Description
- Abstract:
- Though many of Plato's contemporaries wrote Socratic dialogues of their own, Xenophon is the only one of them whose work has survived intact. Yet, much of the scholarship on Xenophon's Socratic writings has dismissed them as flawed imitations of Plato or taken them to be a digest of personal anecdotes or of the lost works of more important Socratics such as Aeschines and Antisthenes. This study puts forward a new, coherent reading of Xenophon's Socratic writings that places them in the tradition of carnival literature described by Bakhtin. These works draw on other authors' Socratic writings, but they do so creatively, adapting the commonplaces of Socratic literature to Xenophon's own concerns and criticizing the work of others through carnival intertext.CHAPTER ONE. The carnival treatment of themes carries on Xenophon's work from other genres. His Hiero and Cynegeticus experiment with carnivalization, and his short treatises often present proposals which take on a serio-comic form in the Socratic works. CHAPTER TWO. The Symposium explicitly treats the opposition of seriousness and play and relates it to problems in the acquisition and exercise of virtue. CHAPTER THREE. The Oeconomicus presents a carnival treatment of the Socratic craft analogy that calls into question the transparency and transferability of practical reason. CHAPTER FOUR. The Apology draws on the tradition of paradoxical encomium to show the problematic position of supererogatory virtue in a system of ethics built on honor and reciprocal beneficence. CHAPTER FIVE. The Memorabilia treats a number of problems in ethics, moral psychology, and virtue epistemology through three carnivalized generic frames: apologetics, paraenesis, and Bildungsroman.Taken together, these readings demonstrate both the continuity of Xenophon's writings with other Socratic dialogues and the relationship of that genre with the broader tradition of carnival literature.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Alderman, Alexander Shane,
"Serio-Comic Elements in Xenophon's Socratic Writings"
(2011).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0930RDC
