As a Russian saying goes, the new is just the well-forgotten old. Let us look at a relatively current debate on universalism. A case in point is Judith Butler's contribution “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism” in her exchange with Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek entitled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Verso, 2000). Traditionally conceived as a pure tool of white supremacy and colonial domination, u...

I was talking about Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis to a bunch of smart young Comp Lit graduate students this morning. My copy of Mimesis is embarrassingly old: bought used in Nashville, circa 1975, it was probably printed around ten years earlier than that. Attention collectors: it has the green geometric border and the tan details on matte paper, in the smaller trade paperback size. My students had bought the current edition, a good bit taller, wid...

Nipping at the heels of S Shirazi's review of canvas sneakers, and mine of my new flat-screen television, I offer here another product review for your instruction and delight: books of theory I taught in my undergraduate comparative literature class this quarter. The mode of consumption to which this product review refers is, then, a pedagogical one. I have rated each book in three categories: Difficulty (10 is Heidegger, 1 the Cathy comic str...

Growing up, the reference section of our home library (underneath all the golden books, to the left of my mother’s Rex Stout collection) consisted of a globe that greatly confused me (I once asked an older cousin what the “USSR” was, and he shrugged his shoulders at me) and a set of encyclopedias pre-dating my mother’s birth. In 5th grade, working on a report on aviation, I opened up one of the encyclopedias and found out that, one day, man ho...