Poetics
by Aristotle · first published 1536
23% recommend73% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
Foundational work of Western dramatic theory that shaped how tragedy, plays, novels and films are built. Useful for those studying storytelling, art theory or media, and for anyone seeking its source.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
One of the first books written on what is now called aesthetics. Although parts are lost (e.g., comedy), it has been very influential in western thought, such as the part on tragedy.
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…misunderstandings arise because the characters are too shy/ polite/ embarrassed/ intimidated to say what they really mean. There are many good books on this subject, but you could do worse than dig up Aristotle's Poetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 hasa helpful list of translations, including links to multiple public domain versions. Also, while it doesn't have breakdowns for individual shows,…
on “Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula” ↗Aristotle's Poetics. Yes, it was published before 2021. A lot of writers try to set their own rules, but according to the best, you need limitations to be creative. Just like you would play sports with rules. That rulebook…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗Parent here. Art != Communication And art is not a form of communication ether. There is no shortage of literature on this topic but good place to start is Aristotle’s Poetics, essentially the first art theory ever written and it dives head first into the issue. In it, Aristotle laments on the corruption of communication at the hands of poetry.
on “Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras” ↗I was introduced to Aristotle's 'Poetics' in college and it transformed the trajectory of my life. The Poetics, as you may or may not know, is the foundation for nearly every western-oriented tragedy: novels, plays, films, etc. dating back centuries.…
on “Ask HN: Aristotle's “Poetics” and his lost “Comedy”” ↗…find that most practical style books can be shortened into a 10th of the size. However, some books end up with much longer notes than the books themselves. One of my favorites was actually Aristotle's Poetics. A lot of the classic non-fiction are like that; the article versions are longer. But what I've learned is avoid most practical books; things that tell you what to do. I think the problem is that the…
on “I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books” ↗…prescribe Plato - Republic, book X, specifically. How can one set of shadows on the wall be better than another, as they’re just shadows, degraded representations of the real? Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis…
on “Sora 2” ↗You might want to check into Aristotle's Poetics.
on “The 2005 screenwriting book that’s taken over Hollywood” ↗…https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe... Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the…
on “Free Programing Books” ↗…taught, the reason the roots of philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the process of directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined. Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Poetics mark some of the earliest attempts made by man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that Descartes took…
on “Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant” ↗…http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... Amusingly, footnote 3 in the perseus text is a rosetta stone for the scholar's leisurely manner of saying "like and subscribe": "I must beg to recommend to the reader's notice my translation of Aristotle's Poetics, with a collection of notes, as the two treatises contribute to each other's illustration in the fullest extent." Bonus tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU
on “A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive” ↗…to act, to care, to help those in pain—something the numbing cycle of doomscrolling rarely inspires. Tangentially related - Aristotle noticed all of this and wrote about it in relation to plays in The Poetics ... except for the doomscrolling bit, that wasn't available yet. He ties it even more deeply than "act, care" - he says it moves us towards virtue or vice.
…old stuff first (e.g. Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's Symposium) is that later writers reference them. Even today, were you to read about, for example, the writing craft, teachers still quote Aristotle's Poetics (e.g. all stories have a beginning, middle and end.) As for personal philosophy, experience will shape you more, especially if/when you have kids, pay higher taxes, buy a house, suffer a sudden medical…
on “Ask HN: Learning about philosophy” ↗…mechanistic metaphors that animate it. I believe it is in fact this rejection, coupled with a return to more confidence in formal realities, closer to the specific philosophical bent of works like Aristotle's Poetics, that is the basis Alexander's entire project. Note that Alexander has received more attention in many ways outside of his discipline (such as in the software community), for precisely his criticism of…
on “Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant” ↗…tricky for two reasons. First, we don't really know how to quantify the relative value of two different species. It's kind of like trying to quantify the value of a book. Losing a volume of Aristotle's Poetics is probably worse than losing a Harlequin romance. And second, the information is not just resident in the genome. We can quantify how many bits of information is contained in DNA, but just knowing…
on “Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)” ↗The "tragic flaw" is a more useful frame for analysis of subsequent Western tragedy, which was obviously heavily influenced by Aristotle's Poetics. However, Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in Poetics is almost solely an analysis of Oedipus: if he was wrong about Oedipus, then his argument for the "tragic flaw" doesn't have much else support. Indeed,…
on “Observations on tragedy in a digital age” ↗