Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics

Abstract

One of Plato's enduring concerns was about the best mode of education. Unsurprisingly, he opts for phi losophy over poetry. In Book X of the Republic and several other dialogues, notably the Ion, Plato inveighs against mimetic poetry on grounds that include its on tological inferiority (qua imitation) and its pernicious effects on the development of the just person and the just state. To the contemporary mind, Plato may appear to be a crank or even an embarrassment. After all, the poetry he targets (Homer, for instance) is now considered to be among the greatest works of literature of all time. However, as Alexander Nehamas (1988) has persua sively argued, Plato's true concern is not with high lit erature or fine arts at all (since those concepts did not exist at his time), but with the ancient Greek equiva lent of contemporary mass-media narrative forms. At