Aristotle: Poetics


 * Aristotle
 * Son of a Macedonian doctor, skilled in biology, was from impoverished nation.
 * Did not reduce physical reality as only an illusion, unlike Plato.
 * Art CAN reveal truth.
 * Truth about human nature.
 * Believed art was more creative than just simply copying Nature.
 * Art can have an educative value.
 * Music should or studied for purgation. (Poetry as well.)
 * Kartharsis – Three possible translations of “Kartharsis.” Clarification, purification, and purification. What is clarified, purified, or purged must be either the “incidents” or the emotions of “pity and fear.”
 * Thought that art had the potential to move people in a meaningful way.
 * Aristitilean ideas – that art can be a method of detachment when it comes to death and other negatives.
 * Movie Massacre: does art cause this? Or do the types of film exist in order to live out our negative emotions w/o causing actual harm?
 * “Rules of Art”
 * All a should be service of universal truth, eternal truth,
 * Art is purposeful, not that it actually does but it has the potential to lead viewers/ reader to eternal truth
 * Aristotle led shift to Rhetorical theories
 * Horace picked up on Aristotle’s ideas; emphasized how to affect audience properly
 * Rhetorical theory – directed at audience
 * Middle Ages, Renaissance, 18th century
 * Didactic – sees literature as a method of instruction.
 * Construct a world of art so that it would most affect an audience
 * Horace – thought that poems should “either delight, or instruct, or if possible accomplish both ends at once”
 * The ideas that would emerge in the 18th century were derived from the beliefs of Aristotle and his rhetorical theory:
 * Pope and Johnson = didactic.
 * Johnson = moralist
 * 18th century = neo-classical, revived ideas of classical authors
 * Scientific Revolution has given birth tho the Modern Era, the Enlightenment by the 18th century
 * Epistemology – branch of philosophy that concerns how a particular era defines truth
 * The Enlightenment provide to the truth for the 18th century
 * Truth found through science
 * Science has given the populace control over Nature (think pastoral paintings)
 * Neo-classical art = symmetry.