Politics of Desire
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A01=Micaela Janan
aeneas
aeneid
aesthetics
ancient
ancient literature
ancient rome
antiquity
archaic greece
augustan poetry
Author_Micaela Janan
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Category=DCF
Category=DSBB
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classical authors
classicism
classics scholarship
cultural studies
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history
lacan
latin poetry
literary criticism
literary theory
lyric consciousness
lyric texts
nonfiction
poetry
propertius
psychoanalytic theory
roman literature
roman poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9780520223219
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Dec 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Propertius (ca. 54 b.c.--ca. 2 b.c.) was a Roman poet who composed four compelling books of elegies in the chaotic years surrounding Rome's transition from republic to empire. The first three of these books revolve mostly around a tormented love affair with a woman called Cynthia. The fourth book of poetry rests on more diverse subject matter and is notoriously the most opaque and elusive. In The Politics of Desire, Micaela Janan radically reassesses Propertius' last elegies, using contemporary psychoanalytic theory to illuminate these challenging texts. Janan finds that the upheaval of Rome's transformation to empire corresponds to the intellectually unsettled conditions of our own time, so that contemporary methodologies offer an uncannily suitable approach for understanding Propertius. In particular, she uses the work of Jacques Lacan, since it provides the best conceptual tools for examining the relation between political crisis and the struggles of the self, a theme that resonates in these difficult elegies.
This book expands our understanding of an important Roman poet, and its innovative and sophisticated methodological approach makes a substantial contribution to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. In addition, Janan addresses elegy's relationship to larger cultural questions, and broadens our understanding of the social crisis affecting Rome during the early empire.
Micaela Janan is Associate Professor of Classics at Duke University. She is the author of When the Lamp Is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus (1994).
