Download or read book Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato written by Rana Saadi Liebert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.
Download or read book Between Ecstasy and Truth written by Stephen Halliwell and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2011 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus On the Sublime. The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of 'ecstasy') and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience - including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge - in the life of their culture.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Plato written by Richard Kraut and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-10-30 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen new essays discuss Plato's views about knowledge, reality, mathematics, politics, ethics, love, poetry, and religion in a convenient, accessible guide that analyzes the intellectual and social background of his thought as well.
Download or read book The Poetics of Aristotle written by Aristotle and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."
Download or read book Frontiers of Pleasure written by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frontiers of Pleasure calls into question a number of influential modern notions regarding aesthetics by going back to the very beginnings of aesthetic thought in Greece and raising critical issues regarding conceptions of how one responds to the beautiful. Despite a recent rebirth of interest in aesthetics, extensive discussion of this key cluster of topics has been absent. Anatasia-Erasmia Peponi argues that although the Greek language had no formal term equivalent to the "aesthetic," the notion was deeply rooted in Greek thought. Her analysis centers on a dominant aspect of beauty - the aural - associated with a highly influential sector of culture that comprised both poetry and instrumental music, the "activity of the Muses," or mousik . The main argument relies on a series of close readings of literary and philosophical texts, from Homer and Plato through Kant, Joyce, and Proust. Through detailed attention to such scenes as Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens and Hermes' playing of his lyre for his brother Apollo, she demonstrates that the most telling moments in the conceptualization of the aesthetic come in the Greeks' debates and struggles over intense models of auditory pleasure. Unlike current tendencies to treat poetry as an early, imperfect mode of meditating upon such issues, Peponi claims that Greek poetry and philosophy employed equally complex, albeit different, ways of articulating notions of aesthetic response. Her approach often leads her to partial or total disagreement with earlier interpretations of some of the most well-known Greek texts of the archaic and classical periods. Frontiers of Pleasure thus suggests an alternative mode of understanding aesthetics in its entirety, freed from some modern preconceptions that have become a hindrance within the field.
Download or read book The Poetics of Aristotle written by Aristotle and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Plato and the Poets written by Pierre Destrée and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-03-21 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato’s discussions of poetry and the poets stand at the cradle of Western literary criticism. Plato is, paradoxically, both the philosopher who cites, or alludes to, works of poetry more than any other, and the one who is at the same time the harshest critic of poetry. The nineteen essays presented here aim to offer various avenues to this paradox, and to illuminate the ways poetry and the poets are discussed by Plato throughout his writing career, from the Apology and the Ion to the Laws. As well as throwing new light on old topics, such as mimesis and poetic inspiration, the volume introduces fresh approaches to Plato’s philosophy of poetry and literature.
Download or read book Aristotle s Poetics written by Stephen Halliwell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-12 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the fullest, sustained interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics available in English, Stephen Halliwell demonstrates that the Poetics, despite its laconic brevity, is a coherent statement of a challenging theory of poetic art, and it hints towards a theory of mimetic art in general. Assessing this theory against the background of earlier Greek views on poetry and art, particularly Plato's, Halliwell goes further than any previous author in setting Aristotle's ideas in the wider context of his philosophical system. The core of the book is a fresh appraisal of Aristotle's view of tragic drama, in which Halliwell contends that at the heart of the Poetics lies a philosophical urge to instill a secularized understanding of Greek tragedy. "Essential reading not only for all serious students of the Poetics . . . but also for those—the great majority—who have prudently fought shy of it altogether."—B. R. Rees, Classical Review "A splendid work of scholarship and analysis . . . a brilliant interpretation."—Alexander Nehamas, Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book Aristotle s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art written by Samuel Henry Butcher and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1951-01-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best translation of one of the most influential books in all history. Greek and English on facing pages, plus Butcher's famed 300-page exposition and interpretation of Aristotle's ideas. Seminal discussions of art and morality, poetic truth, much more.
Download or read book The Particulars of Rapture written by Charles Altieri and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Plato Phaedo written by Plato and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-09-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Phaedo is deservedly one of the best known works of Greek literature, but also one of the most complex. Set in the prison where Socrates is awaiting execution, it portrays Plato's model philosopher in action, spending his last hours in conversation with two other seasoned members of his circle about the fate of the human soul after death. Professor Rowe attempts to help the reader find a way through the intricate structure both of individual passages and arguments and of the dialogue as a whole, stressing its intelligibility as a unified work of art and giving equal attention to its literary and philosophical aspects. The notes also aim to provide the kind of help with Plato's Greek which is needed by comparative beginners in the language, but the commentary is intended for any student, classical scholar, or philosopher with an interest in the close reading of Plato.
Download or read book Homer s Divine Audience written by Tobias Myers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gods of Homer's Iliad have troubled readers for millennia, with many features of their presentation seeming to defy satisfactory explanation. Homer's Divine Audience presents and explores a new 'metaperformative' approach to scenes of divine viewing, counsel, and intervention in the Iliad, referencing the oral nature of the poem's original composition and transmission to cast the Olympian gods in part as an internal audience, who follow the action from their privileged, divine perspective much like the poet's own listeners. Although critics have already often described the gods' activities in terms of attendance at a 'show' and have suggested analogies to theatre and sports, little has yet been done to investigate the particular strategies by which the poet conveys the impression of gods attending a live, staged event. This volume's analysis of those strategies points to a 'metaperformative' significance to the motif of divine viewing: the poet is using the gods, in part, to model and thereby manipulate the ongoing dynamics of performance and live reception. The gods, like the external audience, are capable of a variety of emotional responses to events at Troy; notably pleasure and pity, but also great aloofness. By performing the speeches of the provocative, infuriating, yet ultimately obliging Zeus, the poet at key moments both challenges his listeners to take a stake in the continuation of the performance, and presents a sophisticated critique of possible responses to his poem.
Download or read book Archive Feelings written by Mario Telò and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using classic Greek texts and modern theory, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.
Download or read book Preface to Plato written by Eric A. HAVELOCK and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought. The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction-Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative. The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
Download or read book Republic 10 written by Plato and published by Aris and Phillips Classical Te. This book was released on 1988 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition offers a full and up-to-date commentary on the last book of the Republic, and explores in particular detail the two main subjects of the book: Plato's most famous and uncompromising condemnation of poetry and art, as vehicles of falsehood and purveyors of dangerous emotions, and the Myth of Er, which concludes the whole work with ...
Download or read book The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception written by Jonas Grethlein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new history of ancient aesthetics and its entanglement with ethics, with ongoing significance for current debates.
Download or read book Metaphor in Homer written by Andreas T. Zanker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the Homeric narrator use metaphors of time, speech, and thought to compose and structure the Iliad and Odyssey?