Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
Email:
mtelo@berkeley.edu
Office Hours:
Wednesday 2-5 Zoom
CV:
CV2020.pdf
Languages:
Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian
Periods:
Ancient and Modern
Academic Area:
Ancient and Modern Drama, Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, Political Theory
Research Areas
Biography
In my scholarship, I seek to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (University of Chicago Press 2016) theorizes the nexus between canonicity and sensory—especially haptic—materiality. The edited volume The Materiality of Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury, 2018) tests the advantages and limits of the so-called new materialisms in the interpretation of drama. On the threshold between critique and post-critique, my upcoming monograph, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Ohio State University Press, “Classical Memories/Modern Identities,” 2020), examines how contemporary theorizations of the archive (especially Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) and the death drive (in Freud as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and ?i?ek) can help us understand the aesthetic experience of tragedy. Through an engagement with the texts of ancient plays, art (Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly), architecture (Daniel Libeskind), and film, I locate Greek tragedy’s aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life-death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. I am now working on a book on comedy and political theory, entitled Crisis and Dissent: Aristophanes Ancient/Modern. In another work-in-progress, The Titular Object, I explore how the “literary” negotiates the precarious dichotomies of subject and object, materiality and immateriality, through a consideration of plays (and films) named after objects (Plautus’s The Pot of Gold, Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Ionesco’s Les chaises, Mishima’s The Magic Pillow, Hitchcock’s Rope). I am also developing a comparative project on the notion of “lateness” in literature, taking as starting points the theorizations of Adorno, Said, and Derrida.I am the chief editor of the journal Classical Antiquity, and I regularly write for the cultural section of the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
Selected Publications
Courses
Books
Queer Euripides: Re-reading in Greek Tragedy (under contract with Bloomsbury)
Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (OSU Press, series "Ancient Memories, Modern Identities"), 2020
The Materialities of Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury), co-edited with Melissa Mueller, 2018
Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (Chicago University Press), 2016
Comedy and the Discourse of Genres (CUP), co-edited with E. Bakola and L. Prauscello, 2013
Eupolis Demoi (Florence, Le Monnier), 2007
Recent and forthcoming articles:
"Queer A(e)di-(m)ology: On Callimachus's Aetia Prologue," Ramus
"Batrachopolitics: Crisis, Animal An-omaly, and the Stubborness of Form", in C. Guthenke and S. Gartland, Aristophanes and the Current Political Moment (Bloomsbury)
"Literary Critical Intensities: Pathos, Affect and Greek Tragedy," in J. Connolly and N. Worman, Oxford Handbook of Ancient Literary Criticism and Theory (OUP)
"Colonial Convulsions: Akram Khan's Xen(os) and the Digital Prometheus," in Greek Tragedy and the Digital (Bloomsbury)
"Laughter, or Aristophanes' Joy in the Face of Death," in P. Swallow and E. Hall, Aristophanic Humour (Bloomsbury)
"Between Emotion and the Emetic: Francis Bacon and the Tragic Body at the Margins of the Oresteia" Literary Imagination 22, 2020
"The Politics of Dissensus in Aristophanes' Birds" in R. Rosen and H. Foley, Aristophanes and Politics: New Essays (Brill 2020)
FS 2020
CLASSICS 239=COMP LIT 210=CRITICAL THEORY
Writing Disaster: Tragedy, Ecology, and Psychoanalysis
SS 2021
COMP LIT 100
Titles and Objects