Plato's Nightmare

Steven B. Katz Information and Pricing 978-1-64317-402-0 (paperback, $49.95); 978-1-64317-403-7 (PDF, $29.95); 978-1-64317-404-4 (EPUB, $29.95) © 2026 by Parlor Press, with illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index of poetry. 756 pages. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. About This Book Plato’s Nightmare is a wide-ranging tour de force. This poetic-rhetorical-epic-treatise uses poetry and prose to explore the human desire to escape the material body and world. Beginning with Socrates’s stripping of poetry from rhetoric and speech in Plato’s’ Gorgias, Plato’s Nightmare traces the theme of disembodiment across different historical, philosophical, and literary concepts and periods, from ancient Greek sophism and Hebrew mysticism, and Christian spiritualism and scientific revolutions to transcendentalism, cybernetics, and our even more distant post-Anthropogenic future in deep space. In reunifying rhetorics and poetics in Plato’s Nightmare Katz’s poems act as types of forensic, epideictic, deliberative arguments, forms of evidence (demonstrative, illustrative, descriptive), and commentary (contrary, irony, humorous), as well as literary objects (imitative, imaginative, aesthetic). This experimental and provocative book thus exhibits in its form and content that Plato’s ideals of pure mind were increasingly realized, but in technological media (writing) that frightened yet exhilarated him. Plato’s dream was physical, ambiguous, haunting, and liberating. About the Author Steven B. Katz is Emeritus Faculty in the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design doctoral program in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, as well as Pearce Professor Emeritus of Professional Communication, and Professor Emeritus of English, at Clemson University. He has published several books, including The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric (1996), Nana! (poetry), and with Nancy Penrose, Writing in the Sciences (4th open-access edition, Parlor Press 2020). Katz has published hundreds of poems in professional and literary venues, as well as numerous articles on ancient Jewish and Greek rhetorics, scientific and technical writing, biotechnology and medical communication with the public, and ethics. “The Ethic of Expediency: Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust” was the recipient of the National Council of Teachers (NCTE) Award for Best Article on the Theory of Scientific and Technical Communication in 1993, and has been reprinted in multiple anthologies, most notably in Central Works in Technical Communication edited by Stuart Selber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola (Oxford UP, 2004), and continues to be widely cited. With David Blakesley, he is the author of the forthcoming book, Elaborate Cosmos (Parlor Press, 2026).