The Politics of Desire – Propertius IV (Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature) - Hardcover

Janan, Micaela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520223187 ISBN 13: 9780520223189

Publisher: University of California Press, 2000

Synopsis

Purple cloth hardback. No jacket.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Micaela Janan in "The Politics of Desire has confirmed her status as one of the preeminent interpreters of Latin poetry in our era. This book is a must for anyone interested in Augustan poetry, literary theory, or contemporary psychoanalytic studies. The readings are rigorous, the scholarship meticulous, and the theoretical approach profoundly sophisticated. This book will fundamentally change the way we look at both Propertius Book 4 and the use of psychoanalytic theory to interpret ancient literature. We will be drawing inspiration from, and arguing with it, for a very long time." --Paul Allen Miller, author of "Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome

" Micaela Janan's superb application of Lacan to Propertius deepens our appreciation for both. Her deft readings remind us that Lacan's brilliance, like Freud's, was grounded in classical learning. Janan's astute use of the 'New Lacanian' approach is a model of how to refresh our encounters with literary works -- and with antiquity -- without the deformations so often unwittingly imposed by historicist and eclectic cultural studies frames. Classical authors are indeed revivified when they are read by someone with so lively and contemporary a literary and political sensibility as Janan's." --Juliet Flower MacCannell, author of "Figuring Lacan, The Regime of the Brother, and "The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject

Synopsis:

This work reassesses the last elegies of the Roman poet Propertius. By using psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the texts, the book examines the relation between political crisis and the struggles of the self and offers an understanding of the social crisis that affected the early Roman empire.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0520223187
• ISBN 13: 9780520223189
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256