My journal for THE POETIC FOR ARISTOTLE

• While we were learning Ancient Greek Theatre’s origins, Mr. Boyd asked whether TV shows or movies affect us. The reason of asking this question is  that in those times people realized the theater influenced them. I agree with those people. That is, nowadays there are a lot of TV serials and some people who watch them internalize actors’ roles. For example, in an episode, there was a woman who had a love affair with another woman’s husband. When this woman goes outside in real life, some on the street shout at her because they believe her character is like her role in the episode.

•          I wonder how this theater or TV shows can affect us so deeply. For example, if one of my friends asks me to change some of my traits, I may ignore him/ her.  I think this great impact is due to the fact that visual things like theater have resemblance with our lives.

•          After the lesson, a question came to my mind. It was why the actors had masks in Ancient Greek Theater. To illustrate, if one had to be a woman, he could wear girl costumes and use make up. That is enough. When I came to my room, I searched that on the internet and I found some information about this. There are a lot of reasons but the best reason which is acceptable for me is that the audience focused on his actions not his appearance such as his face. Also using masks are more convenient because the actors can change their roles without losing time by changing just the masks.

• Through reading “the Poetics of Aristotle”, Aristotelian unities appeared as time, place and action in a tragedy. I think these are very elegant ideas. That is , Time has to be in 24 hours in a tragedy according to Aristotle and this makes the play clearer. Moreover, the play looks like actual life by limiting it with one day. The other one is place. The whole play is at one place. Therefore, actors don’t have to change background and scene can be arranged effectively and glitteringly. The last one is action. There should be one aim in the play . Thanks to that, audience focuses on one thing and they don’t have to try to understand from what they should take lesson. I like these unities. Oedipus is the best example for it.

•          Aristotle put “plot” as the first feature of a tragedy, but why?  He explains it as “the soul of a tragedy” (pg:4,  2^nd parag. ). Maybe it is because of that plot forms the play. It is not just full of acts and scenes; also it contains ways to show the play better.