This paper attempts to bring Plato back into dramatic criticism. The dominant view of Plato as a trenchant critic of literature results from an oddly powerful mixture of transhistoricity, literary self-abnegation and political ideology. Using Iris Murdoch, Giorgio Agamben and Leo Strauss to defend Plato against the charge of his anti-poetics, this paper argues that memory and narrative (in place of action), diegesis (against mimesis), alienation and impasse (instead of identification and catharsis) emerge as central features in Platonic dramatic theory. These concepts are put to the test by using texts from a select group of modern Irish and American dramatists (Williams, Friel, Wilder, Beckett and Yeats), all of whom were compelled to dramatize personal and/or collective memory while grappling with the difficulties involving the enactment of it.

• Hyungseob Lee(Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hanyang University) | 이형섭