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E. Gunderson, Nox philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the fantasy of the Roman library

E. Gunderson, Nox philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the fantasy of the Roman library

Publié le par Frédérique Fleck

Erik Gunderson, Nox philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the fantasy of the Roman library, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. ix, 313 pages.

  • ISBN 9780299229702
  • $55.00

Présentation de l'éditeur:

In thisstrikingly original and playful work, Erik Gunderson examines questionsof reading the past—an enterprise extending from antiquity to thepresent day. This esoteric and original study focuses on the equallysingular work of Aulus Gellius—a Roman author and grammarian (ca.120–180 A.D.), possibly of African origin. Gellius's only work, the twenty-volume Noctes Atticae,is an exploding, sometimes seemingly random text-cum-diary in whichGellius jotted down everything of interest he heard in conversation orread in contemporary books. Comprising notes on Roman and classicalgrammar, geometry, philosophy, and history, it is a one-work overviewof Latin scholarship, thought, and intellectual culture, a combinationcondensed library and cabinet of curiosities.
Gunderson tackles Gellius withexuberance, placing him in the larger culture of antiquarianliterature. Purposely echoing Gellius's own swooping word-play anddigressions, he explores the techniques by which knowledge was producedand consumed in Gellius's day, as well as in our own time. Theresulting book is as much pure creative fun as it is a major work ofscholarship informed by the theories of Michel Foucault, GillesDeleuze, and Jacques Derrida.

Erik Gunderson is associate professor of classics at the University of Toronto. His other books include Declamation, Paternity and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self and Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World.