Lucretius and Modernity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Jacques Lezra, Liza Blake

      Pages 1-18

3. What Is Modern about Lucretius?

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. Michel Serres’s Non-Modern Lucretius: Manifold Reason and the Temporality of Reception

      • Brooke Holmes

      Pages 21-37

   3. Lucretius and the Symptomatology of Modernism

      • Joseph Farrell

      Pages 39-55

   4. Lucretius the Physicist and Modern Science

      • David Konstan

      Pages 57-68

4. What Is Lucretian about Modernity?

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 69-69

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   2. The Presence of Lucretius in Eighteenth-Century French and German Philosophy

      • Catherine Wilson

      Pages 71-88

   3. Epicureanism across the French Revolution

      • Thomas M. Kavanagh

      Pages 89-101

5. Lucretian Figures of Modernity: Freedom, Cause, Truth

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 103-103

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   2. How Modern Is Freedom of the Will?

      • Phillip Mitsis

      Pages 105-123

   3. On the Nature of Marx’s Things

      • Jacques Lezra

      Pages 125-143

   4. All Sense-Perceptions Are True: Epicurean Responses to Skepticism and Relativism

      • Katja Maria Vogt

      Pages 145-159

6. Following Lucretius

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 161-161

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   2. From Clinamen to Conatus: Deleuze, Lucretius, Spinoza

      • Warren Montag

      Pages 163-172

   3. Notes on Leo Strauss’s “Notes on Lucretius”

      • Alain Gigandet

      Pages 173-185

   4. Reflections of Lucretius in Late Antique and Early Modern Biblical and Scientific Poetry: Providence and the Sublime

      • Philip Hardie

      Pages 187-202

7. Back Matter

   Pages 203-225

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Lucretius's long shadow falls across the disciplines of literary history and criticism, philosophy, religious studies, classics, political philosophy, and the history of science. The best recent example is Stephen Greenblatt's popular account of the Roman poet's De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini, and of its reception in early modernity, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Despite the poem's newfound influence and visibility, very little cross-disciplinary conversation has taken place. This edited collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars to examine the relationship between Lucretius and modernity. Key questions weave this book's ideas and arguments together: What is the relation between literary form and philosophical argument? How does the text of De rerum natura allow itself to be used, at different historical moments and to different ends? What counts as reason for Lucretius? Together, these essays present a nuanced, skeptical, passionate, historically sensitive, and complicated account of what is at stake when we claim Lucretius for modernity.

• antiquity
• cultural theory
• culture
• Europe
• history
• history of literature
• literary theory
• literature
• Ovid
• poetics
• poetry
• time

"In a series of masterful essays, Lucretius and Modernity offers an astutely philological and multidisciplinary assessment of the pertinence of De rerum natura, both how the work anticipates a variety of conceptions of modernity and how modern readings activate striking latencies contained in this singular Latin poem. Much more than a straightforward account of reception history, this exemplary collection radically presses the limits of reading the past in the present and the present in the past." - John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA


"The return of Lucretius has been one of the more remarkable developments in the humanities over recent years. This scintillating collection offers diverse and focussed challenges to rethink how responses to Lucretius have shaped, and continue to shape, our sense of the Western intellectual tradition." - Duncan F. Kennedy, author of Rethinking Reality:Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature 
 

"Lucretius, writing in the first century before the Common Era, is one of our greatest philosophical contemporaries. He teaches us how to think the atom, the swerve and accident, and freedom: this book, taking stock of the poem's reception across disciplines and periods, persuades us with great force of Lucretius's continuing modernity." - Barbara Cassin, Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
 
"In a series of masterful essays, Lucretius and Modernity offers an astutely philological and multidisciplinary assessment of the pertinence of De rerum natura, both how the work anticipates a variety of conceptions of modernity and how modern readings activate striking latencies contained in this singular Latin poem. Much more than a straightforward account of reception history, this exemplary collection radically presses the limits of reading the past in the present and the present in the past." - John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

"The return of Lucretius has been one of the more remarkable developments in the humanities over recent years. This scintillating collection offers diverse and focussed challenges to rethink how responses to Lucretius have shaped, and continue to shape, our sense of the Western intellectual tradition." - Duncan F. Kennedy, author of Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature 

 

"Lucretius, writing in the first century before the Common Era, is one of our greatest philosophical contemporaries. He teaches us how to think the atom, the swerve and accident, and freedom: this book, taking stock of the poem's reception across disciplines and periods, persuades us with great force of Lucretius's continuing modernity." - Barbara Cassin, Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

 

Jacques Lezra is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at New York University, and a member of the Departments of English and German. He is the co-editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables (Princeton, 2014), with Emily Apter and Michael Wood; the author of Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham, 2010; Spanish translation 2012; Chinese translation 2013); and the editor of the Northwestern University Press book series IDIOM, with Paul North. Lezra won the PEN Critical Editions Award for his translation into Spanish of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight.

Liza Blake is an Assistant Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga and an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Department of English at the University of Toronto. She has published in the journals postmedieval and SEL: Studies in English Literature, and in the edited volumes Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, ed. Bella Mirabella, SpeculativeMedievalisms: Discography, ed. Eileen Joy et al, and the Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature, Science, and Culture, ed. Evelyn Tribble and Howard Marchitello, forthcoming 2015.

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