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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Roman Comedy Against the Subject

Roman Comedy Against the Subject

Telò, Mario

Hardcover

Series: Postclassical Interventions

Literary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 0198920091
ISBN13: 9780198920090
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Nov 28 2025
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.75 Depth: 8.73
Language: English
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 emancipatory potential in renouncing the normative and intrinsically exclusionary subjecthood of he, she, and they, markers of privilege that are burdened by the violence of humanization and often dehumanizing of others. The introduction features nine brief but acute readings of object-oriented modern dramas: Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie, Yukio Mishima's The Damask Drum, Eugène Ionesco's Les Chaises, and Alice Childress's String, among others.

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