"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."
By:
Harry Berger
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 14mm
Weight: 449g
ISBN: 9780823245178
ISBN 10: 0823245179
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 01 July 2015
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
"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"
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.
Reviews for The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt
The Perils of Uglytown is a distillation of Harry Berger, Jr.'s intensive study of the Republic and other Platonic dialogues over several decades and makes an important contribution to understanding these texts and to the literary interpretation of the dialogues generally. Its highly original, provocative, and stimulating close reading of well-chosen passages is grounded in Berger's understanding of the textuality of the Platonic dialogues. -Seth L. Schein, University of California, Davis Somewhere in his innermost closet Harry Berger, Jr., must harbor the secret of perennial freshness. For decades now his vitally important work has conferred the power to see with new eyes familiar works of literature, philosophy, and art, as if their innermost meanings were being glimpsed for the first time. -Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University
