Postclassical Interventions

Roman Comedy against the Subject provides an expansive interpretation of four Roman comedies named after objects--Plautus's Cistellaria, Aulularia, and Rudens, and Terence's Eunuchus. In this book, the titular object provides an opportunity not to reconceive the relational politics of Roman comedy, but to conceive a different politics of familial and social relations with Roman comedy. Employing object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Black critical theory, the book radically recasts perennial problems of Roman comedy and literature in general: the author, in relation to "mothering" (alternative maternities); character, in relation to neurodiversity; genre, in relation to sibling-like parentality; and the title itself, in relation to gendering and ungendering. Roman Comedy against the Subject explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of becoming object, of embracing "itness." Rather than assimilating objects to subjects or vital agents, the book finds emanc

We are living in a moment of environmental and existential crisis that demands a response. Why then study Classics now? From the European assimilation and destruction of the New World to our present environmental destruction of our shared world, Humans, among Other Classical Animals explores in encounters an answer by demonstrating how the Classics have been implicated in the structures of thought that have ultimately led us to our present historical moment. Telling the story of anthropology's Classical entanglements from its inception to its growth to critical self-awareness, it demonstrates that Classical ideas have played a crucial -and often deleterious- role in the Western placing of the human and in the discipline that claimed the study of humanity as its own. Responses to our present crisis, it argues, should therefore include as a prerequisite, considering the origins and implications of these Classical foundations because only by so doing can we attain the full self-awareness