A novel fusing of multiple approaches and range of examples exploring the dimensions, objects, and import of aesthetic encounters.

Examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have drawn on and debated the validity of Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.

Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.

Compares life today in the German Black Forest with Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond.

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

Probing reassessment of the relation between Celan's poetry and Heidegger's thought.