are all about, but it doesnt match up with my experience. But wonder is itself a feeling, the one to which Miranda is always giving voice, the powerful sense that what is before one is both strange and good.
What is this muddy ooze?
It is not a word he uses loosely, and in fact his use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the discussion in the Ethics. Hector, who must go up against those hands, is mesmerized by them; they are like a fire, he says, and repeats it.
The famous first word of the Iliad, mnis, wrath, has come back at the beginning of Book XXIV in the participle meneainn (22), a constant condition that Lattimore translates well as standing fury. But all this hardened rage evaporates in one lamentation, just because Achilles shares it with his enemys father.
While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of the worse or baser parts of it. There are people who use the word sentimental for any display of feeling, or any taking seriously of feeling, but their attitude is as blind as Edgars. This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight, and that seems exactly right.
This is a powerful kind of human communication, and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm. It takes form and has its being in the imagination of the spectator. 4).
By imitation, Aristotle does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that approximate the sound of frogs. Pity is one of the instruments by which a poet can show us what we are. 6 A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious and has a wholeness in its extent, in language that is pleasing (though in distinct ways in its different parts), enacted rather than narrated, culminating, by means of pity and fear, in the cleansing of these passions So tragedy is an imitation not of people, but of action, life, and happiness or unhappiness, while happiness and unhappiness have their being in activity, and come to completion not in a quality but in some sort of action Therefore it is deeds and the story that are the end at which tragedy aims, and in all things the end is what matters most So the source that governs tragedy in the way that the soul governs life is the story. But Dostoyevski depicts a character who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while she wallows in her warm feelings her coach-driver is shivering outside. Acceso 24 horas al da para que aprendas a tu propio ritmo y en espaol. Achilles grief is transformed into satisfaction, and cleansed from his chest and his hands (513-14). An intelligent, feeling, shaping human soul must find them. 