oedipus the king

Aristotelian philosophy teaches that knowing material reality can be achieved by properly identifying the essential traits of things and distinguishing things from other things by forming classification schemes based on those traits. The theory's great power is that it canproduce useful, independently verifiable categories of analysis--if we all can agree on the epic's essential traits, then we can conduct reasonable scholarly discussions about epics. Since Aristotle also was interested (like his teacher, Plato) in the proper organization of human communities, from the one-family "oikos" (whence "economy") to the city-state of the "polis," he also tried to describe the social functions of literature. This continues to be an important line of study in modern literary theory. One of the method's weakness arises from disagreements about what, if anything, can be called essential from the start ("a priori"), outside some kind of social, political, historical processes that made it. A second weakness, shared by some practitioners of Structuralism (q.v.), is Aristotle's fondness for defnition and categorizatino by "binary oppositions": states which are supposed to be mutually exclusive (i.e., "live or dead," "on or off," in that you can't be both, but must be one or the other). Many of the oppositions by which he constructed his literary analysis are suspect or simply wrong, at least in our own era (e.g., "comedy or tragedy" has become confused with tragi-comedy and satire). Post-Aristotelian thinking tends to avoid relying upon unexamined binary oppositions and to look backwards, in order to situate literature's traits in the processes which created them, but otherwise we owe a great methodological debt to "The Philosopher," as he was known to medieval readers.

Some Aristotelian principles--

1) Genre and generic attributes Aristotle sought to anchor his definitions of literary genres in exemplary works and authors. Of tragedians, he