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The Poetics of Greek Tragedy
$16.87
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The Poetics of Greek Tragedy
By Malcolm Heath
This ambitious book attempts a sweeping redefinition of Greek tragedy in terms of the pragmatics of performance. The author presents what he calls an “emotive-hedonist” theory, arguing that the main point of tragedy was not to offer moral or metaphysical instruction (or, indeed, any instruction at all), but “to give its audience aesthetic pleasure through the excitation of an intense emotional response.” This response was most typically in the range of terror, anxiety, fear, and pity, but it ranged more widely, embracing love and joy.
The theory has some particularly arresting implications for the ways we should conceive the central characters in tragedy. Rather than think of a “hero,” the author argues, we should think of “focal figures,” with whose feelings the audience is meant to identify, and we should recognize that focus is mobile and can shift (for example, from Antigone to Creon) in the course of a play.
Emphasizing that a play must be understood in terms of performance, the author also discusses the mode and textual function of tragedy – the way in which dramatic narrative is organized as a text that is coherent and apt to its purposes. He shows how a play as narrative depends on a series of narrated events that must satisfy, or give the appearance of satisfying, the requirements of continuity and closure; satisfying these two requirements is all that is needed to give a play unity. The concluding chapter is a close reading of Sophocles’ Ajax in the light of the author’s theory of tragedy.
At the time of publication, Malcolm Health was a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the original work.
Title: The Poetics of Greek Tragedy
Author: Malcolm Heath
Publisher: Stanford University Press 1987
ISBN 0804710813
Social Aims in a Changing World
$15.25
Book
This book is a carefully considered attempt to picture the changing social life and to reveal and to emphasize the basic purposes or aims which should guide community and social action. The author holds that the recreation of oneness of community life in spirit and in essence involves a change of emphasis from individual privilege to personal obligation -- that the issue is ultimately moral. It is in part the nature of this obligation that he seeks here to establish.
Professor Beach has given us an indictment of the machine age as it has thus far developed, and of the so-called "triumph of the individual." No critic of the machine per se, he flays the purely selfish ends to which our machine-released energies have been directed. No idol smashing destructionist, he makes cogent suggestions for the building of a modern social order, based on mutual understanding and helpfulness, and making use of our present superlative existing and potential resources of knowledge. According to Beach, today's world has lost the excuse of ignorance with respect to such problems as sickness, immigrant maladjustment, child labor, and war. The tools are at hand with which to eliminate almost every social ill to which the world is heir. The ends of living, both individual and community, must be made to conform to a larger and more intelligently pattern ideal.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title Beach
Author Social Aims in a Changing World
Publisher Stanford University Press
ISBN 0804701512, 9780804701518
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