Okay, so if in the Aristotelian sense of catharsis it is the viewer
(or listener/reader) who is to undergo catharsis - being cleansed of
the emotions of terror and grief and so on which the play/text/film
has aroused -, to the extent that we sympathize/empathize with the
protagonist of the play (film) experiencing redemption, we, too,
momentarily undergo a sense of redemption.
Forgive me, but I'm not so sure I follow you regarding Freud. First
of all, who is the protagonist?
Henry
>
> It depends on which theory of catharsis you are referring
> to...for either Aristotle or Freud, it isn't the protagonist that
> is redeemed, but rather the value of the genre, by virtue of its
> purgative powers. Is Hamlet's a redemptive tale, if Horatio was
> wrong and there were no flights of angels to sing him to his rest?
>
> Indeed, if redemption is meant in the biblical sense of the term,
> then tragedy and Christianity are antithetical...our sense that
> Thomas More (Paul Scofield) believes in his personal redemption
> makes his death at the end of "A Man for all Seasons" much less
> tragic (at least in the sense of much less unjust, and much less of
> a waste). The real challenge is to accept tragedy when there is no
> afterlife in which the good will be redeemed and the evil be
> punished...that's where the Greeks were unsurpassed.
>
> Don't get me started.
>
> "For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear,
> and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy
> us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy
>
> Daniel Shaw
> Professor of Philosophy and Film
> Lock Haven University
> Managing Editor, Film and Philosophy
> website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw
>
*
*
Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon.
After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to.
To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask]
For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon.
**
|