What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations. This is the argument of "Through Other Continents", Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive - [...]
Writers on human dignity roughly divide between those who stress the social origins of this concept and its role in marking rank and hierarchy, and those who follow Kant in grounding dignity in an abstract and idealized philosophical conception of human beings. In these lectures, Jeremy Waldron cont[...]