In this pathbreaking study, the historical relationship between nineteenth-century spiritualism and twentieth-century surrealism is the basis for a general examination of conflicting movements in literature, art, philosophy, science, and other areas of social life. Because spiritualism delved into the world beyond humanity and surrealism was founded on the world within, the two provide a provocative frame for examining the struggles within modern culture. Cottom argues that we must conceive of interpretation in terms of urgency, desire, fierce contention, and impromptu deviation if we want to...
In this pathbreaking study, the historical relationship between nineteenth-century spiritualism and twentieth-century surrealism is the basis for a ge...
Why Education Is Useless Daniel Cottom "A tour de force, implicitly summarizing and commenting on more than two millennia of arguments about the function of education. Why Education Is Useless is craftily written and thoroughly enjoyable."--Michael Berube, author of The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies Education is useless because it destroys our common sense, because it isolates us from the rest of humanity, because it hardens our hearts and swells our heads. Bookish persons have long been subjects of suspicion and contempt and nowhere...
Why Education Is Useless Daniel Cottom "A tour de force, implicitly summarizing and commenting on more than two millennia of arguments about the funct...
In Social Figures, Daniel Cottom maps the course of this bourgeois project. His analysis centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual, as exemplified in the novels of George Eliot, whose awareness of her aesthetic and social task was keener than that of most Victorian writers.
In Social Figures, Daniel Cottom maps the course of this bourgeois project. His analysis centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual, as exem...
Text and Culture was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In Text & Culture, Daniel Cottom examines the political aspects of contemporary disciplines of interpretation. He pleads against limiting the act of reading by disqualifying some readings as "wrong" or unscholarly, and he argues for the necessity of multiple readings, claiming that a closed-off text glosses over differences that are political...
Text and Culture was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again a...
The Civilized Imagination is a study of literature in a period of cultural change. As part of the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a great transformation occurred in the relations among aesthetic theory, literature, and society. This study analyses such changes as they appear in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, three apparently distinct novelists whom the author locates within a unified cultural movement. Although the works of these writers are extremely different in many respects, in Professor Cottom's view they are all preoccupied with...
The Civilized Imagination is a study of literature in a period of cultural change. As part of the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth cen...
How did this vagabond word, "bohemia," migrate across national borderlines over the course of the nineteenth century, and what happened to it as it traveled? In "International Bohemia," Daniel Cottom studies how various individuals and groups appropriated this word to serve the identities, passions, cultural forms, politics, and histories they sought to animate. Beginning with the invention of bohemianism's modern sense in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s, Cottom traces the twists and turns of this phenomenon through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the...
How did this vagabond word, "bohemia," migrate across national borderlines over the course of the nineteenth century, and what happened to it as it...
