Terence and the "black figura": A Manuscript Talk by Professor Jesse McCarthy

Terence’s play Eunuchus bears a special relationship to the representation of blackness in Roman New Comedy and a significant place in Erich Auerbach’s 1938 essay “Figura.” Drawing out the implications of this coincidence, Professor Jesse McCarthy offers an introduction to his next book project, Dark Figures: The Representation of Blackness in Western Literature, a study of the representation of blackness in selected works from antiquity to the 20th century. Taking inspiration from Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, his book traces what Auerbach called a “figura,” and his book calls the “black figura,” as the effect of repeatedly reconstructed figural representations that transmit and refashion the Western encounter with racial blackness across succeeding periods of literary history.