ENGLISH

The Sublime Seneca: Ethics, Literature, Metaphysics

By Erik Gunderson

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
2015
ISBN
1107090016, 9781107090019
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (1711743 bytes)
Pages
240\240
Time added
2015-05-19 12:08:26
Classics Literature Fiction Ancient Classical Dram

Description

This is an extended meditation on ethics in literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works at the level both of the work and of the world, the ethics of seeing, and the question of how one can give up on the here and now and behold instead some other, better ethical sphere. Seneca's tragedies offer words of caution: desire might well subvert reason at its most profound level (Phaedra), or humanity's painful separation from the sublime might be part of some cruel divine plan (The Madness of Hercules). The book concludes by considering what, if anything, we are to make of Seneca's efforts to enlighten us.

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