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"Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are," writes E. M. Cioran, the Romanian-born philosopher who has rightly been compared to Samuel Beckett.In History and Utopia, Cioran the monster writes of politics in its broadest sense, of history, and of the utopian dream. His views are, to say the least, provocative. In one essay he casts a scathing look at democracy, that "festival of mediocrity"; in another he turns his uncompromising gaze on Russia, its history, its evolution, and what he calls "the virtues of liberty." In the dark shadow of Stalin and Hitler, he wri

International audience ; This essay reflects, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, on the relevance of literary studies in critical times, as well as on the notion of relevance as a measure of literary history and literary criticism. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Wendy Brown, it argues for a model of relevance as untimeliness, where the function of criticism is to derive from literary texts a critical politics that eventually speaks both to these texts' complex historical context and to their readers' present and ever-changing circumstances. It then turns to the nineteenth-century archive to illustrate the untimely relevance of American literary history at the present time. While Dickinson might seem to suggest that "To suspend the breath/Is the most we can" (F1067) in a time of crisis, intimating that literature is essentially the record of our helplessness in the unraveling of the world, the example of Emerson's antislavery lectures, where both the blight of slavery and the cause of abolition are metaphorized as airborne contamination, offer a template for thinking about the dangers as well as the potentialities of viral contagion. American literature . . . captures the "air" or the atmosphere of history and equips us with models to take it in . . . Such is . . . [its] (un)timely relevance . . . at the present time.

International audience ; This essay reflects, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, on the relevance of literary studies in critical times, as well as on the notion of relevance as a measure of literary history and literary criticism. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Wendy Brown, it argues for a model of relevance as untimeliness, where the function of criticism is to derive from literary texts a critical politics that eventually speaks both to these texts' complex historical context and to their readers' present and ever-changing circumstances. It then turns to the nineteenth-century archive to illustrate the untimely relevance of American literary history at the present time. While Dickinson might seem to suggest that "To suspend the breath/Is the most we can" (F1067) in a time of crisis, intimating that literature is essentially the record of our helplessness in the unraveling of the world, the example of Emerson's antislavery lectures, where both the blight of slavery and the cause of abolition are metaphorized as airborne contamination, offer a template for thinking about the dangers as well as the potentialities of viral contagion. American literature . . . captures the "air" or the atmosphere of history and equips us with models to take it in . . . Such is . . . [its] (un)timely relevance . . . at the present time.

Introduction: Success narratives? -- Chapter 1. The halo of higher learning in the work of Abraham Cahan -- Chapter 2. A reprieve at best: education in the writing of Mary Antin and Elizabeth G. Stern -- Chapter 3. Anzia Yezierska's frustrated pursuit of education -- Chapter 4. M. E. Ravage, Ludwig Lewisohn and Lionel Trilling: education at the 'Real American' University -- Chapter 5. The hidden curriculum in Leo Rosten's H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N stories -- Epilogue: A space apart

This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces. Annick Paternoster is a Lecturer at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. She lectures Rhetoric and Stylistics at the Istituto di studi italiani, where she pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda based on historical pragmatics, the pragmatics of politeness and metapragmatics of Italian. Born in Belgium, she holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp.

"The hands of colonized subjects - South Asian craftsmen, Egyptian mummies, harem women, and Congolese children - were at the crux of Victorian discussions of the body that tried to come to terms with the limits of racial identification. While religious, scientific, and literary discourses privileged hands as sites of physiognomic information, none of these found plausible explanations for what these body parts could convey about ethnicity. As compensation for this absence, which might betray the fact that race was not actually inscribed on the body, fin-de-siecle narratives sought to generate models for how non-white hands might offer crucial means of identifying and theorizing racial identity. They removed hands from a holistic corporeal context and allowed them to circulate independently from the body to which they originally belonged. Severed hands consequently served as 'human tools' that could be put to use in a number of political, aesthetic, and ideological contexts"--