Smiles were in short supply in the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, in large part because so many were concealed beneath masks. In societies that have no modern tradition of wearing masks or veils, the unfamiliar sight of concealed faces can be disconcerting. This is not because we are unable to see the flesh of the face – a lifeless face can be quite as disconcerting as any mask – but rather because artificial face coverings conceal our arts of face making. The face is, after all, the only part of the body that we commonly talk of in terms of ‘making’ and of being ‘made up’. The very word ‘face’ derives from the Latin facere – to make or to do. This chapter considers the psychological power of face-making and the exploitation of that power in political performance. It also considers, more deeply, how physical face-making parallels rhetorical crafting of persona in politics, law, and society at large.

Roman law is often considered as an intellectual matrix of contemporary laws and in particular French civil law. However, even if the vocabulary persisted, some legal concepts went through great changes across history as law was step by step related to a subject’s power. The notion of ‘thing’ originally meant the trial, the case, the litigious situation managed by the legal process. In this way, the thing was understood as a res iuris. In contemporary law systems, the thing (res as a legal category) ordinarily specifies some goods on which the subject applies his property power. This view is understandable considering the evolution due to the theorisation of subjective law which led to the promotion of a strong and exclusive separation between persons and things, while Roman law could imbricate these legal categories. This difficulty is at the heart of the problem when jurists aim to categorise Nature in legal taxonomy.

In the famous 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace called himself “an exhibitionist who wants to hide.” It’s a quote that many Wallace scholars and fans can throw out at a moment’s notice as an example of Wallace’s endearing, self-deprecating wit. However, as self-effacing as that comment may seem, it nevertheless suggests concealment, contradiction, perhaps even deceit. For every aspect of Wallace on display, another remains hidden from view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way he constructs his biography in his writing. Through carefully selected details and statements in fiction, essays and especially interviews, Wallace crafts a literary and public persona that is very much at odds with (or a heavily curated version of) his actual life. Much of the backlash against Wallace and the various debates over whether he ought to be studied, taught, respected or outright canceled stem from the disconnect between the biography presented to his readership and the actual human who has emerged in subsequent biographies, memoirs, testimonials, archives and tweets that have made writing about Wallace a cottage industry in publishing.

As much as these paratexts may appear to carry more authority as more accurate depictions of the “real” Wallace, it is important to examine how these accounts are themselves constructed versions of Wallace grappling with Wallace’s (and at times the author’s own) place in a rapidly shifting literary and media culture. Discussion of the many constructed biographies of David Foster Wallace, including the likes of D. T. Max, David Lipsky, Mary Karr, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and more, would show how much literary culture has changed in the decade since his death and show how much David Foster Wallace is a distinct product of his own time and place. Wallace and Franzen may have believed that writers such as Pynchon and DeLillo had an easier, less public literary life than they did because “they made their bones in a different time,” but the past decade has shown that Wallace made his bones in a different time as well, to the extent that he would not have been able to craft such a persona free from public scrutiny (or the truth) today. In this regard, Wallace may truly be the last of his kind, part of an extinct breed: the last white male writer of the twentieth century, the greatest, male-est narcissist.

The opening chapter sets out the terminological and conceptual ideas that provide a basis for the remainder of the book. Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, it explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective. The second part of the chapter looks in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why? One of the properties of the idea of subjectivity identified here is that it is not a pre-given entity but a dynamic process that requires our own active participation for its interpretation. And thus while a number of conceptual questions still remain to be answered at the close of this chapter, it is given to the main body of the book to respond to these matters.

Chapter 2 delves into George Orwell’s use of the second-person pronoun in Down and Out in Paris and London published in 1933. It has been rarely noted in Orwell’s autobiographical essay and yet, alternating between the ‘I’ pronoun and the indefinite ‘one’, it uniquely brings the reader to more directly experience what other sentient beings living in deprivation are going through. A detailed quantitative as well as qualitative analysis is offered, classifying the different ‘you’ that pervade the text based on linguistic clues and contextual parameters, exposing all the plasticity of the pronoun. The results show that ‘you’ oscillates between specificity and genericity in a way subtly exploited by Orwell in his attempt at implicating the reader in re-living his experience as a tramp through writing about it.

Many of Cicero’s translations of Greek concepts (assent, comprehension, quality) have become common terms in philosophy but also in ordinary language in many European countries. Some of them, pertaining to epistemology, ethics, or physics, are studied in this chapter to show why and how Cicero set out to create a Latin philosophical vocabulary. He wanted to extend the supremacy of Rome to an area formerly reserved to the Greeks. He tried to avoid technical terms or neologisms and preferred open notions to closed concepts. He aimed at conveying the complexity of Greek philosophical doctrines in Latin and sometimes brought out certain nuances which did not exist in the Greek terms (as in the case of probabile). Cicero’s originality as a philosopher does not lie in creating a new system but in providing philosophy with a new language and in promoting the idea that philosophy was not the privilege of Greek culture but a field open to human ingenuity.

This chapter turns to the sorrow songs, beginning with the famous passage from Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies. It focuses on the ethnography of African American song traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of professionalisation of folklore studies in the American academy. White folklorists claimed the songs were irrational, primitive, childlike, unmediated expressions of feeling; other qualities were discovered by African American ethnographers, including Zora Neale Hurston. The songs were also forms of exploitative labour. The chapter includes a reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘A Corn Song’. Dunbar’s shifts between African American vernacular and ‘standard’ English illuminate the tendency of white folklorists to call attention to the failure of the printed and disembodied textual transcription to transmit the real power of the performed lyric. The chapter considers the attempt to secure an ‘authentic’ Black sound through recordings in prisons and labour camps. It also challenges the notion of authenticity through a reading of Olio by Tyehimba Jess, a work that seeks to recover – through a form of poetic ventriloquy – the thoughts and feelings of the artists whose work was appropriated by white critics, scholars and producers in this period.

The proposal advanced in this chapter assumes that linguistic variation is meaningful, and that a non-trivial number of a linguistic variant’s social meanings derive from embodied practice. And crucially, meaning – some of it embodied – can initiate or influence the trajectory of change.

The third-wave approach treats linguistic variation as a semiotic system, with linguistic forms serving as components of sociolinguistic signs. In Peirce’s semiotic, a critical part of the sign is the interpretant, crucial to theories of indexicality that no sign exists independently of its construal. This chapter explores framing the interpretant as the cognitive processes involved in a listener’s recognition of a form-meaning link, and as the resulting mental representation of that link. A recognition memory paradigm tested the association between a Business Professional persona and backed TRAP vowels. Some participants were told the speaker was a BP and some were told nothing. Some listeners heard a linguistic variant congruent with the persona (backed TRAP), while others heard an incongruent variant (fronted TRAP). Listeners accurately remembered a word better when persona and linguistic feature were congruent, and were also more likely to falsely remember sociolinguistically congruent words. This suggests that a speaker’s social persona shapes how we remember – and mis-remember – a feature of that speaker’s linguistic style in ways that conform to our ideological expectations.

This chapter considers why Roman comedy was important generally for Catullus and what about this genre caught his attention in the first place. The chapter suggests that three qualities of the genre are especially pertinent to this question: (1) a nugatory sensibility; (2) a domestic, urban, and local perspective; (3) an interest in Greco-Roman hybridity and translation. Throughout this book, the author returns to these overarching themes, which can be seen to undergird Catullus’ engagement with Roman comedy, but here he sketches their essential features by using a few concrete examples in the Catullan corpus that highlight the poet’s theatrical outlook but whose comic substructure has gone overlooked or underappreciated.

Chapter 1 examines two interrelated concepts – “metatheater” and “theatricality” – that undergird Catullus’ and other Romans’ understanding of their society and the roles that they play in it. Romans of the first century BCE imagined themselves living in a world that could often seem interchangeable with that of their literary and popular dramas, especially Roman comedy, whose boundary between fiction and reality is thin at the best of times. This chapter explores the attitudes that make possible not merely theater that is self-conscious of its status as theater, but the underlying ideas that allow self-conscious theater to be legible. In particular, this chapter considers metaphors of life as theater and points of contact between notions of self and of performance – persona in the sense of “unique individual” and in the sense of “mask that superimposes its identity on the wearer,” both of which definitions were operant in the late Republic. Romans often represented themselves playing a series of shifting roles and improvising their lives as they lived them.

Chapter 7, the concluding chapter, discusses the literary production of Manasses in light of the observations made in the close readings throughout the monograph. Returning to the theoretical considerations of the functions of occasional literature, special attention is here devoted to certain aspects of Manasses’ production: the recycling of Graeco-Roman and biblical material and his own verses within and across genres. The economy of reusing motifs, words, expressions and verses is considered from the perspective of occasional literature written on commission or in the hope of achieving commissions, but also from an aesthetic viewpoint. The ways in which Manasses comments upon his own situation as a writer and inscribes his own authorship into his texts are seen as the conscious creation of an individual voice, but also as a reflection of the Komnenian trend towards poetic self-assertiveness.

While Cicero’s self-fashioning has been a subject of great scholarly interest already, my approach is more granular, emphasizing variability and adaptation in Cicero’s use of eight distinct personae to generate political leverage through the shaping of persuasive political narratives. The speeches from his return from exile in 57 BCE to his death in 43 have received relatively little scholarly attention (some more than others), and this book offers a comprehensive and innovative account of that part of the corpus. Cicero’s time in exile and the rise of the “first triumvirate” combined to change the political landscape, not only for Cicero but in general, creating new challenges in the rebuilding and maintenance of his influence. Each of the eight personae gives readers a framework in which to understand Cicero’s rhetorical strategies, and to see how his arguments and accounts of the world around him are shaped to address his political goals. A persona consists not only of social role and status but also of character traits, affective responses, and relationships to others.

Much has been written on the ‘implied reader’ in Lucretius’ DRN. From G. B. Conte’s textually constructed reader to recent work on Lucretian receptions, Lucretius’ readers or their textual condition have received substantial scholarly attention. What remains largely undiscussed – and what has left generation upon generation of the poem’s readers spellbound – is not so much other readers of the DRN, but the elusive ‘author’ himself. Jerome famously claimed that Lucretius wrote the DRN between intervals of insanity brought on by a love potion, and increasingly wild biographies of Lucretius crop up again and again in the reception traditions of the poem – from death-bed hallucinations brought on by his wicked wife to his beautiful but unresponsive male paramour. Taking some of these biographies as its point of inspiration, this chapter uses the concept of the ‘implied author’ to investigate what exactly it is about Lucretius’ text that inspired and inspires such imaginative, but arguably still textually grounded, portraits of its author.

This chapter offers a framework for understanding how the work gathered under the sign ‘J. M. Coetzee’ has reached – and been received – by multiple publics, from agents, editors, and publishers to a range of readers including critics, censors, interviewers, and literary prize judges. It considers the role of institutional mediation in the processes of making meaning, also highlighting some of the ways in which Coetzee has had to navigate amongst complex local and global value-conferring operations in the service of making a career, yet has sought too to disrupt the terms under which cultural capital accrues. Addressing the circuitous routes through which his first books, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, reached their first readers (and elicited a range of responses), the chapter also considers a number of controversies in the 1980s that served as flashpoints for Coetzee’s negotiation of the demand that a writer speak, in certain circumstances, in their own person. Finally, it assesses the impact of these processes and contexts for such later works as Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year and occasions such as Coetzee’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech and his many public readings and other interventions since.