Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

The Rambler No. 4

Samuel Johnson talks about why fiction is not as good as nonfiction in the Rambler. He talks about how if you take away the imaginary things; you are left with nothing that means anything. He believes that the authors of these books do not worry about being criticized because they are making everything up. I do not see how these authors would not worry about being criticized. If anything, I would think that they would be criticized more because they are doing something different. He also believes that these books are only for the young and ignorant. Johnson says that authors should take the upmost care to not include anything that is indecent in their novels. I understand that this type of novel would appear more to the younger group, but I think educated people like it as well. I know I have to remember that this was at a different time than we are in now, but it is still hard for me to believe that only young and ignorant people liked fiction novels.

Horace



Horace



In Ars Poetica, Horace is giving his guidelines on writing poetry. While I think that many of the points he makes are valid, I also feel that he is being way to strict. It just seems like with all of the rules there would never be any type of different poetry. It seems like it would all sound the same. It would have to get old after awhile.

Plato

Plato

The Republic was a Socratic dialouge written by Plato. He talks about why there should be justice and what good comes from it. In the following video is Robin Waterfield telling us why we should read the Republic. Robin Waterfield is the editor of the Oxford World's Classic edition of the Republic.

Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a physician and a teacher. He believes that everything has a beginning, middle, and end. His ideas about the of unities of Greek tragedy and tragic flaws are a few of the things that he is famous for. The unities include time, place, and action. Time is when the tragedy tries to stay withing a 24 hour time frame, or one revolution of the sun. Place is when the tragedy sticks to one location because of the time frame. Action is when having action keeps you in that one intense place. Too many actions would be hard to keep up with.

Aristotle's tragic flaw, or "hamartia," is when a character is destroyed through some flaw they have. For example, Hamlet over thinking things. A more modern example would be Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.

I've included the following video because I found it to be pretty funny. It is not very professional, but it does explain Aristotle pretty well.