Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture

Description

In Platonic Occasions, Richard Begam and James Soderholm reflect upon a wide range of thinkers, writers and ideas from Plato, Descartes and Nietzsche to Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Moderns — from Evil, Love and Death to Art, Memory and Mimesis. The dialogues suggest that Percy Shelley was right when he claimed “We are all Greeks,” and yet what have we learned about the initiatives of culture and literature since our classical predecessors? Begam and Soderholm’s ten dialogues function as a series of dual-meditations that take Plato as an intellectual godfather while presenting a new form of dialogic knowledge based on the friction and frisson of two minds contending, inventing and improvising. The authors discuss not only what is healthy and vigorous about Western culture but also consider where that culture is in retreat, as they seek to understand the legacy of the Enlightenment and its relation to the contemporary moment. Platonic Occasions is an experiment in criticism that enjoins the reader to imagine what the dialogic imagination can do when inspired by Platonic inquiry, but not bound by a single master and the singular mind. Beyond Socratic maieutics and Cartesian meditation is a form of intellectual interplay where it is impossible not to be of two minds. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE: ART AND AESTHETICS Flaubert’s Hat Trick, Or The Pleasures of Banality The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time The Grapes of Zeuxis: Representation in the Arts PART TWO: EVIL, DEATH, LOVE, POLITICS The Art of Darkness Let’s Hang Ourselves Immediately! On Death and Suicide On the Eros of Species The Benighted States of America? PART THREE: PHILOSOPHICAL DIGRESSIONS The Last of the Cartesians: On Enlightenment and its Discontents Nietzsche’s Cow: On Memory and Forgetting Socrates Among the Cicadas: The Art of the Platonic Dialogue Glossary Index About the Authors