The Berkeley Department of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies is pleased to announce our (virtual) Undergraduate Lecture and Information Session. Please join us for a short lecture by Professor Mario Telò; Talos Tales: Intensity Politics Disability (see description below), followed by Zoom Breakout rooms to discuss all things related to the study of the Ancient Meditteranean at Cal. We will be joined by departmental faculty, graduate student instructors (GSIs), and advisors.

All undergraduate students are welcome. Please come and enjoy the lecture (3:10 - 4:00 pm) and/or our breakout sessions (4:00 - 5:00 pm). Breakout room themes are:

• Main Room - general information & chit chat
• Questions about the major/minor
• Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology
• The Classical Forum (UCB Student Club)
• Post-Lecture Q&A - with Professor Telò
• Greek & Latin Language
• Games!

Talos Tales: Intensity Politics Disability

In this talk, I explore the aesthetic-political link between intensity and disability by reading a scene of Apollonius’s Argonautica in which the metallic giant Talos seeks to ward off the Argonauts from Crete. As I will show, Apollonius's poetic texture exposes the reader to a ghostly inhabitation of Talos's disability or hyperability, his crip embodiment. Talos’s rock breaking could be seen as an insurrectionary gesture against the labor imposed by Zeus as well as against the idea of bodily wholeness. At the same time, the metallic clangor of the giant's movement has an autonomous, impersonal, dissensual conation, which has strong connections with Medea, an alter ego of Talos even as she kills him. Apollonius’s text emits an insistent metallic intensity, which as Legacy Russell says of the digital glitch, opens “a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest” themselves.