Dynamic Reading

Brooke Holmes is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton UniversityW. H. Shearin is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Miami

• Introduction, Brooke Holmes and W. H. Shearin ; 1. Haunting Nepos: Atticus and the Performance of Roman Epicurean Death, W. H. Shearin ; 2. Epicurus's Mistresses: Pleasure, Authority, and Gender in the Reception of the Kuriai Doxai in the Second Sophistic, Richard Fletcher ; 3. Reading for Pleasure: Disaster and Digression in the First Renaissance Commentary on Lucretius, Gerard Passannante ; 4. Discourse ex nihilo: Epicurus and Lucretius in Sixteenth-century England, Adam Rzepka ; 5. Engendering Modernity: Epicurean Women from Lucretius to Rousseau, Natania Meeker ; 6. Oscillate and Reflect: La Mettrie, Materialist Physiology, and the Revival of the Epicurean Canonic, James Steintrager ; 7. Sensual Idealism: The Spirit of Epicurus and the Politics of Finitude in Kant and Holderlin, Anthony Adler ; 8. The Sublime, Today?, Glenn Most ; 9. From Heresy to Nature: Leo Strauss's History of Modern Epicureanism, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft ; 10. Epicurean Presences in Foucault's The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Alain Gigandet ; 11. Deleuze, Lucretius, and the Simulacrum of Naturalism, Brooke Holmes ; Bibliography ; Index

Dynamic Reading is an exciting experiment in perspective. Eleven essays by a range of distinguished scholars come at the Epicurean inheritance from radically different angles, from an ancient Roman who starved himself to death to Mark Rothko, from a 'whore's doctrine of pleasure' to the philosophy of Giles Deleuze. The volume bears witness to the haunting ambiguity of Epicureanism and to its continuing vitality.