Graduate Elected Speaker: Prof. Rebecca Moorman (Providence College)

Please join us this Friday, 12 noon, PH401 for a lovely talk by this year’s Classics Grad Elected Speaker, Rebecca Moorman (Providence College), entitled “Pure Voices and Polluted Mouths: Persius on Expressing the Inexpressible.” This talk should truly have something for everyone, spanning philology, history, aesthetics, philosophy, and more. At least one jaw drop guaranteed or your money back! Contact me with any questions. Here’s the abstract:

 

“This talk examines feelings of love and disgust in the notoriously obscure Neronian satirist, Persius. Studies of Persius tend to begin with the assumption that the Satires aren’t a pleasurable read, at least not in any Stoically appropriate sense. But the absence of a more traditional honey-sweet poetics does not necessarily mean an absence of pleasure or feeling. I propose a new model for reading the Satires in terms of affective engagement and aesthetic appreciation – in other words, through feeling and even enjoying Persius’ overstuffed, indigested corpus. I argue that Persius offers the Satires to his teacher Cornutus as an aesthetic and philosophical expression of eros, pushing past what Cornutus taught him about love to defend the philosophical value of not just a positive sensory experience like sex but also an ostensibly negative or disgusting sensory experience like cannibalism. This model of reading Persius aims to foreground a new way of approaching Roman philosophy and Latin literature in terms of sensory and affective experience, moving us behind or beyond the literary text to access some of the lived, sensory experiences of the Romans who read and wrote that literature.”