Sunday 25 November 2012

ARISTOTLE



HIS LIFE AND WORKS:
·       He lived from 384 B.C. to 322 B.C.
·       He was the most distinguished deciple of Plato.
·       His father had been court physician to Amyntas, king of Macedonia.
·       He was brought up in an atmosphere of culture and refinement.
·       He came to Athens at the age of 17 and he joined Plato’s academy, whose mind was open to so many facets of knowledge. Politics, drama, poetry, physics, medicine, psychology, history, logic, ethics, astronomy, mathematics, rhetoric, natural history, biology. Etc..,.
·       Plato won humarsly remarked that his academy consisted of two parts (I). The body of his students. And (ii). The brain of Aristotle.
·       When Plato died in 347 B.C. Aristotle was not chosen as his master’s successor to the presidency of the academy.
·       In anger and fluctuation, he left Athens and he spent sometime in the court of hermeias in Asia Minor.
·       He was appointed as the tutor of Alexander.
·       Aristotle felt like a fish out of water in an atmosphere of quarrels, duels, treacheries, and assassinations that prevailed in Macedonia.
·       It was not a fit place for Aristotle’s philosophic meditations. So, he returned to Athens. He opens a school “the lyceum”. He discussed in detail three subjects. 1. God, 2. State, 3. Man.
·       He considered the nature of god in his metaphysics. The government of the state in politics and the morals of man in his ethics.
HIS WORKS:
·       He wrote above four hundred volumes in all these volumes covered practically each and every phase of human knowledge and of human activity.
·       His important works are listed below:
1.   Dialogues
2.   Organon
3.   On the soul
4.   Rhetoric
5.   Logic
6.   Endemian
7.   Ethics
8.   Physia
9.   Metaphysics
10. politics and poetics
·       Poetic is the first authentic treatise on the art of poetry and literature.
PLAN OF POETICS:
·       Poetics is a short treatise of 26th chapters and 55 pages was not composed as a book. It is merely a collection of lectures which he used to gives these students in ‘lyceum’. It may be the notes with some student or students took of his lectures, sometimes it may be the mixture of book.
·       It is believed to have had a second part which is lost.
·       He omits some of the important questions. He himself rises in the 2nd part.
·       The 1st four chapters & 25th chapter are devoted to poetry. 5th chapter in a general way deals with comedy, epic and tragedy. Tragedy is exclusively discussed in the following 14 chapter. The next 3 chapter deals with poetic diction. The last chapter is concerned with a comparison of epic, and tragedy.
OBSERVATION ON POETRY:
·       In his poetics, he developed the theories of Plato on lines of his ode.
·       He improved upon Plato’s on theory of imitation. According to him. It stood for falsehood and immorality. To Aristotle, imitation was closely related to human life. He was temperamentally different from his master Plato and his approach to literary problem was also different.
FUNCTION OF POETRY:
·       Aristotle nowhere states like Plato. That, the function of poetry is to teach and teaching however is not ruled out. If, it is incidental to the pleasure. It gives such pleasure should even regarded as superior to all others. Because, it serves a dual purpose that of itself and civic morality. Aristotle partly agrees with Plato, who as we have seen, had no use for any other art than the one that satisfied the requirements of morality.
·       Aristotle also says like Plato that poetry makes an immediate appeal to the emotion taking tragedy as the highest form of poetry. It arises the emotions of pity and fear. Pity at the undeserved sufferings of the hero and fear worst that depart him.
VALUE OF CRITICISM:
·       He was the first critic to give us the theory of poetry as opposed to its practice.
·       He was the first to highlight the universal aspects of poetry, and its representation of truth. He was the first to challenge the ethical view of poetry and assert that the primary function of poetry is to give pleasure.
·       His interpretation of imitation also his own. It is not twice removed from reality. But, an imaginative reconstruction of it, seeing the universal in the particular – comedy no less than tragedy and epic. The poetic truths are of a higher order than those of historical – a fact which Plato could not perceive.
·       Aristotle was the first to relate literature with lie and the first to stress the psychological element in literature, what kind of plot, characters and style for instance, placement.
·       He was the first to emphasize a supreme importance of unity in a work of art. In short, we may say that Aristotle is indisputably. The first of the systematic psychological methods.
OBSERVATION OF TRGEDY:
·       Tragedy, according to Aristotle consists of poems of six constituent parts, plot, character, and thought. Which, are objects it imitates or represents.
·       Diction and song which are the medium which employs to imitate these objects; and spectacle which is its manner of imitating them.
·       In order of plot comes first, character next, thought third, diction fourth, song fifth and spectacle last.
PLOT:
·       The plot which is “imitation of the action” and “the arrangement of the incidents” is the central part of tragedy, plot is more important than character.
CHARACTER:
·       Aristotle prescribes four things for character portrayal. “first and most important. It must be good, the second thing to aim at its propriety. Thirdly, character must be true to life”.
SIMPLE PLOT AND COMPLEX PLOTS:
·       Plots are either simple or complex. According to the nature of actions in real life. In an action which is one and continuous and in which the change of fortune takes place without reversal of the situation (prepeteia) and without recognition (anagnorisis) is simple.
·       A plot imitating such actions is simple. In a complex action, the change is accompanied by such reversal are by recognition or by both.
·       They arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the proceeding action.
HIS OBSERVATION ON STYLE:
·       Aristotle’s observations on style are contained in poetics and rhetoric. The object of writing is to communicate the writer’s meaning. So, it should be clear and intelligible.
·       Writing is an art. It should aim at dignity and charm. The employment of unusual words leads to loftiness and charm.
·       In rhetoric, Aristotle elaborates his comments on composition in prose and style in general
·       In the arrangement of words into sentences multiplicity of clauses, parenthesis ambiguous punctuations.
·       Words can be arranged into two kinds of style. 1. Loose or 2. Periodic. The loose style is formulas being, just a chain of sentences, being, just a reduced at build. A periodic style has a form that cannot be so easily tampered with.
·       The loose style therefore is less intelligible than the periodic and also less graceful. They are just runs on and other follows a measured force that imparts to it’s a charm of poetry.     
                  

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