Poetics (Aristotle)
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory in the West. This has been the traditional view for centuries. However, recent work is now challenging whether Aristotle focuses on literary theory per se or whether he focuses instead on dramatic musical theory that only has language as one of the elements. In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry", they are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: Differences in music rhythm, harmony and melody. Difference of goodness in the characters. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles", Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis, his analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions".
The work was lost to the Western world for a long time. It was available in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes. Aristotle's work on aesthetics consists of the Poetics and Rhetoric; the Poetics is concerned with drama. At some point, Aristotle's original work was divided in two, each "book" written on a separate roll of papyrus. Only the first part – that which focuses on tragedy and epic – survives; the lost second part addressed comedy. Some scholars speculate that the Tractatus coislinianus summarises the contents of the lost second book; some other scholars indicate that "tragedy" is a misleading translation for the Greek tragoidos, which seems to have meant "goat-song" originally. The reason is that Aristotle says three times in the treatise that the protagonist can go from fortune to misfortune or misfortune to fortune; the table of contents page of the Poetics found in Modern Library's Basic Works of Aristotle identifies five basic parts within it.
A. Preliminary discourse on tragedy, epic poetry, comedy, as the chief forms of imitative poetry. B. Definition of a tragedy, the rules for its construction. Definition and analysis into qualitative parts. C. Rules for the construction of a tragedy: Tragic pleasure, or catharsis experienced by fear and pity should be produced in the spectator; the characters must be four things: good, appropriate and consistent. Discovery must occur within the plot. Narratives, stories and poetics overlap, it is important for the poet to visualize all of the scenes. The poet should incorporate complication and dénouement within the story, as well as combine all of the elements of tragedy; the poet must express thought through the characters' words and actions, while paying close attention to diction and how a character's spoken words express a specific idea. Aristotle believed that all of these different elements had to be present in order for the poetry to be well-done. D. Possible criticisms of an epic or tragedy, the answers to them.
E. Tragedy as artistically superior to epic poetry: Tragedy has everything that the epic has the epic meter being admissible; the reality of presentation is felt in the play as read, as well as in the play. The tragic imitation requires less space for the attainment of its end. If it has more concentrated effect, it is more pleasurable than one with a large admixture of time to dilute it. There is less unity in the imitation of the epic poets and this is proved by the fact that an epic poem can supply enough material for several tragedies. Aristotle distinguishes between the genres of "poetry" in three ways: Matterlanguage and melody, for Aristotle, make up the matter of poetic creation. Where the epic poem makes use of language alone, the playing of the lyre involves melody; some poetic forms include a blending of all materials. These points convey the standard view. Recent work, argues that translating rhuthmos here as "rhythm" is absurd: melody has its own inherent musical rhythm, the Greek can mean what Plato says it means in Laws II, 665a: " ordered body movement," or dance.
This conveys what dramatic musical creation, the topic of the Poetics, in ancient Greece had: music and language. The musical instrument cited in Ch 1 is not the lyre but the kithara, played in the drama while the kithara-player was dancing if that meant just walking in an appropriate way. Moreover, epic might have had only literary exponents, but as Plato's Ion and Aristotle's Ch 26 of the Poetics help prove, for Plato and Aristotle at least some epic rhapsodes used all three means of mimesis: language and music. SubjectsAlso "agents" in some translations. Aristotle differentiates between tragedy and comedy throughout the work by distinguishing between the nature of the human characters that populate either f
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice—that is not part of the narrative —is used in a radio, television production, theatre, or other presentations. The voiceover is read from a script and may be spoken by someone who appears elsewhere in the production or by a specialist voice talent. Synchronous dialogue, where the voiceover is narrating the action, taking place at the same time, remains the most common technique in voiceovers. Asynchronous, however, is used in cinema, it is prerecorded and placed over the top of a film or video and used in documentaries or news reports to explain information. Voiceovers are used in video games and on-hold messages, as well as for announcements and information at events and tourist destinations, it may be read live for events such as award presentations. Voiceover is added in addition to any existing dialogue, it is not to be confused with the process of replacing dialogue with a translated version, called dubbing or revoicing. In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Ishmael narrates the story, he sometimes comments on the action in voiceover, as does Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard and Eric Erickson in The Counterfeit Traitor.
Voiceover technique is used to give voices and personalities to animated characters. Noteworthy and versatile voice actors include Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, Don Messick, Paul Frees, June Foray. Charactering techniques in voiceovers are used to give personalities and voice to fictional characters. There has been some controversy with charactering techniques in voiceovers with white radio entertainers who would mimic black speech patterns. Radio made this racial mockery easier to get away with because it was a non-confrontational platform to express anything the broadcasters found fit, it became the ideal medium for voice impersonations. Characterization has always been popular in all forms of media. In the late 1920s radio started to stray away from reporting on musicals and sporting events, radio began to create serial talk shows as well as shows with fictional storylines; the technique of characterization can be a creative outlet to expand on film and radio, but it must be done carefully. In film, the filmmaker places the sound of a human voice over images shown on the screen that may or may not be related to the words that are being spoken.
Voiceovers are sometimes used to create ironic counterpoint. Sometimes they can be random voices not directly connected to the people seen on the screen. In works of fiction, the voiceover is by a character reflecting on his or her past, or by a person external to the story who has a more complete knowledge of the events in the film than the other characters. Voiceovers are used to create the effect of storytelling by a character/omniscient narrator. For example, in The Usual Suspects, the character of Roger "Verbal" Kint has voiceover segments as he is recounting details of a crime. Classic voiceovers in cinema history can be heard in The Naked City. Sometimes, voiceover can be used to aid continuity in edited versions of films, in order for the audience to gain a better understanding of what has gone on between scenes; this was done when the film Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, turned out to be far from the box-office and critical hit, expected, it was edited down from 145 minutes to 100 minutes for its second run in theaters.
The edited version, which circulated for years, used narration to conceal the fact that large chunks of the film had been cut out. In the full-length version, restored in 1998 and released on DVD in 2004, the voiceover narration is heard only at the beginning of the film. Film noir is associated with the voiceover technique; the golden age of first-person narration was during the 1940s. Film noir used male voiceover narration but there are a few rare female voiceovers. In radio, voiceovers are an integral part of the creation of the radio program; the voiceover artist might be used to remind listeners of the station name or as characters to enhance or develop show content. During the 1980s, the British broadcasters Steve Wright and Kenny Everett used voiceover artists to create a virtual "posse" or studio crew who contributed to the programmes, it is believed. The American radio broadcaster Howard Stern has used voiceovers in this way; the voiceover has many applications in non-fiction as well. Television news is presented as a series of video clips of newsworthy events, with voiceover by the reporters describing the significance of the scenes being presented.
Television networks such as The History Channel and the Discovery Channel make extensive use of voiceovers. On NBC, the television show Starting Over used Sylvia Villagran as the voiceover narrator to tell a story. Live sports broadcasts are shown as extensive voiceovers by sports commentators over video of the sporting event. Game shows made extensive use of voiceovers to introduce contestants and describe available or awarded prizes, but this technique has diminished as shows have moved toward predominantly cash prizes; the most prolific have included Don Pardo, Johnny Olson, John Harlan, Jay Stewart, Gene Wood and Johnny Gilbert. Voiceover commentary by a leading critic, historian, or by the production personnel themselves is ofte
Ancient Greek
The Ancient Greek language includes the forms of Greek used in Ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE. It is roughly divided into the Archaic period, Classical period, Hellenistic period, it is succeeded by medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it resembled Attic Greek and in its latest form it approaches Medieval Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects. Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians and philosophers, it has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects; the main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions.
Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", in poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects; the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period, they differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not than 1120 BCE, at the time of the Dorian invasion—and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BCE.
The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians; the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-west Greek is the strongest marked and earliest division, with non-west in subsets of Ionic-Attic and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Non-west is called East Greek. Arcadocypriot descended more from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age.
Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect. Thessalian had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, Northern Peloponnesus Doric; the Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek. All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, these colonies developed local characteristics under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects; the dialects outside the Ionic group are known from inscriptions, notable exceptions being: fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, in Aeolian, the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar and other lyric poets in Doric.
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed based on Attic Greek, but with influence from other dialects. This dialect replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century CE, the Koine had metamorphosized into Medieval Greek. Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language at least related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: a dialect of Greek; the Macedonian dialect (or l
Music
Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time. General definitions of music include common elements such as pitch, rhythm and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. Different styles or types of music may de-emphasize or omit some of these elements. Music is performed with a vast range of instruments and vocal techniques ranging from singing to rapping; the word derives from Greek μουσική. See glossary of musical terminology. In its most general form, the activities describing music as an art form or cultural activity include the creation of works of music, the criticism of music, the study of the history of music, the aesthetic examination of music. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, for example, "There is no noise, only sound."The creation, performance and the definition of music vary according to culture and social context.
Indeed, throughout history, some new forms or styles of music have been criticized as "not being music", including Beethoven's Grosse Fuge string quartet in 1825, early jazz in the beginning of the 1900s and hardcore punk in the 1980s. There are many types of music, including popular music, traditional music, art music, music written for religious ceremonies and work songs such as chanteys. Music ranges from organized compositions–such as Classical music symphonies from the 1700s and 1800s, through to spontaneously played improvisational music such as jazz, avant-garde styles of chance-based contemporary music from the 20th and 21st centuries. Music can be divided into genres and genres can be further divided into subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, controversial. For example, it can be hard to draw the line between heavy metal. Within the arts, music may be classified as a fine art or as an auditory art.
Music may be played or sung and heard live at a rock concert or orchestra performance, heard live as part of a dramatic work, or it may be recorded and listened to on a radio, MP3 player, CD player, smartphone or as film score or TV show. In many cultures, music is an important part of people's way of life, as it plays a key role in religious rituals, rite of passage ceremonies, social activities and cultural activities ranging from amateur karaoke singing to playing in an amateur funk band or singing in a community choir. People may make music as a hobby, like a teen playing cello in a youth orchestra, or work as a professional musician or singer; the music industry includes the individuals who create new songs and musical pieces, individuals who perform music, individuals who record music, individuals who organize concert tours, individuals who sell recordings, sheet music, scores to customers. The word derives from Greek μουσική. In Greek mythology, the nine Muses were the goddesses who inspired literature and the arts and who were the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, song-lyrics, myths in the Greek culture.
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the term "music" is derived from "mid-13c. Musike, from Old French musique and directly from Latin musica "the art of music," including poetry." This is derived from the "... Greek mousike " of the Muses," from fem. of mousikos "pertaining to the Muses," from Mousa "Muse". Modern spelling from 1630s. In classical Greece, any art in which the Muses presided, but music and lyric poetry." Music is composed and performed for many purposes, ranging from aesthetic pleasure, religious or ceremonial purposes, or as an entertainment product for the marketplace. When music was only available through sheet music scores, such as during the Classical and Romantic eras, music lovers would buy the sheet music of their favourite pieces and songs so that they could perform them at home on the piano. With the advent of sound recording, records of popular songs, rather than sheet music became the dominant way that music lovers would enjoy their favourite songs. With the advent of home tape recorders in the 1980s and digital music in the 1990s, music lovers could make tapes or playlists of their favourite songs and take them with them on a portable cassette player or MP3 player.
Some music lovers create mix tapes of their favorite songs, which serve as a "self-portrait, a gesture of friendship, prescription for an ideal party... an environment consisting of what is most ardently loved."Amateur musicians can compose or perf
Filmmaking
Filmmaking is the process of making a film in the sense of films intended for extensive theatrical exhibition. Filmmaking involves a number of discrete stages including an initial story, idea, or commission, through screenwriting, shooting, sound recording and reproduction and screening the finished product before an audience that may result in a film release and exhibition. Filmmaking takes place in many places around the world in a range of economic and political contexts, using a variety of technologies and cinematic techniques, it involves a large number of people, can take from a few months to several years to complete. Film production consists of five major stages: Development: The first stage in which the ideas for the film are created, rights to books/plays are bought etc. and the screenplay is written. Financing for the project has to be obtained. Pre-production: Arrangements and preparations are made for the shoot, such as hiring cast and film crew, selecting locations and constructing sets.
Production: The raw footage and other elements for the film are recorded during the film shoot. Post-production: The images and visual effects of the recorded film are edited and combined into a finished product. Distribution: The completed film is distributed and screened in cinemas and/or released to home video. In this stage, the project producer selects a story, which may come from a book, another film, true story, video game, comic book, graphic novel, or an original idea, etc. After identifying a theme or underlying message, the producer works with writers to prepare a synopsis. Next they produce a step outline, which breaks the story down into one-paragraph scenes that concentrate on dramatic structure, they prepare a treatment, a 25-to-30-page description of the story, its mood, characters. This has little dialogue and stage direction, but contains drawings that help visualize key points. Another way is to produce a scriptment. Next, a screenwriter writes a screenplay over a period of several months.
The screenwriter may rewrite it several times to improve dramatization, structure, characters and overall style. However, producers skip the previous steps and develop submitted screenplays which investors and other interested parties assess through a process called script coverage. A film distributor may be contacted at an early stage to assess the market and potential financial success of the film. Hollywood distributors adopt a hard-headed no approach and consider factors such as the film genre, the target audience and assumed audience, the historical success of similar films, the actors who might appear in the film, potential directors. All these factors imply a certain appeal of the film to a possible audience. Not all films make a profit from the theatrical release alone, so film companies take DVD sales and worldwide distribution rights into account; the producer and screenwriter prepare a film pitch, or treatment, present it to potential financiers. They will pitch the film to actors and directors in order to "attach" them to the project.
Many projects fail to enter so-called development hell. If a pitch succeeds, a film receives a "green light", meaning someone offers financial backing: a major film studio, film council, or independent investor; the parties involved negotiate a sign contracts. Once all parties have met and the deal has been set, the film may proceed into the pre-production period. By this stage, the film should have a defined marketing strategy and target audience. Development of animated films differs in that it is the director who develops and pitches a story to an executive producer on the basis of rough storyboards, it is rare for a full-length screenplay to exist at that point in time. If the film is green-lighted for further development and pre-production a screenwriter is brought in to prepare the screenplay. Analogous to most any business venture, financing of a film project deals with the study of filmmaking as the management and procurement of investments, it includes the dynamics of assets that are required to fund the filmmaking and liabilities incurred during the filmmaking over the time period from early development through the management of profits and losses after distribution under conditions of different degrees of uncertainty and risk.
The practical aspects of filmmaking finance can be defined as the science of the money management of all phases involved in filmmaking. Film finance aims to price assets based on their risk level and their expected rate of return based upon anticipated profits and protection against losses. In pre-production, every step of creating the film is designed and planned; the production company is created and a production office established. The film is pre-visualized by the director, may be storyboarded with the help of illustrators and concept artists. A production budget is drawn up to plan expenditures for the film. For major productions, insurance is procured to protect against accidents; the nature of the film, the budget, determine the size and type of crew used during filmmaking. Many Hollywood blockbusters employ a cast and crew of hundreds, while a low-budget, independent film may be made by a skeleton crew of eight or nine; these are typical crew positions: Storyboard artist: creates visual images to help the director and production designer communicate their ideas to the production team.
Director: is primarily
Dead Space (series)
Dead Space is a horror media franchise created by Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey, developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts. The franchise centers on a series of video games, includes two films and a comic book series; the series began in 2008 as an eponymous video game aimed at creating, in Schofield's words, "the most terrifying game we could acquire". Each installment in the Dead Space series is a continuation or addition to a continuing storyline which began with the release of the original game; the game is set in a 26th-century science fiction universe featuring environments and characters typical of the genre. The series' chronology is not presented in a linear format, with sections of the story line presented in the form of either prequels or sequels, in different media aside from video games. Speaking, the series focuses on an engineer named Isaac Clarke and the horrors that surround him; the series has been critically successful, selling over 10 million copies.
The Dead Space games are survival horrors, with the player character visible at all times. All menu interfaces are diegetic, produced by the character's "Resource Integration Gear" spacesuit for ease of communication with other characters. For instance, the character's hit point meter, built into the spine of his suit, is intended to allow co-workers to monitor his health, when the character moves into depressurized areas, a readout on his back displays his remaining seconds of oxygen. All sound is removed from gameplay during these segments save those which would be transferred to the character's ears by the vibrations of his RIG, such as rounds fired from his weapon. Since the menus are diegetic, opening them does not pause gameplay; the character's RIG can be outfitted with two special abilities for use in combat and puzzle-solving. The "Kinesis" module allows the character to retrieve and transport objects heavier or more distant ones than could be accessed normally; these objects may be expelled at high speed for use as improvised projectiles.
The "Stasis" module causes its target to undergo an extreme slowdown for a short period of time, allowing characters to dart through moving obstacles such as fan blades, or hinder onrushing enemies. The RIG has a slot-based inventory for carrying weapons, healing items and other objects. Gunplay is influenced by the franchise's antagonists; because Necromorphs are re-animated and re-purposed corpses, lacking dependence on nervous and circulatory systems, the conventions of stopping power are irrelevant to them. Thus, instead of targeting foes' heads or center of mass, players are encouraged to engage in "strategic dismemberment" by shooting off their arms and legs; some Necromorphs can be defeated in this manner, but others may change attack patterns or spawn new enemies when slain. Relatedly, the game's weapons are characterized as being repurposed power tools or mining implements, such as plasma cutters, rotary saws and gravitic repulsion tools, though an increasing amount of dedicated military ordnance becomes available as the franchise progresses.
Ammunition tends to be uncommon, thus necessitating careful usage of the tools at hand. In the first two games, RIGs and weapons can be upgraded at bench workstations. Players can visit vending machines to buy or sell items for in-game currency, upload new schematics to those stores in order to unlock new items; this was changed in the third installment. Each type of necromorph has a unique way of slaying the player character, customized to whatever claws, fangs or probosces they happen to possess; the Dead Space games are set in the future. By the 23rd century, humanity has used up most of Earth's natural resources, the world governing body, EarthGov, has fleets of "planet crackers", giant mining spaceships that harvest resources by breaking apart other planets, to gather materials for humanity to sustain itself. During the 23rd century, EarthGov researchers find an alien artifact in the Chicxulub crater, which they call the Marker; the Marker emits a persistent electromagnetic field from no source, which researchers believe could be used to provide limitless energy and solve Earth's ecological crisis.
Work begins to reverse engineer the Marker on various research stations across the colonies, but they are forced to use bismuth instead of an unidentified alien material, resulting in these duplicates being colored red instead of black as the original. The project was classified, but the lead researcher Michael Altman leaks its existence to the world. EarthGov assassinates Altman hoping to quell the news, but it is too late: Altman is seen as a martyr, his belief of what the Marker means for humanity form the basis of a new cult-like religion, that spreads across Earth and the colonies. Followers of Unitology believe that the Markers will help to unify humanity, as to "make us whole", in an event known as Convergence. Too late, the EarthGov researchers discover that the electromagnetic fields sent by the Marker and its duplicates cause living people to suffer paranoia and hallucinations, while causing the de
Comedy
In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, or any other medium of entertainment. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters; the theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old." A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender dramatic irony which provokes laughter.
Satire and political satire use comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of their humor. Parody subverts popular genres and forms, critiquing those forms without condemning them. Other forms of comedy include screwball comedy, which derives its humor from bizarre, surprising situations or characters, black comedy, characterized by a form of humor that includes darker aspects of human behavior or human nature. Scatological humor, sexual humor, race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comic ways. A comedy of manners takes as its subject a particular part of society and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love; the word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία kōmōidía, a compound either of κῶμος kômos or κώμη kṓmē and ᾠδή ōidḗ.
The adjective "comic", which means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking". Of this, the word came into modern usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time, passed through various shades of meaning; the Greeks and Romans confined their use of the word "comedy" to descriptions of stage-plays with happy endings. Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of men worse than the average. However, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, a species of the Ugly; the Ridiculous may be defined as a deformity not productive of pain or harm to others. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings, it is in this sense that Dante used the term in the title of La Commedia. As time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter. During the Middle Ages, the term "comedy" became synonymous with satire, with humour in general.
Aristotle's Poetics was translated into Arabic in the medieval Islamic world, where it was elaborated upon by Arabic writers and Islamic philosophers, such as Abu Bischr, his pupils Al-Farabi and Averroes. They disassociated comedy from Greek dramatic representation and instead identified it with Arabic poetic themes and forms, such as hija, they viewed comedy as the "art of reprehension", made no reference to light and cheerful events, or to the troubling beginnings and happy endings associated with classical Greek comedy. After the Latin translations of the 12th century, the term "comedy" gained a more general meaning in medieval literature. In the late 20th century, many scholars preferred to use the term laughter to refer to the whole gamut of the comic, in order to avoid the use of ambiguous and problematically defined genres such as the grotesque and satire. Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a comic playwright and satirical author of the Ancient Greek Theater, wrote 40 comedies, 11 of which survive.
Aristophanes developed his type of comedy from the earlier satyr plays, which were highly obscene. The only surviving examples of the satyr plays are by Euripides, which are much examples and not representative of the genre. In ancient Greece, comedy originated in bawdy and ribald songs or recitations apropos of phallic processions and fertility festivals or gatherings. Around 335 BCE, Aristotle, in his work Poetics, stated that comedy originated in phallic processions and the light treatment of the otherwise base and ugly, he adds that the origins of comedy are obscure because it was not treated from its inception. However, comedy had its own Muse: Thalia. Aristotle taught that comedy was positive for society, since it brings forth happiness, which for Aristotle was the ideal state, the final goal in any activity. For Aristotle, a comedy did not need to involve sexual humor. A comedy is about the fortunate rise of a sympathetic character. Aristotle divides comedy into three categories or subgenres: farce, romantic comedy, satire.
On the contrary, Plato taught. He believed that it produces an emotion that overrides ra
The dictionary definition of diegesis at Wiktionary