Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, providing a fresh assessment of American exceptionalism and the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush adm...

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum interrogates the polyvalent role that American exceptionalism continues to play after 9/11. Whereas American exceptionalism is often construed as a discredited Cold War–era belief structure, Spanos persuasively demonstrates how it operationalizes an apparatus of biopolitical capture that saturates the American body politic down to its capillaries.The exceptionalism that Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum renders starkly visible is not a corrigible...

In The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, one of America’s most distinguished critics reexamines Melville’s monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In Moby-Dick—a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication—William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "New Americanist" critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon establishe...

This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world’s population has been transformed into a society of refugees and émigrés seeking –indeed, demanding– an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II—and especially after 9/11— it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author’s journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bo...

Assesses the limits and possibilities of humanism for engaging with issues of pressing political and cultural concern.In his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos critiqued the traditional Western concept of humanism, arguing that its origins are to be found not in ancient Greece's love of truth and wisdom, but in the Roman imperial era, when those Greek values were adapted in the service of imperialism on a deeply rooted, metap...

Critics predominantly view Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor as a “testament of acceptance,” the work of a man who had become politically conservative in his last years. William V. Spanos disagrees, arguing that the novella was not only a politically radical critique of American exceptionalism but also an eerie preview of the state of exception employed, most recently, by the George W. Bush administration in the post–9/11 War on Terror.While Billy Budd, Sailor ...