Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato

by Carrie Jenkins, Carla Nappi

Plato's Symposium depicts a group of men giving a series of speeches about the nature of love, with themes ranging from religion and metaphysics to medicine and pregnancy. The lone woman in the room, a "flute girl," is sent away as the discussion turns to serious matters; at the same time, the wisest of the men attributes his theories to a woman, the possibly fictional Diotima. Despite their absence from this important intellectual exchange, women are part of Symposium. What can contemporary feminist readers do with this troubling yet immeasurably influential work? In Uninvited historian Carla Nappi and philosopher Carrie Jenkins talk back to Plato in poetry, inspired by the voices of women characters who were not previously permitted to speak. Images and ideas from Symposium are refracted through multiple lenses to reveal a tumult of mystical, intellectual, pedagogical, and sexual ideologies. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific, these poems dance within and between the lines of Symposium, carving space for new kinds of conversations about love, with themes ranging from gender and voice to power and violence. Designed to be read with or without prior knowledge of Plato, this book invites the uninvited to join a strange, amorphous, and unending conversation on the nature of love and desire - and on the possibilities intellectual and creative activity can offer.

112 pages, Hardcover

Published May 21, 2020

Reviews

[Chris Meinke · Rating 4 out of 5]

While not necessary, I read this along with Plato’s Symposium, which made this book a sort of call and response to that text. Honestly I was delighted by the sense of play as it pulled in fragments of the classical world along with contemporary notions of science, feminism, and the view of earth from Heaven - or the International Space Station. The read is fun on so many levels, I particularly enjoyed the introduction of Sappho, who’s words grow and then slowly contract, truncate, and fragment - illustrating in poetry the tragic fate of her own words. While the audience for this work may be limited, I think anyone who’s spent some time and interest in classical texts and Greek mythology and tried to bring them into modern world would take pleasure in this work.