This is the passage:
The following passage is adapted from a book about television and popular culture.
Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn’t exactly
Line been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. 5 I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored,
reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting
10 our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that—in fact, some 2,500 years earlier— philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama
15 should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the trage- dians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar
20 ring. “Their productions are appearances and not realities,” he gripes. “Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth.” The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances.
25 The “common people,” as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to “peevish and diverse” characters—such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey— who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as “spinning out a long melancholy
30 lamentation” or “disfiguring themselves in grief.” To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth.) “If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic,”
35 Plato warns, “pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law.” Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argu- ment with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that “poetry is not to be taken seriously.”
One academic who has studied and written extensively 40 about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather
than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment
45 of that era. “If, instead of ‘tragedy’ and ‘poetry,’ and ‘Homer’ and ‘Aeschylus,’2 you read ‘mass entertainment’ or ‘popular media,’ you’ll recognize Plato’s arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television.”
50 To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents
is too extreme and violent. Most important, it’s a corrupt- ing influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects—and con-
55 stituting, in Plato’s own words, “a harm to the mind of its audience.”
If Plato’s Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums—if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would
60 have survived at all. Plato’s personal utopia never came to pass—but throughout the centuries, wherever and when- ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot
of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
1 The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology. 2 Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.
THESE are the questions:
19. Which of the following best characterizes Plato’s view of the heroes mentioned in line 27 ?
(A) Admiration
(B) Curiosity
© Distrust
(D) Disappointment
(E) Contempt
- The primary purpose of the statements in lines 39-45 (“One . . . that era”) is to (A) provide an interpretation of a viewpoint described in the previous paragraph (B) show how Plato’s view of politics should be understood in today’s terms (C) put divergent interpretations of Plato into historical perspective (D) account for the appeal of Plato’s writings (E) signal a digression in the passage
Please explain the answers to these questions. Thanks in advance.
If you are having trouble reading the fragmented passage, do check it out here:
https://satonlinecourse.collegeboard.org/SR/digital_assets/assessment/pdf/F4D31AB0-66B4-CE32-00F7-F5405701F413-F.pdf
Section 7
