Derrida & Aristotle
...ons. His first section highlights the importance of judging a poem on how it is written, rather than what it is written about. He explains that a critic must “…treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry.” All forms of poetry are imitation, and differentiate only by how the author presents them to the audience. Therefore, style, not content, should provide a way in which to categorize poetry. In Section Five, Aristotle continues on to distinguish the boundaries between Tragic, Comedic, and Epic poetry. Comedy is considered to be a "lower form" of tragedy, and is not accompanied by the same degree of history due to its previous lack of seriousness. Although there are differences between Epic and Tragic poetry, Tragic poetry contains all the same elements as Epic, but Tragic holds elements that Epic poetry does not. Aristotle differentiates by claiming that “Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of meter and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit, whereas the Epic action has no limits of time. This, then, is a second point of difference; though at first the same freedom was admitted in Tragedy as in Epic poetry.” Section Seven delineates the structural requirements of Tragedy. Aristotle insists that a good plot must obey the principles of a “beginning, a middle, and an end.” A beginning cannot depend on previous action, an end must follow something, but can have nothing follow it, and a middle follows something and is followed by something. A good plot must obey these principles. A tragedy’s beauty increases as its length (magnitude) increases, provided that the whole is understandable and within the bounds of a reader’s limited memory. The action is dependent on change, and therefore the plot must, through chance or necessity, change bad fortune to good, or good to bad. Aristotle expands on his idea of what a plot should be in Section Seventeen. In Aristotl...