This is an extended meditation on ethics in literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works at the level both of the work and of the world, the ethics of seeing, and the question of how one can give up on the here and now and behold instead some other, better ethical sphere. Seneca's tragedies offer words of caution: desire might well subvert reason at its most profound level (Phaedra), or humanity's painful separation from the sublime might be part of some cruel divine plan (The Madness of Hercules). The book concludes by considering what, if anything, we are to make of Seneca's efforts to enlighten us.

Rhetoric thoroughly infused the world and literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity. This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of rhetorical theory and practice in that world, from Homer to early Christianity, accessible to students and non-specialists, whether within classics or from other periods and disciplines. Its basic premise is that rhetoric is less a discrete object to be grasped and mastered than a hotly contested set of practices that include disputes over the very definition of rhetoric itself. Standard treatments of ancient oratory tend to take it too much in its own terms and to isolate it unduly from other social and cultural concerns. This volume provides an overview of the shape and scope of the problems while also identifying core themes and propositions: for example, persuasion, virtue, and public life are virtual constants. But they mix and mingle differently, and the contents designated by each of these terms can also shift.

Declamation was a staple of education and cultured literary life in the Roman world over many centuries. This book offers a radical re-evaluation of the genre, its social importance, and its role in the history of the Western self. Ironically, this genre obsessed with "growing up" has been rejected by its own posterity. Erik Gunderson explores the social and psychic dynamics of this refusal within the ancient world as well as beyond. The book is of interest to specialists in classics, rhetoric, queer studies, and psychoanalytic literary criticism.

This book explores the much maligned and misunderstood genre of declamation. Instead of a bastard rhetoric, declamation should be seen as a venue within which the rhetoric of the legitimate self is constructed. These fictions of the self are uncannily real, and these stagey dramas are in fact rehearsals for the serious play of Roman identity. Critics of declamation find themselves recapitulating the very logic of the genre they are refusing. When declamation is read in the light of the contemporary theory of the subject a wholly different picture emerges: this is a canny game played with and within the rhetoric of the self. This book makes broad claims for what is often seen as a narrow topic. An appendix includes a fresh translation and brief discussion of a sample of surviving examples of declamation.

Laughing Awry offers a comprehensive overview of key themes in the interpretation of the plays of Plautus, and explores the connections between deception, desire, slavery, genre, and audience. In doing so, it offers an account of the mechanisms of Plautus' humour and the uncomfortable origins of laughter, revealing how his dramas do not just play to but also work on the audience. The volume examines the whole corpus of Plautine plays, providing longer accounts of selected dramas and choice scenes. An emphasis on methodological and theoretical questions is maintained throughout, and particular attention is paid to the psychic life of humour and its relationship to questions of social power. Chapters discuss, among other topics, the problem of writing about humour, Plautus' reception by subsequent Roman authors, the plays' embedded social theory, the intersection of circuits of desire, laughter as a scandalous surfeit, and the sublime perversity of laughter. The volume asks what we are laughing at, why we laugh, and what this laughter means.

The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in two poets from the reign of Domitian. Gunderson offers a comprehensive overview of the Epigrams of Martial and the Siluae of Statius. The praise of power found in these texts is not something forced upon these poems, nor is it a mere appendage to these works. Instead, power and poetry as a pair are a fundamental dyad that can and should be traced throughout the two collections. It is present even when the emperor himself is not the topic of discussion. In Martial the portrait of power is constantly shifting. Poetic play takes up the topic of political power and 'plays around with it'. The initial relatively sportive attitude darkens over time. Late in the game we have ecstasies of humiliation. After Domitian dies the project tries to get back to the old games, but it cannot. Statius' Siluae merge the lies one tells to power with the lies of poetry more generally. Poetic mastery and political mastery cannot be dissociated. The glib, glitzy poetry of contemporary life articulates a radical modernism that is self-authorizing, and so complicit with a power whose structure it mirrors. What does it mean to praise praise poetry? To celebrate celebrations? Gunderson's discussion opens and closes with a meditation upon the dangers of complicit criticism and the seductions of a discourse of pure art in a world where the art is anything but pure.

Rhetoric thoroughly infused the world and literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity. This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of rhetorical theory and practice in that world, from Homer to early Christianity, accessible to students and non-specialists, whether within classics or from other periods and disciplines. Its basic premise is that rhetoric is less a discrete object to be grasped and mastered than a hotly contested set of practices that include disputes over the very definition of rhetoric itself. Standard treatments of ancient oratory tend to take it too much in its own terms and to isolate it unduly from other social and cultural concerns. This volume provides an overview of the shape and scope of the problems while also identifying core themes and propositions: for example, persuasion, virtue, and public life are virtual constants. But they mix and mingle differently, and the contents designated by each of these terms can also shift.