- Title
- Fairytales and make-believe, or spinning stories about Poros and Penia in Plato's Symposium: a literary and computational analysis
- Creator
- Johnson, M.; Tarrant, H.
- Relation
- Phoenix Vol. 68, Issue 3/4, p. 291-312
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.7834/phoenix.68.3-4.0291
- Publisher
- Classical Association of Canada
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- This paper is a two-fold study of the muthos of Poros and Penia as narrated by Diotima to Socrates at Symposium 203b1–204a6. The first part employs several features of traditional literary analysis while the second part employs computation stylistics through a study of the most routine elements of vocabulary. Both approaches have been utilised in order to examine the genre of the passage and to present a combined interpretation, privileging a reading of it as an example of an inspired voice that employs the seemingly simple narrative structure of folk- or fairytale to convey a particularly significant and complex meditation on the nature of Eros/eros. This combined approach not only suggests an underlying importance of the narrative that modern readers (or even ancient readers who despised fairytale) might miss, but also demonstrates that what may be “regarded” or “sensed” as a piece of narrative belonging to a particular genre—in this instance, fairytale—can be studied with the aid of quantitative data that complements the qualitative approach of traditional literary analysis.
- Subject
- fairytales; Plato; Poros; Penia; Plato's Symposium
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1336516
- Identifier
- uon:27634
- Identifier
- ISSN:0031-8299
- Language
- eng
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