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 understand how things come to bear meaning for us. He demonstrates that even when Victorians holding seances and surrealists composing manifestoes were most foolish, they had much that was valuable to say about the life (and death) of reason.

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.

Unhuman Culture Daniel Cottom ""Uhuman Culture" takes the categories of the person and the Other, the human and culture, and questions whether their opposition is as fixed as we would think. In particular, Cottom is interested in how language and art animate the human. Our tendency to think and write passionately about the art we make leads him to criticize our 'perennial and perhaps inescapable tendency to underestimate the art in humanity and overestimate the humanity of art.' At issue in this clever chiasmus is the lack of difference separating the human from the unhuman."--"Bloomsbury Review" 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 "in"human, 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. Daniel Cottom is the David A. Burr Chair of Letters at the University of Oklahoma. Among his books are "Ravishing Tradition: Cultural Forces and Literary History," "Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment," and "Why Education Is Useless," the latter also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. 2006 216 pages 6 x 9 18 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3956-0 Cloth $45.00s 29.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0169-7 Ebook $45.00s 29.50 World Rights Cultural Studies Short copy: Through a wide-ranging study of literature, art, and philosophy, Daniel Cottom explains why ours is an unhuman culture and how this culture still gives us reason for hope.

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 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. Daniel Cottom is David A. Burr Chair of Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of numerous books, including "Ravishing Tradition: Cultural Forces and Literary History" and "Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment." 2003 256 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3720-7 Cloth $45.00s 29.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0168-0 Ebook $45.00s 29.50 World Rights Education Short copy: "A tour de force, implicitly summarizing and commenting on more than two millennia of arguments about the function of education."--Michael Berube, author of "The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies"

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 cafes 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.

"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 in nature. He proceeds, then, from the notion of text to culture. Just as the reading of the text is conditioned by irreducible political differences, so is the reading of culture. Finally, to illustrate and further develop his arguments, Cottom presents an extensive analysis of Great Expectations.

Cottom's materials range from academic jokes to King Lear, and the writers he discusses range from Kant to Derrida, from Freud to Basil Bernstein, from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bronislaw Malinowski to Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, and Stanley Fish. This study is especially concerned with the way "culture" and related terms, such as "context" and "norm," are part of a larger discourse in the contemporary humanities and social sciences - a discourse in which their effect is to repress recognition of important historical differences, conflicts, and possibilities. At the same time that he shows how difficult it is to get "beyond culture," he tries to indicate how interpretation may be turned into a more socially responsible practice.

Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of "Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation" (Minnesota, 1987) and "The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott."

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.