Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

hamartia: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaninganagnorisiscompare the meanings
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hamartia1 CONSTRUCTHamartiaARISTOTLE · TRAGIC FLAW

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Literary and dramatic theory

The tragic protagonist's error or flaw that brings about their downfall

Aristotle introduced hamartia in his Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) as the feature of the ideal tragic plot that carries a basically good but imperfect protagonist from good fortune to bad, not through vice or depravity but through some hamartia. The Greek word, built on the verb hamartanein, to miss the mark as an archer misses a target, can range in meaning from an intellectual mistake or error of judgment to a moral fault, and Aristotle's brief, compressed use of it does not settle which he intended. Later scholarship divides on exactly this point: some readers, such as R. D. Dawe (1968), treat hamartia primarily as an error committed in ignorance of some crucial fact, while others read it as a flaw of character, and T. C. W. Stinton (1975) argues the word covers a wide range rather than a single fixed meaning, so the unresolved question is itself a central topic of the literature. What makes the term a landmark is its scope: it names the single plot element Aristotle placed at the causal center of tragedy, the hinge on which a well-constructed tragic reversal turns, and it continues to organize how critics analyse the downfall of a protagonist across drama and narrative.[1][2][3]

Unit
A conceptual category in dramatic theory, identified by interpreting a tragic plot, not a measured quantity
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified through close reading of a tragic plot: locating the protagonist's decisive error or flaw and tracing how it precipitates the reversal of fortune

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Nearby constructs

catharsis4 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, one hope, three fieldsmimesis3 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsakrasia1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Aristotle. (1996). Poetics (M. Heath, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work composed ca. 335 BCE)
  2. Dawe, R. D. (1968). Some reflections on Ate and Hamartia. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 72, 89–123. https://doi.org/10.2307/311076
  3. Stinton, T. C. W. (1975). Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek tragedy. The Classical Quarterly, 25(2), 221–254. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800030068

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