Sarah Nooter and Mario Telò - "Radical Formalisms" - Shane Butler, Sean Gurd, Allannah Karas, Patrice Rankine, and Andrew Parker

Sarah Nooter and Mario Telò will discuss Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical. They will be joined in conversation by Shane Butler, Sean Gurd, Allannah Karas, Patrice Rankine, and Andrew Parker. A Q&A will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

Presented in Partnership with the Classics Department, University of Chicago

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the Book: The term "radical formalism" refers to strategies aimed at defamiliarising and revitalising conventional modes of formalistic reading and theorising form. These strategies disrupt and unsettle established norms while incorporating a metadiscursive awareness of their broader political implications. This volume presents a radical reconceptualisation of literary works from Greek and Roman antiquity. Engaging in an ongoing dialogue with critical theory and postcritique, as well as drawing inspiration from traditions rooted in Black art, poetry and philosophy-both directly and indirectly connected to the classical tradition-the essays in this collection explore subversions of canonical norms and resistances to the hegemony of textual order.

This collection not only provides new, provocative insights into a corpus of texts that has exerted a lasting impact on modern literature and philosophy, but also challenges current interpretive methods, recasting the very practice of reading in relation to form, poetics, language, sound, temporalities and textuality.

About the Editors:

Sarah Nooter is Professor of Classics and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy, The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus, and Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality. She has a volume of translation coming out called How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton University Press).

Mario Telò is Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Archive Feelings; Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis; Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis and of the forthcoming Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler and Roman Comedy Against the Subject.

About the Contributing Authors:

Shane Butler is the Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Passions of John Addington Symonds, The Ancient Phonograph, The Matter of the Page, and The Hand of Cicero. He is the editor or co-editor of Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses, Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, and Sound and the Ancient Senses, and has has edited and translated a volume of the Latin Letters of Renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano

Sean Gurd, the Chair of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and the director of the Ancient Music and Performance Lab, which is dedicated to exploring innovative ways of integrating arts practice with humanities scholarship. He is the author of Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology; Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome, Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece, and The Origins of Music Theory in the Age of Plato. He is writing a book on the poet and performance artist Arman Schwerner and a book on Music, Physics, and Theology in Hellenistic writers from Aristoxenus to Philo of Alexandria.

Allannah Karas is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Miami, Florida. She writes and teaches on notions of coercive persuasion in ancient Greece and on reconfigurations of Greco-Roman sculpture by Black visual artists. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, Ambiguity, Coercion, and Rhetoric: Coping with Peithō in Ancient Greece. Among other pieces, she has recently published “Conflict, Tragedy, and Interraciality: Bob Thompson Paints Vergil’s Camilla,” Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature 51.2 (December 2022), 268-88, and she is currently teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Mix: Race, Paint, and the Classics.”

Patrice Rankine is Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. He is author of Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning in America, 1964-2020, Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Wisconsin 2006), and co-author of The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (Oxford 2015).

About the Interlocutor: Andrew Parker is Professor of French at Rutgers University, where he was also chaired Comparative Literature from 2014-2020. From 1982-2012 he taught English and Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. His many publications include The Theorist's Mother; Performativity and Performance, coedited with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; and After Sex? Writing since Queer Theory, coedited with Janet Halley.