We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good , Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority. -- "Modern Language Quarterly"

" Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity. Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country? Drawing on a vast archive, Bruce Robbins seeks to give atrocity a literary history. With penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of atrocity as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus , David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas , Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames , and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat . What's achieved is a profound exploration of the longer trajectory of the emergence of abhorrence and indignation in the face of mass violence and a critical examination of the conditions for the emergence of cosmopolitanism-the ability to look at your own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger. In the presence of atrocity, what we want most is for someone to bear witness. What is it literature can do with atrocity that simple testimony cannot? Robbins answers by showing how literature goes beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. Meanwhile, venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins pursues the bold proposition that, in the midst of relentlessly repetitive slaughter and nameless, shapeless, irredeemable suffering, humanity's moral history might include a cosmopolitan arc"--