Dwelling in/on Plato’s cave: active readings of a classical allegory and its appropriations for personal and social reflection

Abstract

The thesis explores the reading of ancient Greek texts -often labelled as “classics”- by lay readers in contemporary Greece. Focusing on a well-known classic, the allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic, it investigates how a specific category of readers, namely university students, experienced and interpreted it. I centred particularly on the meanings people attached to the Cave, their expressed value judgments, and their specific reading modes when approaching the text. My study employed qualitative methods: it comprised two rounds of individual semi-structured interviews and solicited reading diaries (in-between the interviews). The generated data were analysed interpretively, through the lens of a holistic and humanist approach that aimed at thick description of individual cases and the generation of ideal types of reading.

The thesis painted a complex landscape of varied meanings and interpretations attached to the text. Initially, the affordances of the allegory and the rich history of its reception were explored; these are the key elements of the horizon in which my participants are positioned as readers and to which they respond. The following chapters centred on the text’s main axes (i.e., its advertised main topic, education, and its ontological and political aspects) and discussed participants’ responses to them. The study generally examined diverse reading approaches (e.g., more receptive or critical, more or less active) and explored how these readings were tied to appropriations of the allegory for personal and social reflection.

Through in-depth exploration of individual reader cases, the research focused on what reading a classical text with strong connotations of moral and political idealism might involve. Throughout the chapters a type of active reader emerged: reader and text interacted, with readers drawing on and feeling the impact of the text’s “cultural grammars”, or “equipment for living”, while the text as well underwent a process of creative, imaginative, and passionate repurposing and resignification. In this process, the contribution of two forces proved essential: (1) readers’ personal constellations of concerns, around their personal or social lives and the experience of negativity in contemporary Greece, and (2) the property of classicalness. A complex frame of reading emerged, in which readers were found to be active and reflective (behaving in accordance with their personal motivations, calculations, and projects), but also defined by their position within the Greek social context, in which generalized discourses around ancient texts’ legitimacy and sacredness are dominant (e.g., through education, through nationalism).

My thesis thus contributes to the existing research on reading, by emphasizing the reader-text interaction in which active/reflective readers –influenced by their socializing contexts– enter a dialogue with an active text, without any part remaining unaltered. And it also contributes to the research around the reception of heritage (especially amid canon debates), by underscoring how considerations of legitimacy and expectations of universality and relevance can mediate the reading of the text and enable its productive appropriation by readers, to reflect both on their personal life and on preoccupations regarding contemporary society.