Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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
Trade ReviewTaking a welcome interdisciplinary approach, this brief yet insightful book succeeds in its stated ambition of making readers contemplate 'rethinking a changing continent.' Highly recommended. * CHOICE *
This is a delightful volume. Fascinating, illuminating, always intelligent, it collects together a variety of thoughtful reflections that probe the 'Europe' of our history, science, imagination, hopes, fears, dreams, values, and, above all, of our minds. If it is true that one cannot go home again, apparently one can still return for the first time. -- Richard A. Cohen, author of Out of Control: Confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas
This lively, wide-ranging, splendid assortment of essays highlights Europe's grand intellectual traditions, its tragic passions and moral dramas. It casts European history and its future as both a deeply familiar and a de-familiarized, largely uncharted terrain—a space of the mind and a riddle to try to solve. -- Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
An interesting, novel, and stimulating scholarly contribution to our way of conceptualizing the European experience. -- Ulf Hedetoft, Aalborg University, Denmark
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Idea of Europe: A Collaborative Pedagogical Project Part I: What Is Europe? Chapter 2: A Story of Europe Chapter 3: The Idea of Europe, Levinas, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice Part II: Where Is Europe? Chapter 4: Relocating Europe Chapter 5: Idea of Rome, Idea of Europe Chapter 6: Provincia Gallia Narbonensis Part III: Testimony and Witness Chapter 7: Listening and the Art of Survival Chapter 8: Primo Levi's Testimony, or Philosophy between Poetry and Science Chapter 9: Europe in the Wake of the Shoah Part IV: Disciplines, Borders, Crossings Chapter 10: Autonomy and the Mistress Discipline in European Thought Chapter 11: Does Baudelaire Read Adam Smith? Chapter 12: On Charting Europeanness Further Reading: A Bibliographical Essay
