Poetics

Introduction

A short, partly unfinished treatise, perhaps notes for teaching. It deals mainly with tragedy and epic; a second book on comedy is lost, a gap that Umberto Eco used in his novel “The Name of the Rose”. Tragedy is defined as the imitation (mimesis) of a serious action that through pity and fear brings about a catharsis of such emotions, a term whose meaning (purging, purification or clarification) is disputed. The plot (mythos) matters most, with reversal (peripeteia) and recognition. Renaissance critics derived from it the “three unities” of action, time and place, though only the unity of action is Aristotle’s.

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Connections

Responds to

• Republicc. 375 BCE · Plato

Taken up in

• Time and Narrative1983 · Paul Ricœur

Criticized in

• The Birth of Tragedy1872 · Friedrich Nietzsche

More works by Aristotle

• c. 350 BCEOn the Soul (De anima)
• c. 350 BCEOrganon
• c. 350 BCEPhysics
• c. 340 BCEMetaphysics
• c. 340 BCENicomachean Ethics
• c. 335 BCEPolitics