ABSTRACT
is, strictly speaking, not a critical term; but it is a concept which is central to one of the major disputes of modern criticism: does literature consist of language, or is language simply one component of literature? In Aristotle's enumeration of the six parts of tragedy, lexis (diction) is merely one component. The CHICAGO CRITICS extended this analysis to poetry, detecting four 'parts' in the lyric, among which 'diction' ( = language) was said to be the least important.
