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Professor Schachter is on leave for the 2008-09 academic year. In the Fall Semester, he was a reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Currently, he is a fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. In June 2009, his affiliation with Duke University will end. During the 2009-10 academic year, Professor Schachter will be on a fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Marc Schachter received his doctorate in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2000 where his concentration was Pre and Early Modern Studies. His teaching and research focus on late medieval and early modern France and Italy and the classical tradition. Interests include the literature of the Wars of Religion in France; Montaigne and La Boétie; Renaissance Epic, particularly Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser; the history of sexuality; feminism and queer studies; the later work of Foucault; the politics, theory, and practice of translation in the Renaissance; and philology and textual editing.
Many of these interests come together in Professor Schachter's first book, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2008), which traces the permutations of the concept of “voluntary servitude” in classical authors such as Plato, Xenophon and Plutarch and in the writings and editorial practices of Étienne de La Boétie, Michel de Montaigne and Marie de Gournay. The book demonstrates how voluntary servitude to a text or an author (through translating, editing or publishing) facilitates certain practices of freedom that transform the meaning of both friendship and voluntary servitude. Drawing on Foucault’s work on critique, governmentality and the care of the self, Schachter explores modes of willful service that enable practices of freedom while offering social and political critique. The nature and implications of these practices and critiques are explored in analyses of La Boétie's well known Servitude volontaire and his less frequented translations of Xenophon and Plutarch; through considerations of Montaigne's editing of La Boétie's works and his engagement with his friend's ideas in the Essais; and by examining in turn Gournay's practices as editor of posthumous editions of the Essais and as an author in her own right.
Professor Schachter's discovery of an unknown manuscript of La Boétie's Discours de la Servitude volontaire at the Folger Shakespeare Library led to an essay in the pages of Montaigne Studies that proposes new ways to think about the early textual history of this most enigmatic of treatises. His continued interest in friendship and servitude has also led to an essay on Marguerite de Navarre's fictionalized account of Lorenzo de' Medici's assassination of his cousin Alessandro in the Heptaméron. This essay will eventually be followed by a twin article considering putatively historical Italian accounts of the assassination, particularly that of Benedetto Varchi.
Professor Schachter's current book project, “The Uses of Desire: Philology, Politics and the History of Sexuality,” focuses on the reception and deployment of classical erotic texts in Italy and France. The book’s thematic concerns are the history of the erotics of interpretation and the use value of desire (how ideas about the merits and demerits of desire have been linked to questions about its utility). The approach to the history of sexuality explored in “The Uses of Desire” offers an alternative to projects that mine literary texts for exemplary social types, whether normal or abnormal, or for information about sex acts in the past and their social meaning. The book thus makes three critical interventions in the study of the history of sexuality: 1) it focuses attention on transformations in the erotics of epistemology and interpretation rather than the history of social types; 2) it denatures sexuality by demonstrating the imbrications between hermeneutic, textual and sexual erotics; and 3) it re-imagines the history of sexuality through offering a genealogy of the use-value of desire. Education:
- PhD University of California at Santa Cruz, 2000
- MA University of California at Los Angeles, 1994
- AB Princeton University, 1990
Research Interests:
Current projects include "'Let me not speak aloud with my own lips of that ancient practice': The Lesbian Philology of Erasmus, Budé and Estienne", "'je n'entends point bien ce mot': Brantôme's Lesbians, Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans and the Erotics of Unknowing" and "
'de asini pendebant iudicio': Interpretation at Play in Apuleius and Beroaldus". Representative Publications (More Publications)
- M.D. Schachter. Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France. Ashgate, 2008.
- Martin Eisner and Marc Schachter. "Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio and the Study of the History of Sexuality." Publications of the Modern Language Association (forthcoming in May 2009).
- M.D. Schachter. "‘Quanto concede la Guerra’: Epic Masculinity and the Education of Desire in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata." A volume on masculinity in early modern Italy and Spain Ed. Jane Tylus and Gerry Milligan. Toronto University Press, volume currently under review.
- Marc Schachter. "‘nous couvrons nostre diable du plus bel ange que nous pouvons trouver’: Friendship and Tyranny in Novella 12 of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron." Friendships “New Begun”: Discourses of Early Modern Friendship Ed. Daniel Lochman and Maritere Lopez. Ashgate Publishing, under contract.
- M.D. Schachter. "'Qu'est-ce que la critique?’: La Boétie, Montaigne, Foucault." Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne Ed. Zahi Zalloua. Whitman College and University of Washington Press, forthcoming in 2009.
- M.D. Schachter. "Presentation of a Newly Discovered Manuscript of La Boétie's Servitude volontaire and Hypotheses on the Datation of the Known Manuscripts." Montaigne Studies 20 (January, 2008): 185-206.
- M.D. Schachter. "Louis le Roy's Sympose de Platon and Three Other Renaissance Adaptations of Platonic Eros." Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 406-39.
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