Audiobook · read by volunteers
Poetics
Aristotle
Read by Robert Foster · 11 chapters · 2 h 23
About the book
Why do stories grip us, and what makes a tragedy work? Some twenty-three centuries ago Aristotle sat down to answer these questions, and his short study of storytelling is still the place where discussions of plot begin. In Poetics he considers the unity of a story, the sudden reversal that changes everything, the nature of character and the effects that drama has on its audience. His examples come from Greek tragedy, comedy and epic poetry, yet his observations have outlived the plays that prompted them. Screenwriters and novelists still turn to him for guidance. This recording, in Ingram Bywater’s English translation, is a compact two and a half hours that moves from preface through the main arguments with admirable clarity. It is a short, demanding and rewarding book for anyone who loves a well-made tale.
Introduction
Aristotle was born in 384 BC and died in 322 BC. A pupil of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great, he wrote on logic, ethics, politics, biology and the arts, and his thinking shaped Western philosophy for centuries. The Poetics, from the fourth century BC, is his brief study of storytelling. It discusses things like the unity of plot, reversal of situation and character in the context of Greek tragedy, comedy and epic poetry.
The text has not come down to us in perfect order, and scholars still debate parts of it. Even so, its central ideas are easy to grasp and have proved remarkably durable. Aristotle argues that a good story has a beginning, middle and end linked by cause and effect, that characters matter chiefly through their actions, and that tragedy moves an audience to pity and fear. Many modern writers of films and novels read it as a handbook, and it is especially popular with screenwriters, as the numerous how-to books on scripts show.
This recording uses the English translation of Ingram Bywater, who lived from 1840 to 1914 and whose edition appeared in 1909. It is divided into eleven sections: a preface, followed by groups of chapters that follow the structure of the original, and the whole lasts about two and a half hours.
The reading was made by LibriVox volunteers. It suits listeners who enjoy ideas, writers looking for a clear account of how plots work, and anyone who would like to hear where some of our most familiar notions about stories first took shape.
Public domain
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text