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The flaw of aristotle's theory of tragedy
The flaw of aristotle's theory of tragedy
Modern concept of tragedy in contrast to the medieval era
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There is no doubt that tragedy has changed considerably since Aristotle first wrote the definition of tragedy in his Poetics in Ancient Greece, but these changes raise the question of whether modern tragedy still fits the classical definition of tragedy. Tragedy has evolved greatly since the times of the classical tragedies, including Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, to the more modern forms of tragedy, as seen in The Hairy Ape and Death of a Salesman. Despite its evolution and deviation from Aristotle’s definition, modern tragedy holds by the same principles, and retains the same power and message expressed by Aristotelian tragedy. Aristotle clearly defined the tenants of a tragedy in his Poetics. Some of the more important tenants play a large role …show more content…
While this change, as well as the changes in play production and the culture in the audience that views these plays, has had a great impact on the evolution of the tragedy, the basic ideas laid down by Aristotle remain adhered to, if not always in the way he wrote them. The tragic hero, Willy Loman, is of little virtue, being in financial trouble and growing more and more reminiscent in his old age. His fall is aided by his tragic flaw, that his pride in “selling yourself” will get one anywhere hey need to be in life, slowly tears his life apart, as well as creating unrealistic expectations of his son, thus bringing his demise. The play arouses fear and pity just as well as any classical work, possibly even more effectively due to the reatability of the “common man.” Just as in The Hairy Ape, the tragic hero dies, forcing the underlying evil on to the audience. This evolution to the common man can be explained through the evolution of society alongside tragedy. In the time of Aristotle, the best way to make a commentary on both societal and familial issues was through the eyes of nobility, which dealt with both. As time went on, however, the emergence of new societal and social issues such and women’s or worker’s rights led to the more effective tragic hero to be that of the “common man,” for they saw these issues in a was the aristocracy never could. These societal changes combined with the readability of the common man led to a shift in the tragic hero, yet never changed the underlying meaning of tragedy laid down in Aristotle’s
...ods come for the free drugs that he offers. Johnny is a man for whom we feel pride, shame and pity all at once but such a contradictory character would be unstable and unpredictable. Aristotle defines tragedy according to seven characteristics. These are that it is characterized by mimicry, it is serious, it expresses a full story of a relevant length, it contains rhythm and harmony, the rhythm and harmony occur in different combinations in different parts of the tragedy, it is performed not narrated and that it provokes feelings of pity and fear then purges these feelings through catharsis the purging of the emotions and emotional tensions. The composition of a tragedy consists of six segments. In order of relevance, these are plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and performance. For a comedy the ending must be merry. Instead Jerusalem ends in death.
Set ages apart, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex provide different perspectives on the topic of tragedy and what is defined as a tragic hero. Although Oedipus would be thought of as better representing the tragic hero archetype due to tradition and time period, the modern tragic hero of Oedipus Rex is more of a dismal one. Through analysis of their respective hamartias, it is exemplified that the New York businessman with his humble story proves to be more thought provoking than the King of Thebes and his melancholic tale. **By incorporating a more relatable character and plot, Arthur Miller lends help to making Willy Lowman spiral toward his own downfall while building more emotion and response from the audience than with Oedipus. When Oedipus learns of his awful actions, this invokes shock and desperation. With Willy Lowman, the audience goes for a bumpy ride until the eventual, but expected, crash. ** (NEEDS WORK)
In addition, Aristotle’s article was explaining what elements a tragedy had in it. He states “Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear.” (Aristotle, 1). The character can’t be all good or all bad and the audience has to be able to connect with them. Aristotle states “The tragic flaw is having a lot of pride that causes the hero to ignore a divine warning or break a moral law.” (Aristotle, 1). A tragedy has six main parts to it, a plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. “A tragic plot needs to be single and complex.” (Aristotle, 3). The character has a lot of characteristics in order to fit the requirements. First, “the character has to be good in some way. They need to act appropriate for their gender. They mus...
The tradition of the tragedy, the renowned form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis, has principally become a discontinued art. Plays that evoke the sense of tragedy-the creations of Sophocles, Euripides, and William Shakespeare-have not been recreated often, nor recently due to its complex nature. The complexity of the tragedy is due to the plot being the soul of the play, while the character is only secondary. While the soul of the play is the plot, according to Aristotle, the tragic hero is still immensely important because of the need to have a medium of suffering, who tries to reverse his situation once he discovers an important fact, and the sudden downturn in the hero’s fortunes. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is the modern tragedy of a common man named Willy Loman, who, like Oedipus from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, exhibits some qualities of a tragic hero. However, the character Willy Loman should not be considered a full-on tragic hero because, he although bears a comparable tragic flaw in his willingness to sacrifice everything to maintain his own personal dignity, he is unlike a true tragic hero, like Oedipus, because he was in full control of his fate where Oedipus was not.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C. believed that tragedy, as an imitation or mimesis of life as it could be, held more importance than history, which simply records the past. He considered that performance of a tragedy provided the perfect cathartic experience for an audience, leaving them spiritually purified and inspired. He felt spectators seeing and experiencing great hardship befall the play’s hero or heroine would achieve this emotional state and benefit from it.
Most readers are aware of the many famous deaths or acts of death within the Shakespearean plays. And when the main characters die in Shakespeare’s plays, indeed, the readers would categorize the play as a tragedy. The problem with any tragedy definition is that most tragic plays do not define the tragedy conditions explained or outlined by Aristotle. According to Telford (1961), a tragedy is a literary work that describes the downfall of an honorable, main character who is involved on historically or socially significant events. The main character, or tragic hero, has a tragic fault, the quality that leads to his or her own destruction. In reading Aristotle’s point of view, a tragedy play is when the main character(s) are under enormous pressure and are incapable to see the dignities in human life, which Aristotle’s ideas of tragedy is based on Oedipus the King. Shakespeare had a different view of tragedy. In fact, Shakespeare believed tragedy is when the hero is simply and solely destroyed. Golden (1984) argued the structure of Shakespearean tragedy would be that individual characters revolved around some pain and misery.
On the other hand, another type of tragic hero exists, the modern tragic hero. This type of hero is a product of a clash between the individual and the social environment. Arthur Miller, the famous playwright, said, “each person has a chosen image of self and position, tragedy results when the character’s environment denies the fulfillment of this self concept.” (LATWP, 640). This is a contrast from Aristotle’s classic tragic hero because the hero is no longer born into nobility but gains stature in the action of pitting self against the cosmos, and the tragedy becomes, “the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world.”
If nothing else, this essay has proven the synthesis of Aristotelian and unconventional tragic elements, through the use of the tragic hero, the three unities and the support of a cathartic response from the audience. Also though, with disregard to many Aristotelian rules, to create perhaps not a dramatic success by Aristotle?s ideals, but undoubtedly an effective and challenging text which is Medea.
Aristotle’s tragic hero is made up of three requirements. The protagonist of the play must be a person of high estate. This allows the protagonist to fall from power or happiness to create a tragedy. The next requirement is the protagonist mus...
In Arthur Miller’s essay, Tragedy and the Common Man, Miller creates a distinction from classical tragedies by creating a modern tragedy. Aristotle’s classic tragedy is, “an imitation of an action that is serious and complete in the mode of action and is not narrated. It effects pity and fear which is called catharsis. It has a beginning, middle, and end and its function is to tell of such things that might happen in the future- to express the universal” (Aristotle). To produce the feelings of either pity or fear, reversal, which is, “the change from one state of affairs to its exact opposite” (Aristotle), and recognition, which is, “the change from ignorance to knowledge, on the part of those who are marked for good fortune or bad” (Aristotle) must both ...
...n Aristotle’s view of characters. Aristotle also suggests that a tragedy should have the power to provoke audience’s emotion of pity and fear. The suffering and behavior of each character in Hamlet possess that power. The author agrees with the Aristotelian analysis of Hamlet, the story of Hamlet was perfectly based on Aristotle’s tragedy theory. However, the author thinks that the tragedy doesn’t always have to end up in misery. A tragic story can also have some hidden happiness in the suffering, misery of tragic hero(s), in which way can audience realize that there is still hopeful when your life is tragic and encourage people to strive hard to create a better life.
In contemporary film and theater, the term “tragedy” has come to mean little more than a sad story. A modern tragedy may feature a person from any walk of life coming to an unpleasant end. But the origin of this genre, the Greek Tragedy, was far more than just an unfortunate tale. Greek playwrights believed that a tragedy must have a tragic hero who meets specific criteria. The tragic hero must begin the play as a man above men, typically a man of nobility. He must also possess a personality defect – known as the tragic flaw – such as selfishness, greed, or pride. The hero’s fault will be directly responsible for his “fall from grace,” wherein he loses his status or reputation. After the fall of the hero comes his enlightenment. During enlightenment,
A tragic play is a combination of dramatic scenes that act out a tragic event and usually labors unhappy endings. The play would usually portray the downfall of the main character. According to Aristotle, “Every Tragedy therefore must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.” Based on Aristotle’s definition, Oedipus and Hamlet are a good examples tragedy. They both have been developed with a strong Plot and Characters. According to Aristotle, Plot is considered to be “the soul of tragedy” and very important in a play. Aristotle also implies Character to be second in line when it comes to developing a successful tragedy.
In 350 B.C.E., a great philosopher wrote out what he thought was the definition of a tragedy. As translated by S.H. Butcher, Aristotle wrote; “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. . . . Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Characters, Thought, Diction, Spectacle, Melody. (http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html)” Later in history, William Shakespeare wrote tragedies that epitomized Aristotle’s outline of a tragedy. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one such tragedy.
In Aristotle’s book, Poetics, he defines tragedy as, “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear” (Aristotle 1149). Tragedy creates a cause and effect chain of actions that clearly gives the audience ideas of possible events. The six parts to Aristotle’s elements of tragedy are: Plot, character, language, thought, spectacle, and melody. According to Aristotle, the most important element is the plot. Aristotle writes in Poetics that, “It is not for the purpose of presenting their characters that the agents engage in action, but rather it is for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters they have” (Aristotle 1150). Plots should have a beginning, middle, and end that have a unity of actions throughout the play making it complete. In addition, the plot should be complex making it an effective tragedy. The second most important element is character. Characters...