Catullus

The poetry of the Late Roman Republican poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, a rich document of the human heart, is the earliest-known reasonably complete body of erotic verse in the West. Though approximately 116 poems survive, uncertainties about the condition of the fragmented manuscript and the narrative order of the poems make the Catullan text unusually problematic for the modern critic. Indeed, the poems can be arranged in a number of ways, making a multitude of different plots possible and frustrating the reader's desire for narrative closure. Micaela Janan contends that since unsatisfied desire structures both the experience of reading Catullus as well as its subject matter, critical interpretation of the text demands a "poetics of desire". She proposes an original and provocative feminist reading of Catullus, a reading informed by theories of consciousness as ancient as Plato and as contemporary as Freud and Lacan. Janan holds that traditional text theory achieves interpretive closure by idealizing a self-aware, autonomous, and concrete textual "persona". In such a view, even the most unexpected or bizarre conduct ought to be explainable in terms of this presumably stable core of consciousness. Thus the extraordinary variations in Catullus' sexuality - including apparent shifts of gender identity - have led critics who seek a personality type that would account for the poet's behavior to speculate about his "bisexuality" or "effeminacy". Postmodern critical theory, narratology, and psychoanalysis, however, suggest a more flexible concept of the "subject" as a site through which a multitude of social, cultural, and unconscious forces move. Human consciousness, Janan contends, isinherently incomplete and in a continuous process of transformation. She argues that Catullus' gender transitions should be understood less as evidence of a conflicted sexuality than as a radical, poetic interrogation of the soci

This literary study of the first-century BCE Roman poet, Catullus uses two sets of comparative models to offer a new understanding of his poems. The first consists of cultural anthropological accounts of male social interaction in the premodern Mediterranean, and the second, the postmodern poetics of such twentieth-century poets as Louis Zukofsky, which are characterized by simultaneous juxtaposition, a "collage" aesthetic, and self-allusive play. The book will be of interest to students of comparative literature and gender studies as well as to classicists.

Taking particular plays and poems from Roman comic theatre and the genre of Latin satire, this book finds Rome sending up Roman culture - making a mess of drama, jesting at rustic gaucherie, caricaturing the cult of masculine aggression. Writing Down Rome explores the robust poetic of self-denigration. Henderson's essays celebrate the energetic self-mockery that powers much of Roman poetry. They range widely over comedy, lyric, bucolic, and, in particular, the Roman speciality of satire.