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Leo Bersani was an enormously seductive critic, and he frequently wrote about seductiveness, beginning with his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art. This essay focuses on a passage in that book where Bersani discusses Proust's character, the Baron de Charlus, whose seductive orientation toward the world Bersani relates to Charlus's "homosexual talk." This essay considers the fate of seductiveness within Bersani's own career-long homosexual talk. It moves, by way of his queer provocations of the 1980s and 1990s, from his first book to his 2013 preface to that book, and shows how, even as Bersani reformulated the seductive in increasingly austere terms, he continued to deploy it, never forgetting how close it is to the intolerable.

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC's) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls "comic cosmopolitanism," an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the "uncooperative" witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to "name names".

Considers the conflation of history with sophistication in the class & gender politics of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1972 [1818]) as an example of proto-Victorian negotiations of these issues. Austen's method is read as a process whereby refinement is manifested as particularization, in that characters who make distinctions automatically have conferred on them the distinction of being sophisticated. This is shown to be particularly true in the character Catherine's judgment of the Gothic novels she reads. Contrary to Nancy Armstrong's (1987) interpretation of this movement in the novel, which describes it as a singular shift from history to sophistication, it is argued that history is only submerged, not erased, from the novel. It is indicated by Austen's novel that, if the classification of fiction becomes more sophisticated, raising the novel's cultural stock, these changes are due to the fact that novels take historiography as their model rather than erase it from their pages. Based on this reinterpretation of the relation between history & sophistication, it is contended that the novel displays a sense that upper-middle-class sophistication might turn every upper-middle-class male body into a nauseating body. Austen's contempt for this male body is interpreted in the context of a social order that denies Austen all other forms of power except the power of style. D. M. Smith