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Book Cover
E-book
Author Berger, Harry, Jr., 1924-2021, author

Title Couch city : Socrates against Simonides / Harry Berger, Jr. ; edited by Ward Risvold and J. Benjamin Fuqua ; introduction by Jill Frank
Edition First edition
Published New York : Fordham University Press, 2021
©2021

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Introduction: Speech Bonds -- Part I. The Republic -- Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch -- Simonides, Part 1 -- Simonides, Part 2 -- Simonides, Part 3 -- Simonides, Part 4 -- Part II. The Protagoras -- Macrological Mystification: Protagoras's Myth -- The Ethics of Etceteration -- The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face -- Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on August 31, 2021)
Subject Socrates.
Simonides, approximately 556 B.C.-467 B.C.
Plato. Republic.
Plato. Protagoras.
SUBJECT Simonides, approximately 556 B.C.-467 B.C. fast
Socrates fast
Protagoras (Plato) fast
Republic (Plato) fast
Subject PHILOSOPHY -- History & Surveys -- Ancient & Classical.
Form Electronic book
Author Risvold, Ward J., editor.
Fuqua, J. Benjamin, editor
Frank, Jill, writer of introduction
ISBN 9780823294251
0823294250
9780823294244
0823294242
0823297411
9780823297412