ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 relates the Poetics’ brief but essential account of comedy to Aristotle’s central ideas about tragic plot and emotional effect. The Poetics responds to Plato’s rejection of dramatic poetry by arguing that drama is a mode of philosophical inquiry: drama represents universal, not merely random or particular events and character types. To accomplish this, drama must represent a “whole, unified action,” whose incidents are bound together by “probability and necessity.” The best plots, though, display causality paradoxically, through events logically ordered yet unexpected or surprising. The crucial plot elements of unified tragic action are recognition and reversal, pathos (suffering), and hamartia (error in judgment), yet they have close counterparts in the hoax and comic error of comedy. Each such plot aspect is crucial because of its role in evoking the emotions that correspond to each genre and that undergo catharsis, the effect Aristotle identifies as the end of tragedy and also, as I show, of comedy.
