Roman Comedy against the Subject

Roman Comedy against the Subject provides an expansive interpretation of four Roman comedies named after objects--Plautus's Cistellaria, Aulularia, and Rudens, and Terence's Eunuchus. In this book, the titular object provides an opportunity not to reconceive the relational politics of Roman comedy, but to conceive a different politics of familial and social relations with Roman comedy. Employing object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Black critical theory, the book radically recasts perennial problems of Roman comedy and literature in general: the author, in relation to "e;mothering"e; (alternative maternities); character, in relation to neurodiversity; genre, in relation to sibling-like parentality; and the title itself, in relation to gendering and ungendering. Roman Comedy against the Subject explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of becoming object, of embracing "e;itness."e; Rather than assimilating objects to subjects or vital agents, the book finds emancipatory potential in renouncing the normative and intrinsically exclusionary subjecthood of "e;he,"e; "e;she,"e; and "e;they,"e; markers of privilege that are burdened by the violence of humanization and often dehumanizing of others. The introduction features nine brief but acute readings of object-oriented modern dramas: Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie, Yukio Mishima's The Damask Drum, EugA*ne Ionesco's Les Chaises, and Alice Childress's String, among others.