Classicism = cultural embezziement? History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial emblem for much of Western thought and literature. Grafting Helen looks at classicism - the privileged thetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West - as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin of the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or...

The specter of the apocalypse has always been a semiotic fantasy: only at the end of all things will their true meaning be revealed. Our long romance with catastrophe is inseparable from the Western hermeneutical tradition: our search for an elusive truth, one that can only be uncovered through the interminable work of interpretation. Catastrophe terrifies and tantalizes to the extent it promises an end to this task. 9/11 is this book's beginning, but not its end. Here, it seemed, was the apocalypse America had long been waiting for; until it became just another event. And, indeed, the real...