What and where and who is Europe? This unique collection contends that Europe cannot be defined as simply a particular geographic location or a group of citizens who inhabit the same place and share a culture. Instead, Europe is a question to be answered by the teachers and students who study it. A collaborative and multidisciplinary collection, Engaging Europe explores Europe through history, literature, philosophy, music, and ethical narratives. A set of imaginative contributors investigates European identity through a variety of cases, including Greece and Rome, the Bible, the Enlightenment, and the Shoah. Scholars of literature, history, and classics, as well as a composer, grapple with students' doubts about Europe's future relevance. The complexity of the topic leads to creativity in each chapter, from a musical composition in words to poetry to a dialogue between Baudelaire and Adam Smith. Engaging Europe is a major part of an experiment that hopes to find more intellectually exciting ways to teach Europe to students in American higher education. Contributions by: Evlyn Gould, Joseph Krause, Robert Kyr, Massimo Lollini, Alexander B. Murphy, John Nicols, Steven Shankman, George J. Sheridan Jr., and Malcolm Wilson

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer, spent twelve years from 1894 to 1906, in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. Amidst the dramatic and shifting revelations of what would come to be known throughout the world as the Dreyfus Affair, four influential authors reassessed their moral convictions on the civic questions posed by this abuse. Emile Zola, Maurice Barres, Bernard Lazare, and Marcel Proust offered fictive articulations of response to these questions. Among them, national citizenship and the roles of secularism and public education, as well as tolerance of Jews and other immigrants to France, loom largest. The four authors considered dilemmas still unresolved in the modern democratic cultures of Europe today. Since the Dreyfus Affair coincided with Europe's first efforts to design legislation that would separate religions and states, moreover, the writers in effect were teaching readers to negotiate individual desire and social purpose and to assess their own values as they and we all weather the winds of change blowing from Dreyfus.

" The] ongoing proliferation of new versions of "Carmen" presents an ideal opportunity to study relationships between literature and the performing arts. "The Fate of Carmen" investigates these relationships, exploring in particular how and why certain literary texts appear to renew their own textual practices in modes of expression which are not uniquely verbal"-- "from the Introduction"

Beginning with Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella, Carmen has been the subject of countless portrayals--from Bizet's 1874 opera, to various dramatic, dance, and musical renditions, to the films of De Mille, Chaplin, Lubitsch, the Marx Brothers, Preminger, Brooks, Godard, Rossi, and Saura. In "The Fate of Carmen," Evlyn Gould offers a comparative study of the power and variability of this modern myth through readings that examine the cultural dilemmas posed by the story. Exploring a range of competing representations, Gould asks whether Carmen is a dangerous "femme fatale," a liberated woman, or, as Nietzsche saw her, a warrior in the vanguard of the battle between the sexes.