The Politics of Desire

"Micaela Janan in The Politics of Desire has confirmed her status as one of the preeminent interpreters of Latin poetry in our era. This book is a must for anyone interested in Augustan poetry, literary theory, or contemporary psychoanalytic studies. The readings are rigorous, the scholarship meticulous, and the theoretical approach profoundly sophisticated. This book will fundamentally change the way we look at both Propertius Book 4 and the use of psychoanalytic theory to interpret ancient literature. We will be drawing inspiration from, and arguing with it, for a very long time." --Paul Allen Miller, author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness : The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome

" Micaela Janan's superb application of Lacan to Propertius deepens our appreciation for both. Her deft readings remind us that Lacan's brilliance, like Freud's, was grounded in classical learning. Janan's astute use of the 'New Lacanian' approach is a model of how to refresh our encounters with literary works -- and with antiquity -- without the deformations so often unwittingly imposed by historicist and eclectic cultural studies frames. Classical authors are indeed revivified when they are read by someone with so lively and contemporary a literary and political sensibility as Janan's." --Juliet Flower MacCannell, author of Figuring Lacan, The Regime of the Brother, and The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject

Micaela Janan is Associate Professor of Classics at Duke University. She is the author of When the Lamp Is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus (1994).