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.