Analysis # 1- Aristotle's Aesthetic Theory

Aristotle’s Aesthetic Theory can be applied to the YouTube video “Fireflies” by Owl City through “…prescriptive criticism and description…whose object is to understand how poetry operates and the way in which it achieves its effects” (Murray xxx). It carries out this goal by invoking the audience that watches and listens to interpret or notice the world around them in order to really experience life and to question the dreams that we have so as to experience pleasure or pain. Aristotle finds our emotions that can be triggered by aesthetic appreciation of beauty as an advantage because we as human beings learn and grow through imitation or mimesis. For example, “…according to Aristotle, the ability to engage our emotions is an essential feature of tragedy, and one that is positively beneficial in its effects” (xxx). For example the singer is provoking the audience by saying “You would not believe your eyes if ten million fire flies lit up the world as I fell asleep” (fireflies). He is expressing to his audience the beauty that surrounds him that he is experiencing being apart of. Throughout the video everything is moving so quickly with the music as the chorus shouts, “That planet earth moves slowly”, maybe indicating to the audience that the singer is overwhelmed with life because it is moving by so quickly. The singer/songwriter is an imitator who has the freedom to express his/her ideas in many different ways that do not have to be exactly reality. In the video the singer is talking about his dreams that he sees and his thoughts which cannot be verified as real for his audience. For example Aristotle talks about this issue, “The artist can present things as they are, as they seem to be, or as they ought to be…hence what he offers is a re-fashioning of nature or experience rather than a straightforward copy” (xxxi)

Works Cited

Murray, Penelope. Classical Literary Criticism. Penguin Books: New York, 2004