Cassirer Lecture 2023
Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, The Program for Early Modern Studies, and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Melanie Möller
Professor of Classics, Freie Universität, Berlin
LECTURE:
“vestigia parva, vestigia certa. Lucretius on His Way to (Post)Modernity”
Thursday, April 13, 5 PM ==== HQ 136 (Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York Street)
Since its rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things has fascinated readers due to its unconventional structure. While the combination of philosophy and poetry was in the center of attention, readers such as Edmund Spenser were impressed by the work’s formal merits. Not only Diderot and other “enlightened” readers appreciated the antiteleological approach, but also Marxist thinkers, not least Marx himself. This in turn is linked to the postmodern reception of Lucretius which developed a new understanding of the intellectual and aesthetic abysses of his atomism.
In her lecture, Melanie Möller asks for the potential of such readings in Lucretius’ own work.
The lecture is free and open to the public - no registration required
For information on the seminar the following day, please visit:
https://german.yale.edu/event/cassirer-seminar-2023-melanie-moller
Melanie Möller is a Professor of Classics (Latin Philology) at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She has worked extensively on the history and theory of classical rhetoric and poetics, and she is an expert on the work of Ovid. Among her book publications are: Talis oratio - qualis vita. Zu Theorie und Praxis mimetischer Verfahren in der griechisch-römischen Literaturkritik, 2004; Ciceros Rhetorik als Theorie der Aufmerksamkeit, 2013; a commentary on Ovid‘s Ars amatoria (with T. Roth und A. Trautsch), 2017; Rhetorik zur Einführung, 2022; editor of Ovid-Handbuch, 2021. She has published on literary and cultural theory, in particular the work of Hans Blumenberg, and she is a member of the advisory board of the Blumenberg Society.