ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into how form (the form of a text) can mediate meditation on imaginative processes and the artefactual frameworks on which they rely. The claim is that these processes are systematically at issue in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, not just in its content, but in its form and style. The Helen’s textuality raises interesting theoretical questions, concerning both the parameters of language and modes of expression and the terms upon which such parameters might be grounded. A key word here is kosmos. The question of what kosmos means extends across surface and depth, form and content, and relates to bodies superficially, psychologically, and ontologically, in a text whose opening calls into question its own superficiality as an embodiment of logos. The chapter falls into five parts. After exploring the relevance of lyric epideixis, it attends to rhetorical figuration. It then examines the exemplary relation between Helen as body and Helen as text, before considering rhetorical hermeticism and attention to thinking as process. Finally, it addresses how thinking with both classical and more contemporary theoretical responses to rhetoric and culture may expose issues already raised by the Helen.
