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The poetic principles defined by Aristotle in his Poetics gave birth to an aesthetic tradition which dominated Western culture and literature up until the twentieth century. All his successors believed that, in order to achieve literary value and public acclaim, a text should comply with criteria such as unity of the subject (mythos), harmony of the parts (taxis), clear inclusive meaning (dianoia), etc. - in other words, structure. However, many authors departed from this ideal and gave free rein to their fantasy, conceiving plethoric, multi-layered, anarchic works, which tended to be, most often than not, excluded from the literary canon. During the twentieth century, with the modern and then the postmodern turn, not only the practical creative Aristotelian rules, but also the very idea of structure was contested. In this paper I make a survey of some of the main critical thinkers who opposed Aristotle’s model of closed works: M. Bakhtin, C.-L. Strauss, J. Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, U. Eco, F. Moretti, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western culture and literature have been moulded, in their main aesthetic conceptions and creative practices, by Aristotle’s principles. Starting from his seminal text Poetics, ancient, medieval, and modern (from Renaissance to the twentieth century) aesthetics, poetics, rhetorical and grammatical theories have reiterated, amplified, adapted and reshaped the concepts of imitation (mimesis), subject (mythos), meaning (dianoia), order (taxis), unity of the whole and harmony of the parts, etc. On this basis, they demanded that literary works should have - as a prerequisite of aesthetic value and artistic success - a structure, a unitary composition, a centred form, a logos, a cogito, a synopsis or any other formal pattern. This brought about the exclusion from the canon of the works failing to complain with these criteria. In this paper I retrace the Aristotelian tradition, from Horace, Cicero and Quintilian to Beda and Dante, from Minturno and Scaliger to du Bellay and Boileau, from Sydney, Dryden and Pope to Mathew Arnold, the Chicago School and Northrop Frye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]