James Ker, PhD
James Ker is an associate professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a BA from the University of Canterbury and an MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Ker is the author of The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford University Press, 2009) and A Seneca Reader: Selections from Prose and Tragedy (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2011) and articles on Greek and Roman literature and culture. A Seneca Reader originated in his desire to introduce students to Seneca's unique literary style and to his wide-ranging works in both prose and poetry.
Books by James Ker, PhD
A Seneca Reader: Selections from Prose and Tragedy
- 7583
- 978-0-86516-758-2
Innovator in the literature of philosophical advising and reshaper of myth in tragedy, at turns inspiring and disturbing: This is Seneca the Younger. A mosaic of readings from four main genres with select follow-up passages showcases Seneca as therapeutic consoler, mirror to the prince, tragedian of the passions, and moral epistolographer—a thinker whose literary voice sounds against the volatility of his times. Seneca spins the republican Cicero's stylistic legacy and Augustan literature's gold into the distinctive silver of the first century CE: concise in encapsulating ideas, inventive in borrowing the vocabulary of everyday life, and with a propensity for using vivid images to depict emotional experience. This is a style the historian Tacitus deemed "œfitted to the ears of his age."
