Paul Allen Miller, professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina, will present, "Satire is Wholly Roman," as the next speaker in the Winslow lecture series at Hamilton College. The lecture is Thursday, March 4, at 4:10 p.m. in the Science Auditorium, and is free and open to the public.
Miller is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (1994), Latin Erotic Elegy (2002), and, most recently, Subjecting Verses (Princeton, 2004). Miller has edited several books and special issues of journals and has published numerous articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature as well as on literary theory. He is currently working on two books--Latin Verse Satire and Spiritual Practices: The Reception of Plato and The Construction of the Subject in Postmodern France.
His lecture will discuss the observation by the second-century rhetorician Quintilian that satire is entirely Roman, arguing that Quintilian means not simply that this particular form of verse was written only by the Romans, but also that there is something peculiarly Roman about the genre itself.
Allen Miller, who received his bachelor's degree from Washington University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin, is a familiar face at Hamilton, having taught classics here in spring 1996.
