Roman Comedy against the Subject (Oxford, 2025) provides an expansive interpretation of four Roman comedies named after objects: Plautus's Cistellaria, Aulularia, and Rudens, and Terence's Eunuchus. Employing object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Black critical theory, Mario Telò (Rhetoric, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, and Comparative Literature) uses each play's titular object as an opportunity to reconceive a politics of familial and social relations within Roman comedy. In so doing, he radically recasts perennial problems of Roman comedy and literature: the author, in relation to "mothering" (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 an object, of embracing "itness." Rather than assimilating objects to subjects or vital agents, the book finds emancipatory potential in renouncing the normative and intrinsically exclusionary subjecthood of "he," "she," and "they," markers of privilege that are burdened by the violence of humanization and often the dehumanizing of others.
Telò is joined by Dora Zhang (Comparative Literature and English). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.
