The Perils of Uglytown : : Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt / / Harry Berger.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Berger, Harry,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Preface --; 1. A Polar Model of Culture Change --; PART I. MISANTHROPOLOGY IN PLATO'S DIALOGUES --; 2. The Discourse of Pleonexia --; 3. Dying Angry --; 4. More Than a Talking Head --; 5. The Perils of Uglytown --; 6. Adeimantus and Glaucon --; 7. Four Virtues in the Republic: (1) Wisdom --; 8. Four Virtues in the Republic: (2) Courage, The Well-Born Lye --; 9. Four Virtues in the Republic: (3) Temperance --; 10. Four Virtues in the Republic: (4) Justice --; 11. Apprehension in the Timaeus --; PART II. MISANTHROPOLOGY IN EARLY MODERN CULTURE --; 12. Cybernetic Alienation --; 13. Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo's Cave --; 14. Prospero's Humiliation --; 15. The Drama of Competitive Posing --; Notes --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780823270590; 9783110729030
• DOI: 10.1515/9780823270590?locatt=mode:legacy
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Harry Berger.

With characteristic wit, Harry Berger, Jr., brings his flair for close reading to texts and images across two millennia that illustrate what he calls "structural misanthropology." Beginning with a novel reading of Plato, Berger emphasizes Socrates's self-acknowledged failures. The dialogues, he shows, offer up, only to dispute, a misanthropic polis. The Athenian city-state, they worry, is founded on a social order motivated by apprehension-both the desire to take and the fear of being taken. In addition to suggesting new politicaland philosophical dimensions to Platonic thought, Berger's attention to rhetorical practice offers novel ways of parsing the dialogic method itself. In the book's second half, Berger revisits and revises his earlier accounts of Italian humanism, Elizabethan drama, and Dutch painting. Berger shows how structural misanthropology helps us to read the competitive practices that characterize Renaissance writing and art, whether in Machiavelli's constitutional prostheses, Shakespeare's pageants of humiliation, or the elbow jabs of Dutch portraiture.