Major Corrections

Sebastiano Timpanaro was one of the purest and most original minds of the second half of the twentieth century – Perry AndersonTom Geue’s book is by a long stretch the best discussion of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s position in the Italian and European intellectual life of the second half of the twentieth century. Through a fresh reconsideration of Timpanaro’s work and an unprecedented engagement with his archive it puts forward a fundamentally original and utterly compelling account of an exceptional scholarly and political trajectory. Geue explores pressing questions on the interplay between intellectual work and political activism, and sets a new standard to future projects on the history of classical scholarship. Timpanaro is carefully and sympathetically discussed on his own terms and in his own context, and the relevance of his work to global debates in the early twenty-first century is deftly articulated. A luminous, enlightening, and energising read. – Federico Santangelo, author of Divination, Prediction and the End of the Roman RepublicThis book comes out from the felicitous encounter between two remarkable classicists. Tom Geue is a masterful interpreter and, at the same time, a fascinating biographer of Sebastiano Timpanaro, a unique thinker who merged Marx, Leopardi and Trotsky, defended historical materialism against structuralism, Hegelianism, and psychoanalysis, and combined classical philology with socialist utopia. Grounded on careful inquiry, this intellectual portrait inscribes Timpanaro in his historical time, striking the necessary balance between political empathy and critical distance. – Enzo Traverso, author of Revolution: An Intellectual HistoryA fully-fledged, challenging portrait of a great 20th century intellectual. – Carlo GinzburgWith a philologist’s eye, and with scrutiny and empathy, Geue asks what the demands of the world can mean for the work of the mind, and for the commitments of an individual scholar. If philology is the discipline of attending to small detail, this book asks what big things it can also teach. Geue’s book shows how philology’s honesty can continue to disrupt and surprise. – Constanze Guthenke, author of Feeling and Classical PhilologyIn Major Corrections, Tom Geue writes of “a vibrant intellectual culture on which it is hard not to look back longingly.” But Geue’s book is itself a cure and corrective for this nostalgia. A work of vibrant intelligence, bracing clarity, and real political acuity, Major Corrections at once retrieves Timpanaro and reinvents him for our times. There has never been a “library mouse” worthier of our attention. – Ramsey McGlazer, author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of ProgressSebastiano Timpanaro, one of the foremost philologists, philosophers, and theorists of revolution, combined passions for truth and for justice in a way that is not untypical of the Italian Left but which is hardly known in most other countries. Tom Geue’s passionate and precise reconstruction of his thought and life is the first well-rounded account of this extraordinary figure. It will break new ground in the understanding of Timpanaro himself and of the sources and context which nurtured his work - and it will serve as a monitory encouragement to thinkers everywhere who are dedicated to the struggle for truth and for justice. – Glenn W. Most, editor of Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method

Tom Geue teaches Classical Studies at the Australian National University. He has written about the mysteries of anonymous writing in the ancient world, including the books Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (2019) and Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (2017). He has also written Marxist criticism on classical Latin poetry. In 2021, his original research was recognised with the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize.