Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
This part of the essay is still eminently readable, but need not be analyzed here. Sufficient to say that Schiller regards the excitation of 'sympathy' as the sole aim of tragedy. He has nothing to say of the Aristotelian 'fear' or 'katharsis'; in fact he did not make the acquaintance of Aristotle until 1797.
It compresses the emotion of a Greek drama into a space of perhaps four thousand words. I find that the closing dialogue in this story is as certain in its march as the closing pages of "Riders to the Sea," and the katharsis is timeless in its final solution.
It is only when the poet thus completely realizes his characters and situations that the audience can be induced to feel sympathetically the pity and fear which produces the katharsis, so important a result of successful tragedy.
To clear the field for this inquiry, it will be well first of all to insist on a distinction which is mostly discounted in significance because taken for granted. We speak o Aristotle's Katharsis as the Tragic Emotion, forgetting that to-day Tragedy and the Tragic are no longer identical.
But before leaving this subject it is interesting to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here outlined the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in all tragic art.
"It's true, certainly. But isn't it more unpleasant than necessary?" Pleydon smiled patiently. "Beauty," he said, with his mobile gesture. "Pity, Katharsis the wringing out of all dross." The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. "Come over here."
So the much-discussed Katharsis, or emotion of Tragedy, is not the experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but rather pleasure in the experience of ideas, tinged with emotion, which belong to each other with precisely that musical rightness.
She gazed again, for a last view, at the bronze seated figure; and a word of Pleydon's, but rather it was Greek, wove its significance in the placid texture of her thoughts. Its exact shape evaded her, a difficult word to recall Katharsis, the purging of the heart.
It was to justify poetry against the attacks of Plato that Aristotle advanced a hedonistic view of poetry and propounded his theory of katharsis. Nowhere in the Poetics does Aristotle explicitly state that the function of poetry is to give pleasure. Indirect evidence, however, is plentiful.
In answer to Plato's second objection to poetry, that it encourages unrestrained emotionalism, Aristotle propounded his theory of katharsis. "Tragedy," he says, "is an imitation of an action ... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking