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Translation--from both a theoretical and practical point of view--articulates differing but interconnected modes of circulation in the work of writers originally from different geographical areas of transatlantic encounter, such as Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean. After Translation examines from a transnational perspective the various ways in which translation facilitates the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic. It rethinks the theoretical paradigm of Anglo-American “modernism” based on the transnational, interlingual and transhistorical features of the work of key modern poets writing at both sides of the Atlantic--namely, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro; the Spaniard Federico García Lorca; the San Francisco-based poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser; the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite; and the Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Another central aim of this book is to analyze how the literary history of modern poetry—traditionally produced within mononational and monolingual frameworks—is altered by a comparative approach that incorporates different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean.

Today democracy has become fundamental. It extends increasingly deeply into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. We can't think past or beyond it as a political or even as a social system. This is a sense in which we do indeed live at history's end. But this end is not a happy one, because the democratic system we now live in does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was hostile to political democracy in particular. It continually attempted not just to resist democracy but to explore other ways of being democratic than those instituted politically. Today, Against Democracy argues, literature helps us not so much to imagine political and social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived simultaneously in and outside of democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism's contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservative resistances to capitalism and democracy. It also proposes innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is a colonial one that elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace articulations of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents an interdisciplinary comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—whom she maintains have been cast as the canon of the city in a belated “Alexandrianism.” Attending to genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers’ representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anti-colonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas one of which centres on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

With writings that span more than thirty-five years, this book is a collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian-American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States is noteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population — so too does their educational attainment and income. Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a self-conscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee, as well as challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research. The book offers insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collection brings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences about being and becoming an American.

More than twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. Within hours, a debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or a suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as a writer and survivor. Many weighed in with thoughtful and sometimes provocative commentary, but the debate over his death has sometimes overshadowed the larger significance of his place as a thinker after Auschwitz. This volume contains chapters that deal directly with Levi and his work; others tangentially use Levi's writings or ideas to explore larger issues in Holocaust studies, philosophy, theology, and the problem of representation. They are included here in the spirit that Levi described himself: proud of being impureand a centaur, cognizant that asymmetry is the fundamental structure of organic life. “I became a Jew in Auschwitz,” Levi once wrote, comparing the concentration camp to a university of life. Yet he could also paradoxically admit, in an interview late in life: “There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.” Rather than seek to untangle these contradictions, Levi embraced them. This volume seeks to embrace them as well.

This book sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment by arguing that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, it examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event—and marked or mutilated bodies—into its future reception. The book is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the book focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman. Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, it argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works' “apocalyptic futures” in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century. The first chapter outlines an innovative account of concepts as cultural entities. The second develops an original methodology for recovering the historical formation of the concept of human rights based on data extracted from digital archives. This enables us to track the construction of conceptual architectures over time. Having established the architecture of the concept of human rights, the book then examines two key moments in its historical formation: the First Continental Congress in 1775 and the publication of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in 1792. Arguing that we have yet to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of the eighteenth-century invention of the concept “rights of man,” the final chapter addresses our problematic contemporary attempts to leverage human rights as the most efficacious way of achieving universal equality.

Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, this book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the Prevailing Operating System at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. The author's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.

Radical aestheticism describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature, offering us the best way to reckon with what takes place at certain moments in texts by Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde. This book explores what happens when these writers, deeply committed to certain versions of ethics, politics, or theology, nonetheless produce an encounter with a radical aestheticism that subjects the authors’ projects to a fundamental crisis. A radical aestheticism offers no positive claims for art, whether on ethical or political grounds or on aesthetic grounds, as in “art for art’s sake.” It provides no transcendent or underlying ground for art’s validation. In this sense, a radical aestheticism is the experience of a poesis that exerts so much pressure on the claims and workings of the aesthetic that it becomes a kind of black hole from which no illumination is possible. The radical aestheticism encountered in these writers, in its very extremity, takes us to the constitutive elements—the figures, the images, the semblances—that are at the root of any aestheticism, an encounter registered as evaporation, combustion, or undoing. It is, therefore, an undoing by and of art and aesthetic experience, one that leaves this important literary tradition in its wake. The book embraces diverse theoretical projects, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida.

Offering the first interdisciplinary study of refugees in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States, this book relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual conditions of refugees. In doing so, the author weighs the questions of truth value associated with various modes of witnessing to explore the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee subjectivity in New World cultural and political formations. By examining literary works by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Nikl Payen, Kamau Brathwaite, Francisco Goldman, Julia Alvarez, Ivonne Lamazares, and Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, as well as human rights documents, government documents, photography, and historical studies, the book constructs a complex picture of New World refugees that expands current discussions of diaspora and migration, demonstrating that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires us to reshape the boundaries of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial studies.