Customer Reviews

Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy

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People generally recognize that Socratic dialogues are "dialogical" in some fuller sense than just alternating speakers, but describing this quality is quite difficult. Baktin is the best critic for this subject, but reading him can be quite trying, and later Bakhtinian criticism often leads to rather vague or tangential musings on the nature of discourse. Not so with this monograph, a rather nuts and bolts guide to the dialogical elements in Plato's writings and their origins in the rich dramatic and rhetorical genres of fifth and fourth century Greece.

What's more ambitious than showing how this dialogism works in each genre is Nightingale's attempt to show how Plato draws the dialogical elements out of those genres to put his own work into a dialogical relationship _with_ those genres. She's most successful with the genres of tragedy and encomium in her second and third chapters, and her fourth chapter, on the slippery relationship between genre elements and the works that include them, is probably the best in the book. I feel that much more could have been done with the fifth chapter, which seems hampered by our discipline-wide anxiety over the earnestness of Books V and VI of Plato's Republic. Even so, it's the best book I've read on Plato in years, and a good place to start for people wanting to read historically informed, theoretically contemporary literary criticism on Plato.