Bøker av Bruce Robbins

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Robbinstraces the emergence of a cosmopolitan postwar recognition of atrocity. Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country? Posing this cosmopolitan question to a vast archive of representations, Bruce Robbins seeks to give atrocity a literary history. In the presence of atrocity, what we want most is for someone to bear witness. What is it literature can do with atrocity that simple testimony cannot? As a work of literary history, the book answers that question, showing how literature goes beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. Meanwhile, as a work of literary history, the book uses the long history of representations of mass violence, from the Bible to Zadie Smith, to pursue the bold proposition that, in the midst of relentlessly repetitive slaughter and nameless, shapeless, irredeemable suffering, humanity's moral history might include a cosmopolitan arc. With penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of atrocity as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. What's achieved is a profound exploration of the longer trajectory of abhorrence and indignation and a critical examination of the conditions that have yielded the cosmopolitan postwar recognition of atrocity.

Arguing that intellectuals must critique bellicose U.S. nationalism, Bruce Robbins advocates cosmopolitanism in its traditional sense, as an elevation of loyalty to the good of humanity as a whole over loyalty to one's own nation.

We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good, Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority.

Reckoning with one's role in perpetuating systematic inequality, Bruce Robbins examines the implications of a humanitarianism in which the prosperous are the both the cause and the beneficiaries of the abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy.

Whether global culture is merely a pale and sinister reflection of capitalist globalization is among the questions addressed in this text on nationalism, culturalism and the role of intellectuals in the age of globalization.

A work of innovative literary and cultural history, The Servant''s Hand examines the representation of servants in nineteenth-century British fiction. Wandering in the margins of these texts that are not about them, servants are visible only as anachronistic appendages to their masters and as functions of traditional narrative form. Yet their persistence, Robbins argues, signals more than the absence of the "ordinary people" they are taken to represent. Robbins''s argument offers a new and distinctive approach to the literary analysis of class, while it also bodies forth a revisionist counterpolitics to the realist tradition from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), The Servant''s Hand is appearing for the first time in paperback.