joan8611tw的部落格

1. tragic flaw

It is most often associated with Greek tragedy.  In tragedy, hamartia is theprotagonist’s error or flaw that leads to a chain of plot actions culminating in a reversal from his/her good fortune to bad. What qualifies as the error or flaw can include an error resulting from ignorance, an error of judgement, a flaw in character, or sin.

For example, a tragic flaw shown in Shakespeare's work occurs in Macbeth. In this play, Macbeth allows his wife to convince him to murder the king and take over the throne. Although he knows it is wrong, Macbeth believes he is a great leader and gives into his tragic flaw: ambition. He murders the king and takes over the throne.

2. catharsis

It is the purification of emotions—especially pity and fear—through art or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration. It is a metaphor originally used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the effects of tragedy on the spectator. William Shakespeare wrote two of the famous examples of catharsis.

One of these catharsis examples is his tragic drama “Macbeth”. This play presents a great example of catharsis. The audience and readers of Macbeth usually pity the tragic central figure of the play because he was blinded by his destructive preoccupation with ambition.

3. dues ex machina

Deus ex machina is a Latin calque from Greek, meaning "god from the machine". The term has evolved to mean a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object. Depending on how it is done, it can be intended to move the story forward when the writer has "painted himself into a corner" and sees no other way out, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or as a comedic device.

For example, When Medea is shown in the chariot of the sun god Helios, the god himself isn’t present. From her vantage point in the chariot she watches the grieving Jason. The argument goes about that this specific scene is an illustration of the employment of the device within the plot of the tragedy.

4. chorus

It is a non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action. The chorus consisted of between 12 and 50 players, who variously danced, sang or spoke their lines in unison and sometimes wore masks.

For example, Plays of the ancient Greek theatre always included a chorus that offered a variety of background and summary information to help the audience follow the performance. They commented on themes, and, as August Wilhelm Schlegel proposed in the early 19th century to subsequent controversy, demonstrated how the audience might react to the drama.

5. parable.

A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of analogy.Some scholars of the canonical gospels and the New Testament apply the term "parable" only to the parables of Jesus, though that is not a common restriction of the term. Parables such as "The Prodigal Son" are central to Jesus' teaching method in the canonical narratives and the apocrypha.

For example, Jesus has mentioned a very popular parable related to Good Samaritan in the holy Bible. Gospel of Luke (10:29-37) describes that there was a traveler (may be a Jew), whom some people had robbed and beaten alongside the road and left him. A Levite and a priest passed through that way, but both ignored that man. Eventually, a Samaritan reached there and helped the injured and miserable man without thinking about his race or religious belief (generally, Samaritans despise Jews). The moral of this parable is to help all those who are in need, without having prejudice for anyone due to perceived differences.

Masks may have provided many benefits to the origins of theatre and the performances they were used in. Masks were able to bring the characters face and emotions closer to the audience, this is because masks often have over exaggerated facial features and are showing the emotion which has been exaggerated. There were two genres in which the plays were performed in theatre, they were Comedy and Tragedy. Tragedies from Greek theatre all had of one thing in common, the plays were scripted about the life and legends of Greek Gods and the audience were presumed to have knowledge of them they also included hamartia, which an injury has been done to another person and a hubris, which is the arrogance of a character. Comedy likewise was about mocking the Gods using crude humor and mythical, imaginary creatures.  Comedies, at these times used the crude, vulgar humor with that every lingering sexual- innuendo along with Tragedies which use the idea of telling legends and sad occurrences.

Mimesis can be roughly translated as "imitation." We might say that something is mimetic if it is not, and does not pretend to be, "the real thing." A painting of a chair is not a chair. Poetry is imitative in that it describes events in the real world without pretending to be these events. No one watching Oedipus Rex will think that they are watching real life unfold, but the performance will approximate something that could happen in real life. This is somewhat problematic, since the events in Oedipus Rex did not actually take place in real life. What is important is that, in some sense, they could have taken place. Aristotle claims that we are naturally imitative creatures and learn from imitation, and so we are naturally drawn to tragedy and other mimetic arts.Claiming that poetry is imitative, Aristotle limits poetry to narrative: it has to describe something in the world. This would exclude most abstract or experimental poetry in this century, and would also raise serious questions about the dominant tradition of lyric poetry in the modern world, which usually deals more with emotions and ideas than with events and actions.