ARTICLE AD BOX
"The greatest playwrights know everything about human nature not because they have some mystical, clairvoyant insight into you or me, but due to the structural constraints of their format: in order for tragedies to work — for problems, decisions, and plot twists to be accepted by the audience as true — the writers must learn to tweak the interactions between the characters until those seem logical and believable to all. Accessing good theatre gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behaviour. Read Sophocles, watch Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations, see Molière or Chekhov on stage, enter a book club debate about Brecht, David Mamet or Yasmina Reza, and you will experience many 'Aha!' moments that will be assets in your subsequent life.
"You will also, of course, feel aesthetic pleasure and what Aristotle calls catharsis* ... which is why most people engage with plays in the first place. The great knowledge that you will be gifted is just the bonus."
~ Anna Gát from her post 'Tyranny as Tragedy'* Increasingly, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" rather than the more commonly held "emotional purgation" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis. "Without doubt 'katharsis' [in the original Greek spelling] is the most celebrated concept in the entire field of literary criticism" says Leon Golden, yet Aristotle, The Poetics, his work on aesthetics, "provided neither a definition nor a commentary for this key term". "That katharsis is meant to represent some form of moral [or emotional] purification has been held [widely] ... [but] there is not a single word in The Poetics itself to justify it." He argues that what Aristotle meant by the word is "the intellectual pleasure of learning" — and so "'katharsis' in The Poetics should not be translated as 'purgation' or 'purification' but, rather, as 'intellectual clarification'."
~ Anna Gát from her post 'Tyranny as Tragedy'* Increasingly, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" rather than the more commonly held "emotional purgation" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis. "Without doubt 'katharsis' [in the original Greek spelling] is the most celebrated concept in the entire field of literary criticism" says Leon Golden, yet Aristotle, The Poetics, his work on aesthetics, "provided neither a definition nor a commentary for this key term". "That katharsis is meant to represent some form of moral [or emotional] purification has been held [widely] ... [but] there is not a single word in The Poetics itself to justify it." He argues that what Aristotle meant by the word is "the intellectual pleasure of learning" — and so "'katharsis' in The Poetics should not be translated as 'purgation' or 'purification' but, rather, as 'intellectual clarification'."
English (US) ·