Tragedy, Theatricality, and Eschatology in Augustine's City of God

Eugene Vance's scholarship focuses on Saint Augustine, exploring Augustine's unparalleled genius in recognizing that a religion of the embodied Word, the Logos, desperately needed a new theory of signs to teach believers why it was so revolutionary. For Vance, Augustine's sophisticated and complex sign theory is just as radical as the religion it was meant to teach. Vance has published five books: Reading the Song of Roland (1972), L'Archéologie du signe, co-edited with Lucie Brind'Amour (1983), Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (1986), and From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (1987). He has also edited volume 45 of Yale French Studies, Language as Action, in 1970.