Due to its long age and incompleteness, Aristotle’s Poetics, like other ancient texts, was by no means free from difficulty, and lent itself readily to serious misinterpretation. Various interpretations have been provided to the term “tragic pleasure”, and the “pity and fear” closely related to it have become an arena where not a few famous scholars displayed their “hidden skills”. Their interpretations make up an evolutionary history of the “tragic pleasure”. Free from its bondage, and based both on the common view about pleasure of grief in the ancient Greece, and on Aristotle’s general principles of pleasure, this paper aims at exploring the deep meaning of the pleasure proper to tragedies through categorizing the tragic pleasure and drawing relevant ideas from Aristotle’s Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Rhetoric.
HE Weiwen
. “Smile through the Tears”: The Tragic Pleasure in Aristotle’s Poetics Revisited[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2015
, 15(05)
: 56
-61
.
DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2015.05.011
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