Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (Tamarkin Elisa)(Paperback)

A history of the idea of "relevance" since the nineteenth century in art, criticism, philosophy, logic, and social thought. Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, ignored, or lost becomes important and interesting. When so much makes claims to our attention every day, how do we decide what is most valuable right now? Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was an Anglo-American concept, derived from a word meaning to raise or lift up again, and also to give relief. It engaged major intellectual figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and the pragmatists--William James, Alain Locke, John Dewey, and F. C. S. Schiller--as well as a range of philosophers, phenomenologists, linguists, and sociologists.
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