Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance is a tremendous and erudite book, but its argument is breathtakingly simple. Relevance is, roughly, the idea that things become important depending on the context in which they are apprehended. Over the course of the nineteenth century, U.S. artists, writers, and intellectuals worked out this definition of relevance and made it, well, relevant. In the book’s introduction, Tamarkin quickly establishes the historical stakes of this study: “No one thought about relevance and irrelevance before the nineteenth century aside from their limited use in Scottish law for determining evidence or pleading a case” (p. 5). At first blush, this seems impossible: how could relevance be a new idea? Across ten brilliant chapters, Tamarkin more than makes the case that the idea of relevance is made new and vital in the nineteenth century.
The root of the word “relevance” is “to...