The Zen of Writing combines words and direct intuitive insight that takes your writing where you want it to go.
The Kansas City school system is going bankrupt. The United States has spent $1 billion in Haiti. Where is, “We Are the World”, John Travolta, the Church of Scientology, Sean Penn, American churches, etc. The Kansas City school system needs your help, folks.
Aristotle, The Poetics
Aristotle’s Poetics is a fragmentary work; originally it was a text for use by philosophy students rather than by the general public. The part which survives is mostly about Tragedy. The most notable thing about Aristotle’s view of the poetical process is that he sees it as an ‘imitation’ (mimesis) of real situations, rather than invention. But since it is a mental abstraction derived from many single instances, it is `truer’ than any individual situation, because it is more ‘universal’, more general, or (as Plato might have said) it participates in the Ideal to a greater degree.
The PROCESS OF IMITATION in Tragedy includes:
(1) language [diction]
(2) meter [rhythm]
(3) music
(4) dance [movement]
The SUBJECT MATTER OF TRAGEDY is THE ACTIVITY OF HUMAN BEINGS, either seen as
(a) IDEALIZED [heroic deeds, klea andron]
(b) REALISTIC [average human activities]
(c) CARICATURIZED [comedic exaggeration of reality]
EPIC AND TRAGEDY compared and contrasted:
THE EPIC TRAGEDY
idealized men & women idealized men & women
direct and indirect narrative direct narrative
dactylic hexameter various meters
open-ended length limited length [usually one day, the ‘unity of time’]
PURPOSE OF DRAMA:
According to Aristotle the purpose of Drama is to arouse in the audience feelings of PITY and FEAR, and to purge these emotions (catharsis), thereby making people stronger emotionally.
ELEMENTS OF DRAMA:
(1) scenery and costume (spectacle)
(2) musical score (organized sound)
(3) libretto (the text, diction)
(4) characterization
(5) thought content (themes and ideas)
(6) plot (action: METABOLE)
Since a drama is dynamic, it is PLOT which governs the whole. In fact, music and spectacle can be omitted (as in the reading of a play) while the effect of the drama is still preserved. A PLOT must have: a beginning, a middle and an end; it must be of a certain length (neither too long nor too short); it must have unity of theme (connection actions, not random items); it must be graspable by the mind and memory both in its parts and as a whole.
PLOT can be
(a) simple (without `reversal’ [PERIPATEIA] or `discovery’ [anagnoresis])
(b) complex (with either Peripateia or Anagnoresis)
ANAGNORESIS
(1) by signs or tokens, or marks on the body ‘recognition’
(2) arbitrary, by direct discoveries invented by author
(3) awakened memory (recall of forgotten events)
(4) logical reasoning, or sophistical reasoning
(5) discovery from incidents, in a `probable’ manner.
-John Paul Adams, CSUN
john.p.adams@csun.edu
“…A Cal Tech seismologist was aware of the natural forces that are working slowly but inexorably under the earth, out of sight, unnoticed, setting off reactions and counterreactions in fragile earth faults deep in the bowels of the earth. There was no reliable way, despite all the scientific research, to predict them — except for the behavior of animals trying to escape the doomed area. Nobody but the horses, dogs, birds, fish, rats and cockroaches, fleeing their forest or city homes, seem to know with certainty when a temblor is about to strike, and then, alas, only a few hours before the event.
In Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the day before a major quake the forest became silent, and visitors wondered at the absence of the chirping birds. They didn’t wonder long. Twenty-four hours later a devastating life-threatening quake shook the wild nature preserve, uprooting trees and buildings and causing widespread damage. Showing some primal connection between animal life — closer to nature than man — and the natural forces brimming under the surface of the earth. And in its heavens.
-Dick Sutphen