Exiling the Poets

Naddaff, Ramona A., Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic, University of Chicago Press, 2003, 192 p.

ISBN: 0-226-56727-3

Description de l'éditeur:

The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original approach to this problem, reading Plato's censorship as a creative and transformative act intended to produce literature, philosophy, and a reciprocal relationship between them.

Naddaff's approach identifies two distinct censorships in the Republic. With his first censorship, in books 2 and 3, Plato constitutes poetry as literature that matters and the poet as a legitimate (though ultimately vanquished) rival of the philosopher. In book 10's second censorship, Plato exiles the poets as a mode of self-subversion, thereby rethinking and revising his theories of mimesis, the soul, and, most important, his first censorship of poetry. Finally, with the poetic myth of Er, Plato censors his own censorships of poetry, thus producing the unexpected result of a poetically animated and open-ended dialectical philosophy.

Exiling the Poets will interest not just classicists, philosophers, and historians of rhetoric but anyone concerned with the historical contexts of censorship.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Other Side of Censorship: Literature on Trial

1. The "Miserable Inventions" of Poets

"And There Will Be Poets"

A Tradition of Poetic Truth Tellers

Behind the Veil of Censorship

2. New Songs Are Best

Socrates' "Homericide"

"They Could Be Heroes": The Guardians' Poetic Education

Another Way to Sing a Song: Student, Rhapsodist, and Poet

3. The Making of the Poet's Image

From Identity to Difference

The Philosopher on the Couch: From Creators to Imitators

Dangerous Mimetic Images and Artists

Finally, the Poet

4. The Death of Poetry, the Poetry of Death

Eternal Returns

The Civil War of the Divided Soul

Enslaving Reason: Sympathy for the Other

Conclusion: A Myth to End . . . All Myths

Innovative Action and Conservative Reaction

Production, Repression, and Self-Subversion

Index