Daniel Cottom - Böcker

This book is a study of modern spiritualism, which flourished in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and of surrealism, in its heyday between the world wars. The pairing yields a range of provocative material for working through issues with which criticism in all sorts of fields today remains preoccupied.

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 changing relation between aristocratic and middle-class values. In Ann Radcliffe's works middle-class values are beginning to emerge within a governing aristocratic context; in Jane Austen's novels these newer values are precariously balanced against the old; in Sir Walter Scott's books they have become victorious, at least superficially. Professor Cottorn examines the way these writers deal with such topics as taste, landscape, communications, morality and women, in order to show how certain aesthetic problems result from social change.

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 more so, perhaps, than in the United States during the past twenty years.Critics of education point to the Nazism of Martin Heidegger, for example, to assert the inhumanity of highly learned people; they contend that an oppressive form of identity politics has taken over the academy and complain that the art world has been overrun by culturally privileged elitists. There are always, it seems, far more reasons to disparage the ivory tower than to honor it. The uselessness of education, particularly in the humanities, is a pervasive theme in Western cultural history.With wit and precision, Why Education Is Useless engages those who attack learning by focusing on topics such as the nature of humanity, love, beauty, and identity as well as academic scandals, identity politics, multiculturalism, and the corporatization of academe. Asserting that hostility toward education cannot be dismissed as the reaction of barbarians, fools, and nihilists, Daniel Cottom brings a fresh perspective to all these topics while still making the debates about them comprehensible to those who are not academic insiders.A brilliant and provocative work of cultural argument and analysis, Why Education Is Useless brings in materials from literature, philosophy, art, film, and other fields and proceeds from the assumption that hostility to education is an extremely complex phenomenon, both historically and in contemporary American life. According to Cottom, we must understand the perdurable appeal of this antagonism if we are to have any chance of recognizing its manifestations-and countering them.Ranging in reference from Montaigne to George Bush, from Sappho to Timothy McVeigh, Why Education Is Useless is a lively investigation of a notion that has persisted from antiquity through the Renaissance and into the modern era, when the debate over the relative advantages of a liberal and a useful education first arose. Facing head on the conception of utility articulated in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill, and directly opposing the hostile conceptions of inutility that have been popularized in recent decades by such ideologues as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John Ellis, Cottom contends that education must indeed be "useless" if it is to be worthy of its name.

It is widely acknowledged that the unhuman plays a significant role in the definition of humanity in contemporary thought. It appears in the thematization of "the Other" in philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and postcolonial studies, and shows up in the "antihumanism" associated with figures such as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. One might trace its genealogy, as Freud did, to the Copernican, Darwinian, and psychoanalytic revolutions that displaced humanity from the center of the universe. Or as Karl Marx and others suggested, one might lose human identity in the face of economic, technological, political, and ideological forces and structures.With dazzling breadth, wit, and intelligence, Unhuman Culture ranges over literature, art, and theory, ancient to postmodern, to explore the ways in which contemporary culture defines humanity in terms of all that it is not. Daniel Cottom is equally at home reading medieval saints' lives and the fiction of Angela Carter, plumbing the implications of Napoleon's self-coronation and the attacks of 9/11, considering the paintings of Pieter Bruegel and the plastic-surgery-as-performance of the body artist Orlan.For Cottom, the unhuman does not necessarily signify the inhuman, in the sense of conspicuous or extraordinary cruelty. It embraces, too, the superhuman, the supernatural, the demonic, and the subhuman; the supposedly disjunctive animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the realms of artifice, technology, and fantasy. It plays a role in theoretical discussions of the sublime, personal memoirs of the Holocaust, aesthetic reflections on technology, economic discourses on globalization, and popular accounts of terrorism. Whereas it once may have seemed that the concept of culture always, by definition, pertained to humanity, it now may seem impossible to avoid the realization that we must look at things differently. It is not only art, in the narrow sense of the word, that we must recognize as unhuman. For better or worse, ours is now an unhuman culture.

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 twentieth century in the United States, England, Italy, Spain, and Germany.Even when they traveled under the banner of l'art pour l'art, the bohemians of this era generally saw little reason to observe borderlines between their lives and their art. On the contrary, they were eager to mix up the one with the other, despite the fact that their critics often reproached them on this account by claiming that bohemians were all talk-do-nothings frittering away their lives in cafÉs and taverns. Cottom's study of bohemianism draws from the biographies of notable and influential figures of the time, including Thomas Chatterton, George Sand, George Eliot, Henry Murger, Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont, Walt Whitman, Ada Clare, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Through a wide range of novels, memoirs, essays, plays, poems, letters, and articles, International Bohemia explores the many manifestations of this transnational counterculture, addressing topics such as anti-Semitism, the intersections of race and class, the representation of women, the politics of art and masquerade, the nature of community, and the value of nostalgia.

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.“…Daniel Cottom has produced a readable, well-researched, and thoroughly referenced work that speaks to a broad scholarly audience composed of philosophers, psychologists, sociolinguists, literary critics, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, to name but a few.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly