Ebook: Bodies of Speech: Text and Textuality in Aristotle

Until Plato, poetry and oration were conceived as oral activities; writing, if considered at all, was conceived as a kind of 'tape-recorder'. Aristotle was the first thinker who examined the products of the literate culture in which he lived as such: he conceived the works of poetry and oration not only as oral events, but also as written texts. Bodies of Speech reads Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric through this assumption, and shows how both are underlain by a systematic text theory, which contains semantic and communicational aspects. The semantic structure is hierarchic, or 'vertical', in nature, and it is constructed as a series of semantic layers, ordered on an axis between a surface level and a deep pattern. The communicational structure means the interrelation between speaker and recipient, which takes place on a single level, and is, thus, 'horizontally' structured. Its discussion concerns the complex roles of the author (poet, orator) and the addressee (spectator, listener, reader). Finally, the book also discusses the larger structures surrounding the single text: the poetic and rhetoric genres as ordering principles and as historical phenomena developing in time. Aristotle's conception of the literary text, thus, is not a mere archeological remnant; it is a complex and profound theory, able to hold a lively and fruitful dialogue with modern theory.