•  81
    The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.
  •  57
    Fragments for a History of the Human Body
    with Michel Feher and Nadia Tazi
    Philosophy East and West 41 (2): 276-278. 1991.
  •  17
    The wrong words in the wrong times
    Common Knowledge 23 (1): 91-100. 2017.
    Written for a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution describes an undergraduate course on ancient rhetoric at Berkeley, in which Professor Ramona Naddaff was accused by a male student of demeaning women during a lecture and of causing him trauma in the process. He threatened to bring charges against her to campus authorities, claiming the support of fellow students. In her lecture, she had discussed the classical figuration of rhetoric—persuasive speech—as…Read more
  •  13
    Between Terror and Freedom: Philosophy, Politics, and Fiction Speak of Modernity (edited book)
    with Joseph Chytry, Marianne Constable, Joshua Foa Dienstag, Frederick Michael Dolan, Anne-Lise Francois, Jeffrey Isaac, Peter Euben, Michael MacDonald, Hannah Pitkin, Andrew Seligsohn, and Simon Stow
    Lexington Books. 2006.
    In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction_including poetry, drama, and film_as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning, shortcomings, and the future of modern politics
  •  8
    Introduction: To Support Our Claims
    with Caroline Walker Bynum, Mary Harvey Doyno, Dorothea von Mücke, Frederick S. Paxton, and Katharine Wallerstein
    Common Knowledge 23 (1): 57-58. 2017.
    The historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who solicited and organized this set of five case studies, explains in her introduction to them that their intent is to bypass the currently popular and unsupported claim that the humanities have practical relevance and, instead, to offer ruminative descriptions of what happens when teachers and students meet to discuss texts and objects. She explains that the essays report in detail on five individual classes in five very different academic settings, in the …Read more
  •  1
    Alien Pleasures: The Exile of the Poets in Plato's "Republic"
    Dissertation, Boston University. 1994.
    Previous attempts to elucidate the meaning of Plato's exile of the poets in Republic X fall into two groups: they either dismiss the exile of poetry as marginal to the dialogue's main argument or they understand its logic in relation to only one, among several, fundamental Platonic doctrines advanced within the dialogue. In Alien Pleasures: The Exile of the Poets in Plato's Republic, I argue that not only is Book X's exile of poetry an integral and important part of the dialogue but it is also t…Read more