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Theories of style, with especial reference to prose composition (1912)
Theories of style with especial reference to prose composition - 1912 Author:Lane Cooper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II PLATO (b.c. 428-347) From the Pnaearus [From The Dialogues of Plato, translated into English by B. Jowett, M.A., Oxford, The Clarendon Press; New York,... more » Macmillan, 1892, Vol. 1 (pp. 466-489). The Phcedrus is one of several Platonic dialogues in which fundamental questions about literature are discussed. Others are the Ion, Republic, and Symposium; in connection with rhetoric, more especially the Gorgias. The Phcedrus was probably composed after the Symposium, when Plato was upwards of forty years old, an influential university teacher — we may call him so, although of his activities as a lecturer little is definitely known — and an assured master of the imaginative literary form in which his doctrines are preserved for us. Regarding this dialogue form, as opposed to the strict prose of an academic lecturer, we must always remember that it does not necessarily transmit to us in a given case Plato's actual, so to speak, scientific, opinion on any problem. Thus in the Phcedrus, we must observe, the discussion of " the rules of writing and speech " represents first of all, not Plato's own theory, but a theory which Plato's imagination puts into the mouth of Socrates; even though Grote in this particular instance holds that " the theory of rhetoric ... is far more Platonic than Socratic " (Plato, etc., 1875, Vo1- 2 P- 245)- Were it true, as some have maintained, that the Phcedrus constituted Plato's inaugural address at the opening of his school (see Hirzel, Der Dialog, Vol. 1, p. 245), we should still expect a less poetical treatment of the theory in his everyday instruction. Neither the matter nor the manner of Plato's dialogue is a thing to be disposed of in a cursory note. Plato's style is well handled by M. Alfred Croiset in the incomparable Histoire de la Litteratu...« less