Anima and Animal Life: Nymphs, Satyrs, Dogs as Late Style — a Talk by Mario Telò

“Late style,” in Edward Said’s classic formulation, is concerned with what is “untimely and scandalous”; with what remains unreconciled and unresolved, fragmentary and irresolute; with the foreclosed possibilities of synthesis and totality. But is there another valence of meaning in late style that classical and modern literary tales of animals can help us to articulate? Drawing on Said’s discussion of the dog Bendicò in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, this talk will move between Ovid’s nymphs and Pan figures and their reappearance in Virginia Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush to consider the breath (anima) that animates animal life and what sort of relation it enables—beyond the shifting ground of language. What might a cognizance of our animal skin and animal breath entail for a reconsideration and inhabitation of the “inhuman,” a concept central to Said’s definition of late style?

Mario Telò is Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Rhetoric, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His research seeks to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form. His books include Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis, Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading through Pandemic Times, Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler, and, forthcoming, Roman Comedy against the Subject and Edward Said and the Late Animal: the Queer Politics of Graeco-Roman Style.

This talk is being held in the context of BISR’s Language Learning and Critique program, an innovative approach to classical languages and their ever-changing scenes of reception. RSVPs will receive a link to the Zoom meeting room where the talk will be held. 

This talk is now available for viewing on BISR’s Vimeo page; click here to watch.

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