Criticism in Plato’s Republic: Writing the Just City/Just Writing the City

Abstract

Abstract George Grube has characterized Plato as the first writer ‘to develop a theory of literature and of its place in society’. If this is so, it is a theory of literature which must raise some anxieties. In the Republic, one of the traditionally privileged texts in the history of criticism, if not the most privileged, Plato would appear to banish poetry from the ideal state, and accordingly, to propose that (literary) art and philosophy are distinct categories of discourse and practice. Scholars draw attention to the discussion of art and mimēsis in Book io, where the philosopher rejects imitation for the reason that it is an ontologically and epistemologically deficient copy of the object that it attempts to represent. Despite apparently contradicting the stance of books 2 and 3, where the work’s interlocutors admit the role of poetry in the education of the young citizen, the final book of the Republic has become the authorized and privileged Platonic position on literary art.