Comedy and Tragedy

This chapter explains that Aristophanes' comments on comedy are often hard to understand because they presuppose a culture whose literary perspectives are — to us — almost inconceivably narrow. It clarifies that for Aristophanes and the Greek poets during his time, literature begins with Homer and consists largely of a few major writers in each of a few different media or genres, most of which exclusively belong to the world of the Greek city-state. It discusses that Aristophanes is concerned with tragedy because he is concerned with the possibilities of comedy. It notes that tragedy is not per se comedy's opposite; comedy is free to use tragic norms to help create a new comic self-sufficiency and it is autonomous.