Literature (cont.)
A course on Catullus might involve discussion of Roman sexuality as illuminated by his poems; the idea of lyric in, before, and after Catullus; the process of transmission of the physical text from antiquity through the advent of printing to the present day; the tensions between Catullus' embeddedness in the discourse of elite life at Rome and his unprecedented assertion of a personal and private world; the connections with contemporary philosophical views on the emotions; the question of whether Catullus' Lesbia is to be identified with the Clodia attacked by Cicero; and the tyranny of the canon in deciding which poems of Catullus represent the "real" Catullus: how can this love poet have authored those crude and obscene poems attacking such politicians as Julius Caesar?
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