Formalism

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Formalism (1930s-present) - Formalism attempts to treat each work as its own distinct piece, free from its environment, era, and even author. Formalists assume that the keys to understanding the text lies within the text itself.

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Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 24

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Aristotle continues to give important points related to epic poetry. He says that just like tragedy, epic is also of various kinds such as simple, complex, that which depend upon character, and that which depends upon suffering. Other then this, the epic and tragedy are similar in the sense that both have the same constituent elements except for song and spectacle. There is also reversal, recognition, and suffering in the epic. The thought and diction of the tragedy must also be good. Homer had excelled in these two in his ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. The ‘Iliad’ is a story of suffering and is simple in structure while the ‘Odyssey’ is complex in structure because it has scenes of recognition and is based on character. The epic differs form a tragedy in length and meter . The proper length of a literary genre should be such that it’s beginning and end could be viewed as a complete whole. The poets of the present should try to compose poems which are limited in size. The epic, according t...
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Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 26

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Aristotle in the final chapter of The Poetics has compared the epic form of poetry and tragedy. He analyses which is the greater between the two. If the greater form of art is that which is the less vulgar one and if the greater form of art pleases the specific kind of audience then the art which appeals to every one is the vulgar one. And in fact, the performers tend to bring various unnecessary movements on the stage as if they would not be identified if they do not perform such actions. Bad flute players twist and twirl, if they have to represent ‘the quoit-throw’, or hustle the Corpyhaeus when they perform the ‘Scylla’. Tragedy is said to have the same defects. It could be compared to what the older actors said of the later ones; for, Myniscus used to call Callipides, ‘the ape’, because he over acted. The same view was presented for Pindarus. Thus tragedy is related to the epic art just as the later actors are related to the older ones. Thus the epic poetry is the higher form of p...
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Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 20

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Language viewed as a whole consists of the following parts - letter, syllable, connecting word, noun, verb, inflection or case and phrase or sentence. A letter is an indivisible sound but not any sound without intelligence. It is true that animals also utter indivisible sound but that sound cannot be called letter. These indivisible sound can be vowel, semi vowel or mute. A vowel has an audible sound which does not need the contact of the two organs of speech to be produced. A semi vowel such as s or r has an audible which needs this contact. The audible sound produced by a semi vowel is because of this contact. A mute even with the aid of this contact is not able to produce an audible sound, it needs to be combined with letters that possess some sort of sound such as g and d. The letters have different types of sounds depending upon the shape of the mouth while they are spoken and also on the places from where they originate, as aspirated or not aspirated, as short or long, as acute,...
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