Abstract

This paper reanalyzes the role of plot in Aristotle’s Poetics, with a view to clarifying Aristotle’s comment that poetry speaks of universals as opposed to particulars. I argue that the universals of which Aristotle writes are not general or metaphorical principles, but rather plot itself, understood as the universal form in a poetic substance and essential to tragedy’s telos and self-realization—the arousal of pity and fear. This argument resituates the Poetics and both its arguments and taxonomies of plot’s parts within the framework on Aristotelian ontology and teleology