• Part of
    Ubiquity Network logo
    Contact us Submit a book proposal

    Read Book Online
  •  Read EPUB Now
  • Platonic Occasions

    Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture

    James Soderholm, Richard Begam

    Book 1 in the Stockholm English Studies series.
     Read Book

    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.

    Chapters

    • Introduction

    • 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

    • The Art of Darkness

    • Let’s Hang Ourselves Immediately! On Death and Suicide

    • On the Eros of Species

    • The Benighted States of America?

    • 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

    Metrics:

    How to cite this book
    Soderholm J. & Begam R. 2015. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa
    Soderholm, J. and Begam, R., 2015. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa
    Soderholm, Jand R Begam. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm University Press, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa
    Soderholm, J., & Begam, R. (2015). Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa
    Soderholm, James, and Richard Begam. 2015. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa




    Export to:




    License

    This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s)

    Peer Review Information

    This book has been peer reviewed. See our Peer Review Policies for more information.

    Additional Information

    Published on Jan. 29, 2015

    Language

    English

    Pages:

    204

    ISBN
    EPUB 978-91-7635-002-7
    Mobi 978-91-7635-001-0
    Paperback 978-91-7635-000-3
    PDF 978-91-7635-003-4

    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa



    comments powered by Disqus