Apropos of Something

“Apropos of Something is a phenomenal achievement—lucid, urgent, and rampantly intelligent. Tamarkin’s readings of art and literature emerge, like a leaping trout in a Winslow Homer painting, from the ground of careful philosophical explication to capture that feeling of surprise when we truly pay attention to something. Tamarkin does not simply analyze; she teaches us how to see. As a contribution to intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetic criticism, and theories of reading, this book possesses an Emersonian power to realize one of our great abstractions.” * Gavin Jones, author of 'Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity' *
“Elisa Tamarkin shows what we do when we think the world, or the world thinks us—when an object separates from the slurry of general impressions and becomes important, singular, and relevant: standing out like Poe’s raven amid forgettable furnishings. A marvelous study of patterns of thought in American culture.” * Alexander Nemerov, author of "Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York" *
“Apropos of Something summons the work of mostly major American thinkers from the nineteenth century, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. It thus tells a story of how something that was overlooked on the grounds of its insignificance comes to occupy the center of attention. But that story, told by Tamarkin with impressive erudition, does more than simply make us see the American intellectual tradition in a new light, as preoccupied with questions of the minor, disregarded and insignificant, rather than the exceptional, central, and powerful. In reconstructing how attention can come to refocus on what has escaped it, her argument also becomes a remarkable theory of aesthetic perception in its own right. Its major and far-reaching proposition is that, in its very nature, aesthetic perception is profoundly ethical; for it is nothing other than a practice of saving and elevating what is weak, fragile, and frail.” * Branka Arsic, author of 'Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau' *
"A beautifully written account of the development of the concept of 'relevance' in nineteenth-century Anglo American thought and art. . . . Tamarkin has all sorts of insightful things to say about attention and 'attentional communities.'" -- Ben Lerner * The Paris Review *
"This is a learned and deeply researched book that establishes continuities across an extraordinary variety of materials through careful acts of interpretation, and yet it is also an exploratory essay that does not disguise the role of fortuitousness in assembling its archive... This book is as much a writer’s achievement as a scholar’s, and it builds a mind-expanding argument for why this should be so." * Critical Inquiry *