ABSTRACT
Catastrophe See DÉNOUEMENT, DRAMA.
Catharsis The most disputed part of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is his statement that it is an action ‘through pity and fear effecting a catharsis of these emotions’. Traditionally catharsis is rendered as ‘purgation’ and refers to the psychological effect of tragedy on the audience. Against Plato’s condemnation of art for unhealthily stimulating emotions which should be suppressed, Aristotle argues that audiences are not inflamed or depressed by the spectacle of suffering in tragedy, but in some way released. Our subjective, potentially morbid, emotions are extended outward, through pity for the tragic hero, in an enlargement, a leading out, of the soul (psychogogia). So tragedy moves us towards psychic harmony. A related, but less psychological, interpretation puts catharsis into the context of Aristotle’s argument that the pleasure peculiar to tragedy arises from the fact that our emotion is authorized and released by an intellectually conditioned structure of action. In fiction, unlike reality, we feel the emotion and see its place in a sequence of probability and necessity.
