Paper no 03 Short note on various terms.

Name : Vidhya Pandya

Semester: MA – 1

Roll No: 43

Paper No : 3 Literally Theory and Criticism

Enrolment No: 2069108420190031

Email id: vidhupandya10497@gmail.com

Year: 2018 – 20

Submitted to: Department of English, Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Assignment’s topic: Write a short note on various types of terms.

◆ Introduction:-

There are many various types of terms which describe below in detail, like:

1.Three unities

2.Hamartia

3.Catharsis

4. Deus Ex Machina

5. Mimetic Criticism

6. Pragmatic Criticism

7. Practical Criticism.

1.    Three Unities:-

Unities, in drama, the three principles derived by French classicists from Aristotle’s Poetics; they require a play to have a single action represented as occurring in a single place and within the course of a day. These principles were called, respectively, unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time.

These three unities were redefined in 1570 by the Italian humanist Lodovico Castelvetro in his interpretation of Aristotle, and they are usually referred to as “Aristotelian rules” for dramatic structure. Actually, Aristotle’s observations on tragedy are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and he emphasizes only one unity, that of plot, or action.

In the sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and France added to  unity of action, which he describes in his poetics , two other unities to constitute one of the so- called rules of Drama known as “the three unities”.

On the assumption that verisimilitude – the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of the stage play – requires that the action represents by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play, these critics imposed the requirement of the “unity of place”. (that the action represented be limited to a single location ) and the requirement of unity of the “unity of time” (that the time represents be limited to the two or three hours it takes to act the play, ao at most to a single day of either twelve or twenty-four hours.)

In large part because of the potent example of Shakespeare, many of whose plays represents frequent changes of place and the passage of many years, the unity of place & time never dominated English Neo-classical as they did Criticism in Italy and France.

Since then England, the unities of place and time have been regarded as optional device, available as needed by the playwright to achieve special effects of dramatic concentration.

2.  Hamartia:-

Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both, and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is”better than we are” . In the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action , to which he is led by his hamartia – his  “error” or “ mistake of judgement” or, as it is often, although misleading and less literally translated, his tragic flaw.

The tragic hero ,like ‘Odious in  Oedipus the King, moves us to   because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of “the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke “tragic pity and fear” is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs a sudden peripeteia , or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster.

3.  Catharsis :-

    Aristotle defined tragedy as “ the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself.” In the medium of poetic language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving “ incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such  emotions.” Precisely how to interpret  Catharsis – which in Greek signifies “purgation.” Or “purification” or both – is much disputed. On two matters, however many commentators agree. Aristotle in the best place sets out to account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle use this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls, “ the pleasure of pity of fear”, as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of the tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot.

4.Deus ex Machina:-

Latin for “ a god from a machine.” It designates the practise of some Greek playwrights to end a drama with a god, lowered to the stage by a mechanical apparatus, who by his judgement and commands resolves the dilemmas of the human characters. The phrase is now used for any forced and improbable device – a telltale birthmark, an unexpected inheritance, the discovery of lost of will or letter- by which a hard pressed author resolves a plot. Conspicuous examples occur even in major novels like Charles Dickens' Oliver twist and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D' Urbervilles . The German playwright Berrolt Brecht parodied such devices in the madcap Conclusion of his Threepenny Opera.

5.Mimetic Criticism:-

Mimetic Criticism views the literary work as an imitation, reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is the”truth” and “adequency” of its representation to the matter that is represents or should represent. This mode of Criticism, which first appeared in Plato and in Aristotle, remains Characteristics of modern theories of literary realism. The notion that the form of a work could itself be mimetic, either of the world or of the  intentional state, was attacked by the New Criticism.

6.Pragmatic Criticism:-

This criticism views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience, and it tends to judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim. This approach, which largely dominated literary discussion from the versified Art of Poetry by the Roman Horace through the eighteenth century, has been revived in rhetorical Criticism, which emphasizes the artistic strategies by which an author engages and influences the responses of readers to the matter represented in a literary work. The pragmatic approach has also been adopted by some structuralists who analyze a literary text as a systematic play of codes that produce the interpretative responses of a reader.

7.Practical Criticism:-

Practical Criticism, concerns itself with particular works and writers; in an applied critique , the theoretical principles controlling the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit or brought in only as the occasion demands. Among the more influential works of applied Criticism in England and America are the literary essays of Dryden in the Restoration ; Dr. JOHNSON'S Lives of the English Poets;  chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria and his lectures on Shakespeare; William Hazlitt’s lectures on Shakespeare and the English Poets in the second and the third decades of the nineteenth century; Mathew  Essay in Criticism; I A Richard’s Practical Criticism T.S Eliot’s “Selected Essays” and the many crucial essays by Virginia Woolf , F.R Leavis and Lionel Trilling.

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