The Teeming Body

“Forming an image of the soul through words” is an idea introduced in passing by Socrates in Plato's Republic that Rapp documents and examines in terms of the word-images of the soul presented in the Phaedrus. Through her close textual study of the “menagerie” of these images and their viscerally rendered, dynamic blurring of boundaries of various kinds (e.g. between humans, animals, birds, vegetation) Rapp argues that strictly dualistic interpretations of Plato's conception of the soul have missed more than they have seen. Drawing upon a Robert Creeley poem, Rapp sets forth the hermeneutic methods and principles by which she develops her approach to the Phaedrus, emphasizing that the text itself bears the seeds for interpretive trajectories disruptive of long-standing presumptions about Plato's ideas.