Couch City

Berger's provocative interpretation of the Protagoras is guided by his immensely capacious reading practice, which trains his inimitable historical, literary, and sensorial energies on the implicities and complicities of the dialogue's language, on what he calls its "agonistic surfaces" and "mnemonic triggers." Attending to the Protagoras's preoccupation with face, Berger gives face to ainigma, allusion, ambivalence, ambiguity, amphiboly, and analogy (staying, in the interest of space, with the letter "a"), taking these sites of instability as prompts to shift from logic to ethics and rhetoric, and as occasions for heightened philosophic and dramatic scrutiny. Berger subjects to similar scrutiny the invalid arguments and rhetorical misfires that punctuate the Protagoras but that Socrates's interlocutors often fail to mark.---Jill Frank, from the Introduction
Harry Berger has done it again. His ever-sharp vision has once more pierced through the opacities of plodding scholarship about the debates of Plato's Socrates about poets and their poetry. Yes, these poets and their defenders were foils for Plato, but they were in real life Socrates' most worthy intellectual match. Berger's portrait of Simonides as viewed by Protagoras is translucent--yet another masterpiece achieved by a true master of Platonic exegesis.---Gregory Nagy, Harvard University
This is an outstanding work by a truly exceptional scholar and critic of the European literary and cultural heritage. The particular advantage of this book is its searching attentiveness to parts of the Protagoras that no one has ever had a good idea what to make of. This work demonstrates the value of interpretations of Plato that employ true literary expertise. Berger knows about poetics, about discourse analysis, about rhetorics of fiction, about narratology, about the phenomenology of performance, and about other complexities of the representation of human agents in literary and dramatic media, and he uses his expertise adroitly in eliciting implications of the Platonic text that have eluded commentators less attuned to that text's literary features.---Jay Farness, Northern Arizona University