Earl Miner's seminal study "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems" (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1978, pp. 339-353, Spring 1979, pp. 553-568) serves me as a point of departure. Adopting the differentiation between literary and critical systems as suggested by Claudio Guill~n, Miner thinks that two major systems of criticism, an Eastern and a Western system, have emerged in the history of world literature. Next he proves that the Western system of criticism has been defined from drama. Owing to the high standards and communal assets of dramatic poetry in ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle could base an influential critical system on it. "It is because Plato and Aristotle took drama as the norm that they considered imitation the essential character of literature. And taking imitation as the norm, they were unable to distinguish lyric from narrative. Moreover, they were unable to account for the very lyrics of which Greek tragedy was then largely made. And they were forced, by their conception of imitation, to consider the two Homeric poems as, in their description, half dramatic and half narrative. This seems to have bothered Aristotle insofar as he insisted that Homer was the single exception. Yet in each culture, a systematic poetics emerges in the same way as powerful critical minds encounter the existing, esteemed genre. As we shall be seeing, only a triadic conception of genre allows for the evidence available in the literatures of the world (although of course 'genre' is simply my word designating one of the three kinds)" (p. 350). Miner's prototype for an Eastern system of criticism is Ki no Tsurayuki's preface to the Kokinsh~t: "It would be difficult to imagine a kind of criticism more different