Peripeteia

Peripeteia (Greek, Template:Polytonic) is a reversal of circumstances, or turning point. Primarily used with reference to works of literature. The English form of peripeteia is Peripety. Peripety is a sudden reversal dependant on intellect and logic.

Aristotle defines it as "a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity."

Peripeteia includes changes of character, but also more external changes. A character who becomes rich and famous from poverty and obscurity has undergone peripeteia, even if his character remains the same.

When a character learns something he had been previously ignorant of, this could be described as peripeteia; the character has been turned from a state of ignorance to that of knowledge, or from doubt to certainty. However, this is normally distinguished from peripetia as anagnorisis or discovery, a distinction derived from Aristotle's work.

Aristotle considered the combination of peripeteia and anagnorisis the mark of a superior tragedy. Two such plays are Oedipus the King, where the oracle's information that Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother brought about his mother's death and his own blindness and exile, and Iphigeneia in Tauris, where Iphigeneia realizes that the strangers she is to sacrifice are her brother and his friend, resulting in all three of them escaping Tauris. These plots, he considered complex and superior to simple plots without anagnorisis or peripetia, such as when Medea resolves to kill her children, knowing they are her children, and does so. Aristotle identified Oedipus the King, as the principal work demonstrating peripety.

See also: Aristotle's Poetics.

Alfred Hitchcock is often seen as a modern master of peripety, as seen in his films Rear Window and North by Northwest.