Exposition/Protasis: a comprehensive description or explanation of an idea
Inciting Incident: a moment or plot point that incites the audience, hooks them in and makes them interested to continue paying attention. This is the trigger point for the other events of the piece.
Rising Action/Epistasis: the events that occur before the climax of the piece, they influence the climactic incident to happen and rise in intensity and tension.
Climax: the culmination of an event, the most exciting high-intensity and important moment of an event.
Reversal/Peripeteia: sudden reversal or change in direction of fortune for the tragic hero.
Hamartia: downfall of the hero.
Hubris: a kind of ambition that leads to downfall…
Falling Action/Catastasis: this comes immediately after the climax and is when the issue that was influencing the climax is resolved.
Catastrophe: a sudden event causing great devastation.
Denouement: drawing together any different or open ends to draw a set, balanced and sometimes satisfying conclusion.
Recognition/Anagnorisis: a discovery that encourages the change from ignorance to enlightenment.
Catharsis: the release of emotions.
‘Imitation of Action’: is describing the way these tragedies have not been imagined out of no where, they follow guide lines and these guide lines imitate realistic life. “…it may be a general truth enunciated” in that, it is a general truth of humanity made more clear and communicated through the play.
Quality of a Tragedy: Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle and Song.
Are there any more crucial aspects?: Realistic so that audiences are captured and can find some part of themselves or their lives that relates to it, therefore giving it greater impact. Dramatic excitement, for it to be successful and impactive it needs to have an aspect of theatricality, flair or tension to engage its audience.
Character of Plot:
- Aristotle believes that “without action, there cannot be a tragedy; there can be without character.” He is convinced that “Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.”
- He argues this principle because he understands that without action a character would be nothing but a set of qualities, but with their action added and the affect it has on them and their trajectory, a story is formed.
- I understand this theory in principle, however in reality, I believe that the impact of a tragedy and the success of it rides on the investment of its audience. As we ourselves are not plots, but characters, we relate, empathize and become attached to characters and it is their depth and humanity that causes the events of the plot to be tragic; whereas a plot with no character may be tragic in theory but not truthfully in an audience’s reaction to it.
How does A describe Peripeteia?: He describes it has following a set of strict rules, its purpose is to “…produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those by which, by our definition, Tragedy represents.” His rules state that the reversal or change of fortune “must not be the spectacle of . virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity; for this moves neither pity nor fear, it merely shocks us. Nor again that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity.”
How does A describe Aganorisis?: Aristotle states that “recognition which is most intimately connected with the plot and action is, as we have said, the recognition or persons.” Recognition may be when one person is recognize