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 as well as communicational aspects. Aristotle’s conception of the literary text, thus, is not a mere archaeological remnant; it is a complex and profound theory, able to hold a lively and fruitful dialogue with modern thinking.