Mario Telò

The Philology of the Future: Essays in Honor of Jim Porter

Mario Telò
2026

This book gathers a group of scholars whose work has been influenced by the distinctive dialogue between ancient philosophy (and rhetoric) and critical theory promoted by the scholarship of James I. Porter. A classicist who has pushed classics beyond itself – beyond its traditional boundaries – Porter has demonstrated that antiquity cannot be studied without participating in what is sometimes dismissively labeled “reception.”

The collection here does not simply celebrate the work of a major figure in the field of classics through a series of Porterian writing
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Representations 169, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Elementality

2025

Special Issue: Elementality (edited by James I. Porter and Mario Telò).

Published by University of California Press.

Roman Comedy against the Subject

Mario Telò
2025

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...

Eupolis Demoi

Mario Telò
2007

In un'epoca perennemente alla ricerca di un'identità e ansiosa di ritrovare in un passato immaginario i propri padri spirituali non può che apparire di grande attualità una commedia come i Demi di Eupoli che portava in scena, facendoli risuscitare dall'Oltretomba, quattro 'mostri sacri' della storia politica ateniese (Solone, Milziade, Aristide, Pericle). Questo libro, che fornisce un testo critico, la traduzione e, per la prima volta, un commento sistematico di tutti i frammenti superstiti, tenta di ricostruire l'articolazione...

Comedy and the Discourse of Genres

Mario Telò
2013

Recent scholarship has acknowledged that the intertextual discourse of ancient comedy with previous and contemporary literary traditions is not limited to tragedy. This book is a timely response to the more sophisticated and theory-grounded way of viewing comedy's interactions with its cultural and intellectual context. It shows that in the process of its self-definition, comedy emerges as voracious and multifarious with a wide spectrum of literary, sub-literary and paraliterary traditions, the engagement with which emerges as central to its projected literary identity and,...

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis

Mario Telò
2023

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression?

The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction,...

Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler

Mario Telò
2024

Considering Butler's “tragic trilogy”-a set of interventions on Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Bacchae, and Aeschylus's Eumenides-this book seeks to understand not just how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy, but also how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking, even when their gaze is directed elsewhere. Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler's writing. It shows how Butler's mode of reading tragedy-and, crucially, reading tragically-offers a distinctive ethico-political response to the harrowing...

Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory

Mario Telò
Andrew Benjamin
2024

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both...