This thesis reads the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernstein in relation to
his interest in sophistry and sophistics. Taking his 1987 volume The Sophist as a
central text, the influence of a sense of sophistics is developed across his wider range
of published works. This involves identifying some of the many different
interpretations of the sophists throughout the history of philosophy, from the early
dismissals by Plato and Aristotle to the more recent reappraisals of their works. A
secondary aspect of the thesis is in examining the renewal of interest in the Ancient
Greek sophists and suggesting some of the affinities between contemporary literary
theory and poetics and the fragments of the works of the major sophists (primarily
Protagoras and Gorgias). Finally, I suggest that The Sophist itself is a valuable and
contemporaneous re-examination of sophistic ideas, that in fact goes further than
those by academics from within philosophy and rhetoric by virtue of employing the
stylistic innovations and linguistic experimentation that was so central to the sophistic
approach