Author: Janan, Micaela Wakil
Title: The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV
Description: Berkeley [CA], Univ. of California Press, (2001). orig.cloth. 24x15cm, xi,244 pp. Minor rubbing. VG. ¶ Contents: Theoretical Preliminaries; "Shadow of a Doubt": Framing the Subject in the Gallus Poems; The Ethics of Evil: Arethusa to Lycotas (4.3);"Beyond Good & Evil": Tarpeia & Philosophy in the Feminine (4.4); The Return of the Dead: The Acanthis Elegy (4.5); "The Book of Revelation": Cynthia's Truth (4.7); Cynthia Returns from Lanuvium (4.8); Hercules in Rome (4.9); The Phenomenology of the Spirits (4.11); Dreaming Rome. [" 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.." - Publisher's description]

Keywords: Classical Philology, Propertius, Elegiac Poetry, Latin Literature, Rome Roman Empire, Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic, Desire