Seneca and the Self

This collection of essays by well-known scholars of Seneca focuses on the multifaceted ways in which Seneca, as a philosopher, politician, poet and Roman senator, engaged with the question of ethical selfhood.

The contributors explore the main cruces of Senecan scholarships, such as whether Seneca's treatment of the self is original in its historical context; whether Seneca's Stoicism can be reconciled with the pull of rhetorical and literary self-expression; and how Seneca claims to teach psychic self-integration.

Most importantly, the contributor's debate to what degree, if at all, the absence of a technically articulated concept of selfhood should cause us to hesitate in seeking a distinctively Senecan self - one that stands out not only for the 'intensity of its relations to self', as Foucault famously put it, but also for the way in which those relations to self are couched.

Author: Shadi Bartsch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 07/23/2009
Pages: 316
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.41lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780521888387

About the Author
Bartsch, Shadi: - Shadi Bartsch is the W. Duncan MacMillan Professor of Classics at Brown University. Her most recent book is The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (2006). Wray, David: - David Wray is an Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. His publications include Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge, 2001).