Engaging Europe: Rethinking a Changing Continent

(Paperback)

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What 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 exciting ways to teach Europe to students in American higher education.

Contributions by: Evlyn Gould, Joseph Krause, Robert Kyr, Massimo Lollini, Alexander B. Murphy, John Nicols, Steven Shankman, George J. Sheridan Jr., and Malcolm Wilson

Reviews

Taking 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 Reviews *
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 terraina 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

Author Bio

Evlyn Gould is professor of Romance languages at the University of Oregon. George J. Sheridan Jr. is associate professor of history at the University of Oregon.