Camelia Elias (October 22, 1968) is an associate professor of American Studies at Roskilde University. She has made significant contributions to comparative studies, cultural studies, and American studies. Her book The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre [1] is the first history of the fragment to appear in English, and it is also the first attempt at producing a consistent taxonomy of literary and critical fragments. The fragments are categorised according to function, not author intention, and the study addresses a number of questions: What constitutes the fragment, when the fragment can only be defined a posteriori? Does the fragment begin on its own, or is it begun by others, writers and critics? Does it acquire a name of its own, or is it labelled by others