Aristotle

10 Key excerpts on "Aristotle"

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  A History of Literary Criticism

  From Plato to the Present

  • M. A. R. Habib(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Like philosophy, it seeks to express universal truths, which are not constrained by reference to particular elements of reality. Its relation to reality is governed by the notions of probability and necessity. Also classical in outlook is Aristotle’s insistence on distinguishing clearly between different genres in a hierarchical manner: comedy, which deals with “low” characters and trivial matter, ranks lowest; epic, which includes various plots and lengthy narration, falls below tragedy, which is more concentrated and produces a greater effect of unity. Again, the insistence on propriety and consistency of character is classical. Finally, Aristotle’s view of the audience as an elite profoundly affects his prescriptions for the construction of tragedy. Aristotle’s notions anticipate developments in several areas of literary criti-cism: the issue of poetic imitation, the connection between art and reality, the distinc-tion between genres as well as between high and low art, the study of grammar and language, the psychological and moral effects of literature, the nature and function of the audience, the structure and rules of drama, as well as the notions of plot, narrative, and character. All of these notions are still profoundly pervasive in our thinking about literature and the world. The Poetics is usually recognized as the most influential treatise in the history of literary criticism. For a long time, however, the Poetics was lost to the Western world and often misrepresented. It was available through the Middle Ages and the early part of the Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by the philosopher Ibn Rushd, known to the Latin West as Averroës. While Aristotle by the later Middle Ages had supplanted Plato as the predominant influence on philosophy and theology, Horace remained the most powerful classical influence on literary criti-cism.

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  Literary Criticism and Theory

  From Plato to Postcolonialism

  • Pelagia Goulimari(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Aristotle and tragedy From Poetics to postcolonial tragedy

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203487198-3

  Aristotle, Horace, Sidney, Richardson, Johnson, Hegel, Shelley, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Steiner, Williams, Soyinka, White, Nussbaum, Cixous, Eagleton, Quayson, Reiss

  In this chapter we will outline Aristotle’s literary theory, focusing on his Poetics and his understanding of tragedy. We will then trace Aristotle’s influence and sketch out the development of tragic theory and practice up to the present.

  Aristotle (384–322 BC) studied with Plato for many years. Unlike Plato, he was not an Athenian, though he lived, studied and taught in Athens for a large part of his life. Aristotle came from the kingdom of Macedonia, a region of the ancient Greek world that, in his lifetime, rose to succeed Athens and Sparta as the leader of that world, first with Philip II and then with Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s father was the royal physician to Alexander’s grandfather, while Aristotle himself was Alexander’s tutor. He benefited from this association until Alexander’s early death, though Alexander’s great favourite was the Iliad and its hero Achilles, rather than the works of his tutor.

  Aristotle’s early works, like Plato’s, were dialogues; unfortunately none of them have survived. His mature works are systematic expositions of their subject area aiming at comprehensiveness, that is, they are more like philosophical works as we tend to think of them than are Plato’s dialogues. Unlike Plato’s works, no one could mistake Aristotle’s works for literature or read them for aesthetic pleasure. At first glance, the difference between Plato and Aristotle is deceptively huge. One could say that Plato insists on the difference between philosophy and literature but writes philosophical works in a literary form; Aristotle argues for a rapprochement of philosophy and literature but doesn’t practice it. Unlike Plato, who is a visionary often starting from the ideal world of Forms as the realm of being and truth, Aristotle is more of an empiricist and a scientist tending to start from careful observation of the particular and the already existing and then moving up, classifying the particular into general categories, as part of a system. However, these are oversimplifications, as Plato’s method has both an “upward” and a “downward” path, and Aristotle follows him in this.

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  Interpreting the Play Script

  Contemplation and Analysis

  • Anne Fliotsos(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Methuen Drama

    (Publisher)

  Remarkably, the Poetics continues to be a foundational text in the analysis of drama some 2,400 years later, though it has also sparked debate. Over the centuries Aristotle’s Poetics has been interpreted by art-ists and critics in a variety of ways, at times skewing his origi-nal ideas or taking them out of context. During the European Renaissance, for example, Aristotle’s ideas were interpreted through the writings of the Roman philosopher Horace. During the French Renaissance, neoclassicists of the French Academy codified “rules” for writers based on Aristotle via Horace, though Aristotle himself never prescribed rules per se . In the Poetics , his prime objective was to observe and classify dramatic literature in a manner similar to the classification of genus and species in ani-mal and plant life. (Biology and zoology were among Aristotle’s many areas of scientific research, and classification was a part of his study of the natural world.) Implicit in Aristotle’s writing are biases based on Greek culture of the time, a culture which viewed women and slaves as having less worth, or at best different purposes, than Greek-born male citizens. Despite the cultural differences reflected in the drama, we can borrow from Aristotle’s classification system and defini-tions, applying these concepts to our understanding of Greek drama and retooling some of his statements to fit more contem-porary plays. Aristotle’s tools remain useful, but should not be considered out of the context for which they were originally written, particularly in terms of value judgments of “good” or “bad” practices of play construction. For example, Aristotle held that the episodic plot was of lesser quality than the causal (lin-ear) plot, a concept we no longer embrace in modern theatre. Aristotle revealed: breaking down the Poetics 2 The first step in any study of Aristotle is to read his actual text.

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  Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers

  • Alessandro Giovannelli(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 Aristotle (384–322 BCE) Angela Curran The Poetics by Aristotle is the first and most important work of a philo-sophical account of an art form ever written. In the Greek, the title means, “On the poetic [craft]” ( Peri poe ¯ tike ¯s ), but much of the Poetics focuses on a specific genre of poetry: ancient Greek tragedy, specifi-cally Greek tragedy performed in the fifth and fourth century BCE. The meaning of its key ideas— especially the concept of katharsis —has been hotly disputed. The recommendations for plot and character in the Poetics has been both widely influential on playwrights—and, more recently, screenwriters—and chastised by others for its rigid prescrip-tions for tragic plots and characters. But whether embraced or criticized, Aristotle’s views on tragedy still hold sway today and they are often taken to have implications for other forms of narrative fiction, such as the novel or film. The Poetics is currently receiving renewed interest from philosophers of art, who find in Aristotle’s work insightful sugges-tions as to how a narrative art form like tragedy engages the audience’s emotions and prompts learning. Many scholars think the works of Aristotle that have survived are in fact notes he made for himself or his students, not polished works prepared for public distribution. Aristotle’s writing style is often cryptic, compressed, and difficult to follow, with many terms in need of clari-fication. The Poetics is especially challenging in this respect due to its poor state of preservation. Internal and external evidence (specifically Politics 1341b 38–40) suggests that there was a lost second book of the Poetics that discussed comedy and the concept central to the work, katharsis . What remains is the first book, and there is a great deal of 22 Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers scholarly disagreement both at the level of details of the text and at the broader level of what overall arguments this book contains.

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  Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism

  The Humanistic Alternative

  • James Seaton(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  4 Aristotle and the Humanistic Tradition Aristotle’s response to Plato provides a model for humanistic criticism that remains valid today. Aristotle’s case for literature is all the stronger because he tacitly accepts Plato’s rejection of the notion that poets have special access to divine truth, a claim defended by the Neoplatonists and revived by the Romantics. Literature, Aristotle believes, can tell us important things about human life but little about the universe. Plays and epic poems can provide valuable insight into the sorts of things that certain sorts of people are likely to do in certain sorts of situations. Whereas Plato believed that the culture of his time was wrong about the most important things, Aristotle was willing to give due deference (although not unquestioning acceptance) to the common sense of his society, both about the value of literature and about moral questions. The humanistic tradition in literary criticism remains Aristotelian both in its view of literature as a source of insight about human life and in its willingness to judge grand theory by the norms of common sense. When literary criticism has relied overmuch on one or another overarching theory – including Aristotle’s own – for its intellectual authority, it has not only broken with common sense, but it has forfeited its role as the tradition within which the insights of novels, poems, and plays are worked out, made explicit, and their implications for personal lives and society debated. 73 For more than a thousand years, it was not Aristotle’s Poetics but Horace’s The Art of Poetry that was the most influential work of Western literary criticism. Horace’s observation that the best writer is one “who has managed to blend usefulness with pleasure,” whose work “delights his reader at the same time as he instructs him” (108) is the classic formulation of the dual emphases of the humanistic tradition.

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  The Social Impact of the Arts

  An Intellectual History

  • Eleonora Belfiore, Oliver Bennett(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The ultimate aim of Aristotle’s 5 Education and Self-Development 108 The Social Impact of the Arts response to Plato, however, was to free poetry from enslavement to the ethical sphere. As Butcher explains: Aristotle [...] was the first who attempted to separate the theory of aesthetics from that of morals. He maintains consistently that the end of poetry is a refined pleasure. In doing so he severs himself decisively from the older and more purely didactic tendency of Greece. [...] he never allows the moral purpose of the poet or the moral effects of his art to take the place of the artistic end. If the poet fails to produce the proper pleasure, he fails in the specific function of his art. He may be good as a teacher, but as a poet or artist he is bad. 1 (1951, 238) As was shown in the discussion of the category of catharsis, however, this has not prevented later thinkers from interpreting Aristotelian thinking on poetry in epistemological terms, as an argument for the formative and educational function of tragedy and poetry in general. This development rested on a crucial passage in Chapter IX of the Poetics, which has been interpreted as offering ‘an explicit statement that the nature of the learning process involved in poetry is that of see- ing the relationship between the individual act and the universal law it illustrates. It is clearly indicated that the aim of poetry is to express what is universal in the form of particular or ‘historical’ events’ (Golden 1962, 54). In Aristotle’s own words: the function of the poet [is not] to relate what has happened, but what may happen, what is possible according to the law of probabil- ity or necessity. [...] Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity [...].

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  The Origins of Criticism

  Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece

  • Andrew Ford(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  54 Synthesizing these ideas with the language-centered approaches to discourse ( logos ) that had been pion-eered in the fifth century, Aristotle developed a method of analyzing po-etry for readers who had begun to exploit the inner, verbal dynamics of song texts removed from their original contexts. My concluding question is what the critic gained by this knowledge. 54 Halliwell, in a study that minimizes the autonomy of art for Aristotle, yet observes (1986: 96), “The concept of unity, in one version or another, is one of the most pervasive and arguably indispensable criteria in the understanding of art.” TWELVE THE RISE OF THE CRITIC P O E T I C C O N T E S T S F R O M H O M E R T O A R I S T O T L E I F POETICS, in its most comprehensive and rigorously argued form, was first articulated as a topic for students of philosophy, the consoli-dation of such knowledge in itself changed the standards for exper-tise in poetry. For Aristotle’s interlocutors inside and outside the Lyceum, and for the teachers and advisers they would come to support, a knowl-edge of how poetry worked as poetry was now added to the ethical and social wisdom that had traditionally been expected of commentators on song. This hybrid skill, combining technical expertise with a broader vi-sion of social harmony, was expressed by the Greeks through the meta-phor of “judging” ( krinein ) poetry, a metaphor we still use when we recognize such a thing as “literary criticism .” It was only after the death of Aristotle, in the period of intensive literary scholarship from the third to the first centuries B . C . E ., that we find professional experts in literature claiming to be “judges” or “critics” ( kritikoi ) of poetry. Antiquity remem-bered Crates of Mallos, a scholar attached to the royal library in second-century Pergamon, as having adopted the word kritikos to name his conception of the true literary expert.

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  Aristotle on Language and Style

  The Concept of Lexis

  • Ana Kotarcic(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Aristotle’s extensive body of work has consistently attracted the attention of scholars, both ancient and modern. As a researcher of his day, Aristotle made valuable observations concerning logic, language, rhetoric, poetics, biology, meteorology, ethics and politics. All of these allowed him to engage with his environment, to participate in contemporary debates, and to become an avant-garde thinker both in his own time and for centuries to come. 1 This is not least the case with his thoughts on lexis. Like other terms used by Aristotle, this notion is notoriously difficult to translate, 2 covering in its most inclusive form the semantic field of ‘lan- guage’ and in its least inclusive form that of a particular ‘diction’ 3 or ‘style’. 4 1 See e.g. Kennedy (1963) and (1994), Halliwell (1995: 3–20); for an outline of Aristotle’s place in the history of rhetoric see Lord (1981), and A. E. Walzer et al. (2000); for the novelty of Aristotle’s thinking and proceeding see e.g. Haskins (2004); for Aristotle’s influence within ancient scholarship see the collected volumes edited by Montanari et al. (2015), and especially the entries by Lapini (2015), Novokhatko (2015), Nünlist (2015), and Swiggers and Wouters (2015). 2 For problems related to translating the term lexis see Chapter 1, ‘Aristotle’s definitions of lexis’. 3 Schenkeveld (1964: 67) defines ‘diction’ as ‘choice of words, arrangement or composition of the chosen words.’ 4 For full entries on the term lexis see Bonitz et al. (1870: 426), Ernesti (1983: 196–197), Dickey (2007: 245) and LSJ ad loc. On the development of lexis into elocutio see Calboli (1998). For the modern notion of lexis see e.g. Green (2000) and Barcroft et al. (2011); for the Greek notion of ‘style’ see Roberts (1901). For a compact overview of the main issues related to the notion and study of ‘style’ more generally see e.g.

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  J. W. H. Atkins on Literary Criticism

  • J. W. H. Atkins(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is, however, in the light of the circum- stances that produced it that the doctrine of Aristotle is perhaps best understood. Plato had complained of the dis- turbing, debilitating effects of the drama; Aristotle's defence is that the effects are really hygienic, curative in kind. And herein probabfy lies the true explanation of Aristotle's argument. He had a case to answer, a defence to make; and his theory of "catharsis", thus conditioned, is to some extent at least a piece of special pleading. Having thus defined tragedy, Aristotle proceeds in analytical fashion to consider the elements out of which it is composed; and these he describes as (i) Plot, Character, and Thought, all ofwhich are concerned with the object represented, (2) Diction and Melody, which have to do with the means ofrepresentation, and (3) Spectacle, relating to the manner of representation. 2 Of these elements, some naturally call for more attention than others; and Aristotle at once declares the plot to be of supreme importance, more important than the mere revelation of 1 v (vm), 7,1341b, 32ff. • 1450a, 9. Aristotle 87 personal qualities (Character), or the intellectual processes (Thought) of the dramatic characters concerned. And this point he is at some pains to establish, as if anxious to meet current criticisms of his day. For one thing, he maintains, tragedy being an imitation, not of men but of men in action, the plot is obviously the essential element. Characterisation he regards as merely subsidiary, since it only adds to the re- velation of what is best revealed in action. Nor does a string of speeches, however finely-wrought or expressive of character, provide the same tragic effects as a well-constructed plot; for the latter with its elements of movement and surprise possesses features which add greatly to the emotional interest.

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  A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature

  • Garry L. Hagberg, Walter Jost, Garry L. Hagberg, Walter Jost(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Poetry, for Aristotle, is a type of making, and the activity of any making occurs in the person or thing toward which the making is directed. 71 For example, the activity of the teacher teaching is occurring, not in the teacher, but in the students who are learning; the activity of the builder build-ing is occurring, not in the builder, but in the house being built. It stands to reason that, for Aristotle, the activity of the poet creating his tragedy occurs ultimately in an audience actively appreciating a performance of the play. 72 Not only does Aristotle define tragedy in terms of its effect; he thinks that various tragic plots can be evaluated in terms of their effects on an audience. We assume that, for the finest form of tragedy, the plot must be not simple but complex; and further, that it must imitate actions arousing fear and pity, since that is the distinct-ive function of this kind of imitation. It follows, therefore, that there are three forms of plot to be avoided. A good man must not be seen passing from good fortune to bad, or jonathan lear 206 a bad man from bad fortune to good. The first situation is not fear-inspiring or piteous, but simply disgusting. The second is the most untragic that can be: it has no one of the requisites of tragedy; it does not appeal either to the human feeling in us, or to our pity, or to our fears. Nor, on the other hand, should an extremely bad man be seen falling from good fortune into bad. Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity or fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves; so that there will be nothing either piteous or fear-inspiring in the situation. 73 The important point to note about this passage is that Aristotle is evaluating plots not on the basis of feelings, but on the basis of the emotions.

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