Current Research

The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Roman Empire

Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in April 2006.

Jacket copy: People in the ancient world thought of vision as both an ethical tool and a tactile sense, akin to touch. Gazing upon someone—or oneself—was treated as a path to philosophical self-knowledge, but the question of tactility introduced an erotic element as well.  In The Mirror of the Self, Shadi Bartsch asserts that the links among vision, sexuality, and self-knowledge are key to the classical understanding of the self. Weaving together literary theory, philosophy, and social history, Bartsch traces this complex notion of self from Plato’s Greece to Seneca’s Rome. She starts by showing how ancient authors envisioned the mirror as both a tool for ethical self-improvement, and, paradoxically, a sign of erotic self-indulgence. Her reading of the Phaedrus, for example, demonstrates that the mirroring gaze in Plato, because of its sexual possibilities, could not be adopted by Roman philosophers and their students.

Bartsch goes on to examine the Roman treatment of the ethical and sexual gaze, and she traces how self-knowledge, the philosopher’s body, and the performance of virtue all played a role in shaping the Roman understanding of the nature of selfhood. Culminating in a profoundly original reading of Medea, The Mirror of the Self illustrates how Seneca, in his Stoic quest for self-knowledge, embodies the Roman view, marking a new point in human thought about self-perception.Bartsch leads readers on a journey that unveils divided selves, moral hypocrisy, and lustful Stoics—and offers fresh insights about seminal works. At once sexy and philosophical, The Mirror of the Self will be required reading for classicists, philosophers, and anthropologists alike.

Seneca and the Self

 Contributors: Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, Catharine Edwards, Christopher Gill, Brad Inwood, James Ker, A.A. Long, Martha Nussbaum, Alessandro Schiesaro, and David Wray. A PDF file of the introduction by Shadi Bartsch and David Wray is available for online reading here.

Essays on Ekphrasis

 Contributors: Shadi Bartsch, Val Cunningham, Page duBois, Jas Elsner, Simon Goldhill, Adrian Rifkin, Richard Strier, and Wes Williams. Forthcoming as Classical Philology volume 101. A PDF file of the introduction by Shadi Bartsch and Jas Elsner is available for online reading here.

Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern

Co-edited with Thomas Bartscherer

 Contributors: Shadi Bartsch, Peter Brooks, J.M. Coetzee, Catharine Edwards, Anthony Grafton, Tom Gunning, David Halperin, Valentina Izmirlieva, Jonathan Lear, Eric Marty, Susan Mitchell, Glenn Most, Martha Nussbaum, David Pippin, Jim Porter, Philippe Roger, Ingrid Rowland, Mark Strand, David Tracy, Richard Wollheim, and Slavoj Zizek.

Press description: Erotikon brings together leading contemporary intellectuals from a variety of fields for an expansive debate on the full meaning of eros. Renowned scholars of philosophy, literature, classics, psychoanalysis, theology, and art history join poets and a novelist to offer fresh insights into a topic that is at once ancient and forever young. Restricted neither by historical period nor by genre, these contributions explore manifestations of eros throughout Western culture, in subjects ranging from ancient philosophy and baroque architecture to modern literature and Hollywood cinema.
An idea charged with paradox, eros has always defied categorization, and yet it cannot--it will not--be ignored. Erotikon aims to raise the difficult question of what, if anything, unifies the erotic manifold. How is eros in a sculpture like eros in a poem? Does the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche still speak meaningfully to modern readers, and if so, why? Is Plato's eros the same as Freud's? Or Proust's? And what is the erotic dimension in Nietzsche's thought? While each essay takes on a specific issue, together they constitute a wide-ranging conversation in which these broader questions are at play.

Metaphors of Thought: Philosophy and the Figural in Persius' Satires

 Persius' marvelous, difficult, grotesque poetry, in its unabandoned use of metaphor and simile, both engages with and dramatically violates Stoic philosophical teaching on literary and ethical propriety. What does it mean to represent Stoicism in the same figural language with which one condemns obesity, gluttony, and sexual depravity?