Replete and Porous

Rapp's introduction is both a reflective essay on ordinary forms of forgetting and their significance for how we think about selfhood as well as an anticipatory sketch of the major arcs of the book. The core of her argument is presented here in compressed form, namely, that ordinary oblivions in a life—and in a text like the Phaedrus—foster the kinds of unmooring needed for the self to change and for truer lines of sight onto the world (or the text) to be opened. She claims Plato's conception (and literary constructions) of the soul are a viable source for accounting for this change and that—against dominant consensus—Plato is fully relevant to contemporary ethics, in particular, to its discussion of fragility. She draws upon poets Theodore Roethke and Emily Dickinson to present her account.