Harry Berger 
Couch City [EPUB ebook] 
Socrates against Simonides

Support

Crowning six decades of literary, rhetorical, and historical scholarship, Harry Berger, Jr., offers readers another trenchant reading. Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato’s kalos kagathos, showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors’ speech acts even as they are tethered to his.
Plato’s Republic and Protagoras both reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod: the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. In the Protagoras, Socrates takes apart a poem attributed to Simonides and uses this to finish off the famous and supposedly dangerous sophist, Protagoras. Couch City is a close reading of the comic procedures Socrates deploys against Protagoras as he reduces him to silence. But it also shows that Socrates takes the danger posed by Protagoras and his fellow sophists seriously. Even if they are represented as buffoons, sophists are among the charismatic authority figures—poets, rhapsodes, seers, orators, and lawgivers—who promote views harmful to Athenian democracy. Socrates uses Simonides’s poem to show how sophists not only practice misinterpretation but are unable to defend against it.
Berger ports his roots as a pioneering literary theorist into this rhetorical discussion, balancing ideas such as speech-act theory with hard-nosed philology. The result is a provocative and counterintuitive reassessment of Plato’s engagement with democracy.

€57.99
payment methods

Table of Content

Introduction : Speech Bonds, by Jill Frank | 1
Part I: The Republic
1 Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch | 13
2 Simonides, Part 1 | 25
3 Simonides, Part 2 | 46
4 Simonides, Part 3 | 62
5 Simonides, Part 4 | 82
Part II: The Protagoras
6 Macrological Mystification: Protagoras’s Myth | 109
7 The Ethics of Etceteration | 123
8 The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face | 130
9 Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras | 143
Notes | 171
Index | 177

About the author

J. Benjamin Fuqua is Lecturer in English at Clemson University.

Buy this ebook and get 1 more FREE!
Language English ● Format EPUB ● Pages 192 ● ISBN 9780823294244 ● File size 3.6 MB ● Editor Ward Risvold & J. Benjamin Fuqua ● Publisher Fordham University Press ● City New York ● Country US ● Published 2021 ● Edition 1 ● Downloadable 24 months ● Currency EUR ● ID 7793045 ● Copy protection Adobe DRM
Requires a DRM capable ebook reader

More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor

40,395 Ebooks in this category