Dramatic Foundations - Computers as Theatre - page 42

useful in the computer domain have diffi culty with what they perceive as
an extremely antiquated approach. Why Aristotle? How can it be useful to
us today to employ concepts that were defi ned in the fourth century BCE?
Aren't there more contemporary views that would be more appropriate to
the task?
I want to answer the latter question fi rst. Without a doubt there are
more recent theorists who have made major contributions to the body of
dramatic criticism; the next few chapters will touch on the work of many
of them. But none has provided a theory of the drama that is as wide-
ranging, complete, and well integrated as Aristotle's; they haven't needed
to. For most, the Poetics has been a jumping-off place—a body of ideas to
tweak and elaborate on. For some, it has been something to bounce off of;
many theorists (such as Bertolt Brecht, mentioned in Chapter 1) have per-
suasively amended Aristotle's poetics on certain points. But none has pre-
sented a fully formulated alternative view of the nature of the drama that
has achieved comparably wide acceptance.
A second reason for looking to the Poetics as opposed to more con-
temporary theories (such as post-structuralism) is that the Aristotelean
paradigm is more appropriate to the technology to which we are trying to
apply it. In order to build representations that have theatrical qualities in
computer-based environments, a deep, robust, and logically coherent no-
tion of structural elements and dynamics is required, and this is what Aris-
totle provides.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a student and successor of the philosopher
Plato. His many works included the Ethics , Rhetoric , Physics , and Metaphys-
ics . Natural Philosophy, as it was called in his day, eventuated in what we
now know as science. His work encompassed what we now call both philo-
sophical and scientifi c thought, and he explored subjects from biology to
logic, government to art. He was tutor to Alexander the Great, whose as-
sumption of power in 336 BCE ushered in the Hellenistic Age.
Aristotle worked and wrote in the century after the great blossoming
of Greek drama, exemplifi ed by the works of Aeschylus (525-456 BCE),
Sophocles (496-406 BCE), Euripides (484-406/7 BCE), and Aristophanes
(448-380 BCE). During the brightening days of the fi fth century BCE, the-
atre seemed to spring full-blown from the brows of these early dramatists.
Looking back on that remarkable century, Aristotle set himself the task
of understanding where the various forms of poetry, including narrative,
lyric, and dramatic, came from and how they work. Aristotle's work was a
response to criticisms of poetry leveled by his teacher, Plato. Plato asserted