The Perils of Uglytown - Harry Berger

The Perils of Uglytown

Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
336 Seiten
2015
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8232-4517-8 (ISBN)
37,40 inkl. MwSt
The Perils of Uglytown develops a new concept, structural misanthropology, and traces its operation first in the dialogues of Plato and then in the work of humanists, playwrights, and painters of the Renaissance in Italy, England, and the Netherlands.
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 political

and 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.

Harry Berger, Jr., was Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books are Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’; Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare's Henriad; and The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt.

1. A Polar Model of Culture Change: Introduction to Structural Misanthropology Part 1. Misanthropology in Plato's Dialogues 2. Critical Logography: Thucydides and Plato on the Politics of Communication 3 Katabasis and Narrative 4. Safemindedness: Lysis and Crito 5. Dying Angry: The Wrath of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo 6. More Than a Talking Head: Socrates and Cephalus in Republic 1 7. The Perils of Uglytown: Structural Misanthropology in the Republic 8. Adeimantus and Glaucon 9 Apprehension in the Timaeus: Plato's Nervous Narrator Part 2. Misanthropology in Early Modern Culture 10. Cybernetic Alienation: Prosthetic Strategies in Alberti, Leonardo, Castiglione, and Machiavelli 11. Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo's Cave: Vasari's Lives and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship 12. "Fenced ears": The King's Body Impolitic in Gorboduc, King Lear, and Richard II 13. Prospero's Humiliation 14. Bad Boys and Hipsters: Shakespeare's Iago and Rembrandt's Rembrandt 15. The Drama of Competitive Posing: Portrait Plots in Hals and Rembrandt

Erscheint lt. Verlag 1.7.2015
Verlagsort New York
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Kunst / Musik / Theater Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie
ISBN-10 0-8232-4517-9 / 0823245179
ISBN-13 978-0-8232-4517-8 / 9780823245178
Zustand Neuware
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