bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Festive Theater, Restive Narrative inDon Quixote, Part 1
Authors: Farness Jay
Published: February 2007

An impromptu “festive theater” spreads its folkloric motives and themes throughout the action represented in the 1605Quixote, shedding light on the knight's vexed status as hero or fool and the often lamented eclipse of his adventures by interpolated subplots in the book's second half. In a manner similar to the one C. L. Barber ascribes to Shakespeare, Cervantes allows the saturnalian rule of misrule to govern the theatricalized, carnivalized interactions of characters. But in archly celebrating the sentimental, romantic closures of a renewed golden age, the Cervantine narrative conspicuously stages—and thereby arouses curiosity about—the mediated text's dependence on unmediated festival. This complicity of theater and text typifies the negotiations between the high culture of early modern Europe and the popular practices and traditions that saturate it.
Decentering Garcilaso: Herrera's Attack on the Canon
Authors: Navarrete Ignacio
Published: February 2007

Fernando de Herrera carefully crafts in hisAnotacionesa version of literary history that redefines the position of Garcilaso de la Vega, who had been seen as the only national poet worthy of imitation and as an aristocrat who attained an exemplary combination of literary and military glory. Herrera directs the reader's intertextual location of Garcilaso's poetry for polemical purposes: the profusion of source citations stresses Garcilaso's imitations and undermines the perception that the poems are acts ofsprezzatura. Herrera also inserts himself into the intertext through translations, quotations of his own poems, and the sheer quantity of annotations, which dwarfs the original texts. Furthermore, the overly learned citations have a countereffect, as the mass of contradictory information subverts the very notion of literary authority and thus of canonicity. Today theAnotacionesis read as promoting Garcilaso's canonization, but the responses of Herrera's earliest readers show they understood the work's subversive aims.
La tía Julia y el escribidor: The Writing Subject's Fantasy of Empowerment
Authors: Alonso Carlos J.
Published: February 2007

Mario Vargas Llosa'sLa tía Julia y el escribidorconsists of the rigorous alternation of two textual registers that nonetheless appear to have little in common. A careful reading reveals that these seemingly unrelated tracts can be taken jointly as a fantasy depicting the triumph of oedipal desire and configuring a tale of the author's coming into being. This fantasy provides an insight into the ideology of writing that underlies Vargas Llosa's entire textual production. The phantasmatic empowerment of the writing subject thus identified is linked finally to Vargas Llosa's widely disseminated pronouncements regarding economic and political agency in Latin America and to his equally influential views on the nature of the literary act.
Kissing the Pardoner
Authors: Burger Glenn
Published: February 2007

The conceptual dominance of the “heterosexual” in modern thinking has conditioned us, when we consider theCanterbury Tales, to think about the Pardoner and his audience in essentialist terms. The Pardoner and the Host's kiss, however, stills and defers attempts by the masculine gaze of Harry and the “redeemed” pilgrims to control what the Pardoner means. By returning meaning to circulation, the kiss provides an instance in which the Pardoner's body can do more than simply deconstruct categories or gesture elsewhere for meaning. Offering an alternative view of the Pardoner's supposed “destructive otherness,” this essay suggests that his true import lies not in his alterity but in his similarity to the other pilgrims and ultimately to us as readers—in short, that the Pardoner constitutes the “open secret” of the Canterbury project.
Epiphany and Browning: Character Made Manifest
Authors: Tucker Herbert F.
Published: February 2007

The fortunes of epiphany indicate both recent historical disparities within literary criticism and current cultural disparities between academic and popular discourse. The contextualist practice of Wordsworth and Joyce, in contrast to the purist theory that arose with the New Criticism, suggests that epiphany is a narrative device underscoring the historical and cultural construction of character. This conception is borne out by the original Epiphany, in Matthew, which manifests divine personality to human eyes through an episode of cultural difference and accommodation. Robert Browning's historicist poetry uses comparable but secular means of manifesting personality. In his dramatic monologues “Karshish,” “My Star,” and ‘“Transcendentalism,”’ epiphanic themes serve as measures of their speakers’ cultural construction. In discerning the relative differentiae that characterize such speakers, Browning's readers encounter their own relativity to interpretive conditions. As these examples imply, the modern literary epiphany ultimately effects the hermeneutic manifestation of the reader.
The Discipline of Deconstruction
Authors: Nealon Jeffrey T.
Published: February 2007

This essay reexamines the institutional rise and fall of deconstruction as a reading method in American literary criticism. Deconstruction was, to put it bluntly, commodified for an American market, simplified and watered down for use in how-to books that gave (and continue to give) a generation of literature students an overview of what was supposedly Derrida's work without paying corresponding attention to his texts. The deconstructive criticism of de Man and Hillis Miller is too often conflated with Derrida's thought—especially surrounding the question of undecidability—and this confusion misses essential questions that Derrida poses to any critical enterprise. For rhetorical deconstructive criticism, undecidability is the end revealed by reading, whereas for Derrida undecidability is only the first movement in a necessarily double economy. The essay concludes with a discussion of Derrida's own inscription within the institutional debate over deconstruction.
Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology
Authors: Kahn Victoria
Published: February 2007

This essay takes Habermas's early work as a point of departure for considering the place of humanism in contemporary debates about ideology and interested critical judgment. I argue that from the Renaissance to the present the humanist tradition demonstrates a continuity of reflection on the relation between knowledge and human interests. Habermas can be seen as the inheritor of those Renaissance humanists who argue for the possibility of political consensus based on a shared faculty of critical judgment. Machiavelli's critique of this consensual strain of humanism can offer contemporary critics another model of judgment, in which conflict and dissent are of paramount importance.
Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure
Authors: Winnett Susan
Published: February 2007

Despite the last decade's preoccupations with the pleasure of the text and sexual difference, few of the theories that have addressed the relation of narrative and pleasure have raised the issue of the difference between women's and men's reading pleasures. An oedipal model of narrative whose ideology of representation is derived from male sexuality not only places the female reader in the position of reading from a male point of view but also distorts our expectations for narratives written by women. Reconceiving such issues as incipience, repetition, and closure in terms of an experience of the female body helps to explain a “problematic” narrative such asFrankenstein. George Eliot'sRomolathematizes and thereby discredits the oedipal struggle that structures it. Both strategies remind us that the oedipal paradigm's claim to universality depends on its either “forgetting” or actively discrediting issues that would expose its arbitrariness and mitigate its pleasures.
Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics
Authors: Jeffreys Mark
Published: February 2007

Since the mid-1980s, lyric has been stigmatized by its association with the New Criticism. This circumstance raises the question whether an ideology can be assigned to a text on the basis of the text's identification with a particular genre or school of critical thought. Observing several recent critical constructions of the ideology of lyric, both hostile and sympathetic, I argue that the act of identifying lyric as either an oppositional genre or a reactionary one encourages oversimplification of the term's history and criticism and desensitizes readers to the ideological diversity of texts identified as lyrical.
The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, andJane Eyre
Authors: Marcus Sharon
Published: February 2007

Through the concept of abstraction I examine the relation between female subjectivity and writing inJane Eyre.In the novelabstractionmeans a lack of attention or a lapse of will, conditions that permit Jane to realize her wishes. Three other meanings of the term shed light onJane Eyreand on Charlotte Brontë's career. Through abstraction as a degree of relative disembodiment, both Jane and Brontë avoid becoming female spectacles, Jane by shifting from corporeal rebelliousness to an anonymous advertisement, Brontë by adopting an ungendered pseudonym. Abstraction also involves the alienation of the self into objects and texts, as when Jane and Brontë project themselves into their written products. Finally, abstraction entails the synthesis of the particular into the general: Jane rhetorically enters a professional body of governesses, and Brontë participates in the commercial literary marketplace.
Literary History and Sociology
Authors: Lanson Gustave , Rand Nicholas T.
Published: February 2007

Some anniversaries may seem to deserve to pass unnoticed. Why revive Gustave Lanson (1857-1934), the epitome of justly spurned literary positivism, on the centennial of the publication of his classic Histoire de la littérature française? Lanson's less than glorious reputation (established by 1913 and strengthened beyond correction after 1960) as the dogmatic sponsor of airless academic scholarship—which extinguished the life of literary works under the weight of idle historical fact, biographical and philological minutiae, and innumerable sources and influences—has not inspired a return of the sort that Novalis, August and Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, to cite only the German traditions, have enjoyed in recent years. Yet such a return could be productive and rewarding, for Lanson, a focal point of French criticism at the dawn of the twentieth century, crystallizes significant trends from the past and anticipates crucial tenets of German and American literary reception theory.
Gödel's Theorem and Postmodern Theory
Authors: Thomas David Wayne
Published: February 2007

In 1931 the mathematician Kurt Gödel published a treatise establishing the inherent incompleteness and inconsistency of that order of logical system used in Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell'sPrincipia Mathematica.Gödel's work has proved an attractive reference in diverse fields, particularly in postmodern literary-critical theory, which often seems intent on logical impasse and which sees a protodeconstructive corroboration in Gödel's theorem. Such analogizing is not without informative substance, but a closer look at the philosophical and mathematical theory surrounding Gödel's practice reveals that Gödelian undecidability emerges from a theoretical framework—a mathematical Platonism—with extensive metaphysical commitments regarding subject position and the objects of thought. Gödel's explorations of logical undecidability do not so much undermine logocentric suppositions as exploit them all the more consequentially. The analogy between Gödel's theorem and postmodern theory underscores the metaphysical operations of any criticism that finds in Gödel a “postmetaphysical” ally. (DWT)
Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne's “Homopoetics”
Authors: Blank Paula
Published: February 2007

If recent studies of homosexuality in Renaissance literature have helped to challenge the modern idea of an essential sexual identity, I aim to challenge the idea that homosexual desire has its source in sexual “sameness,” in an identity with another. Donne's “Sapho to Philaenis” participates in a common Renaissance discourse of likeness in love; his Sappho appeals to physical identity—the “sameness” of the bodies of two women—as the basis of an idealized passion. But in “Sapho to Philaenis” difference emerges as the only inviolable, invariable feature of erotic experience with another, and sameness is exposed as rhetorical rather than material, a contingency produced by Donne's comparative method. By comparing Sappho to Philaenis, Donne's poem suggests that sameness has to do not with the “nature” of homosexuality but with a cultural “homopoetics” that makes such likenesses and produces sexual identities.
The Decomposing Form of Joyce'sUlysses
Authors: Staten Henry
Published: February 2007

Every aspect of organic life, including sexuality and death, is comprehended inUlyssesas a moment or aspect of a general circulation whose primary figure is eating and the digestive process. But the digestive process is a form of decomposition, and in one senseUlyssesis a stomach or tomb in which language breaks down into its constituent units—ultimately, letters, the elements of an onomatopoeic notation for human speech.Ulyssesworks between the figure of onomatopoeia (as the limit of mimesis) and that of infidelity (as an image for the undermining of all ontological security at the sexual-gastronomic level) to reconceive mimesis as the isomorphism between two decompositional series, one involving language and the other the body.
“Kissing a Negress in the Dark”: Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf'sOrlando
Authors: Hovey Jaime
Published: February 2007

This essay questions the relation between national affiliation and other elements of identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality. Citing British newspaper stories and editorials of the 1920s that sexualized and pathologized the black man, I connect the fear these articles reflect to the fear of the white flapper. Joan Riviere's 1929 psychoanalytic study of femininity and masquerade, which explores the psychic parameters of gendered national belonging, frames my reading of Woolf's use of racial tropes inOrlando(1928), where they function within strategies for granting national belonging to the queerly gendered white Englishwoman. These strategies, which are part of the masquerade, include the narrator's satiric stance and the deployment of secret codes. Despite the text's ambivalences and ambiguities, Orlando's sexuality is finally domesticated by the racial and sexual terms of national belonging.
The Bonds of Patrimony: Cervantes and the New World
Authors: Fernández James D.
Published: February 2007

“El celoso extremeño” is one of the most widely read tales in Cervantes'sNovelas ejemplares.The story—a variation on the tale of the old man with a young bride—has been analyzed in the contexts of the Hispano-Arabic tradition (e.g., Américo Castro) and of the European humanist tradition (e.g., Alban Forcione). This essay attempts to develop a reading that identifies, and comes to terms with, the novella's numerous allusions to the Americas. Three neglected circumstances motivated this reading: “El celoso extremeño” takes place in Seville (the city that enjoyed an official monopoly on traffic between Spain and the New World in Cervantes's time), centers on the government of an isolated community of racially diverse women, and begins and ends with a character's departure for the Indies. The essay speculates that Spain's early colonial experience may have influenced and informed the debates concerning domestic social relations on the peninsula.
Violence and Rhetoric in Euripides's Hecuba
Authors: Kastely James L.
Published: February 2007

Euripides's Hecuba contributes to a theory of rhetoric by exploring the problems created for persuasion in a world where those in power are isolated from the pain of others. For Euripides, the threat to rhetoric resides not in active suppression of speech but in an audience's indifference to a speaker. He dramatizes this threat and the personal cost to a rhetor who would challenge the security of the powerful. The result is a tenuous recovery of a rhetoric that can contend with a world governed by force and chance.
An I for an Eye: “Spectral Persecution” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Authors: Williams Anne
Published: February 2007

Coleridge's theory of “creative Imagination” and his description of The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination” have usually encouraged critics to search for the work's unity. This endeavor represses the text's manifest disjunctions of form and content, as well as slighting Coleridge's use of Gothic conventions. Freudian commentary, while addressing The Rime's irrational, dreamlike qualities, cannot account for the poem's emphasis on linguistic inadequacy or for the horror of the female that pervades the Mariner's tale and his identity. Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and of how the subject “abjects” the maternal in attaining the symbolic suggest that The Rime narrates the unspeakable process through which the symbolic is reached. From this perspective The Rime describes the creation of imagination.
“Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You”: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy
Authors: Ramazani Jahan
Published: February 2007

Plath makes a major contribution to the development of the elegy with a series of poems mourning her father's death, even though they have seldom been read as elegies. More than any of her forebears, Plath intensifies the mourner's aggression toward the dead, dramatically expanding the boundaries of the genre. She summons a furious anger that most earlier elegists eschew in favor of pathos, reverence, or homosocial rivalry. At first deflecting rage inward in elegies of masochistic self-reproach, Plath dramatizes an ever more explosive grief. Although the “female elegy” has been defined as a “poem of connectedness,” Plath writes elegies of violent separation and rupture, rejecting the prostrate role assigned by literary and gender codes to the female mourner. She helps to remake the elegy for the twentieth century, shifting its psychic work from consolatory mourning to the violent, contradictory, and protracted work of melancholia.
Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Contemporary Japanese Literature
Authors: Treat John Whittier
Published: February 2007

Fukazawa Shichirō's 1960 short story “Furyū mutan” (“The Story of a Dream of Courtly Elegance”) humorously postulates an anarchic popular uprising that culminates in the execution of the Japanese imperial family. A right-wing terrorist attack on the story's publisher not only prompted an end to the depiction of the emperor in fiction but also may have caused the informal ban—still in force—against any overtly critical public discussion of the emperor system (tennō-sei). What distinguished “Furyū mutan” from earlier literary treatments of the emperor is its unique parody of his postwar, postdivine status as emblem of a democratic citizenry and, at the same time, of his cultural duties as principal poet of the nation. Fukazawa's carnivalesque mockery of imperial verse challenges the rhetoric of the emperor's ambiguous role as Japan's foremost symbol and reigning symbolist. The apparent price, however, has been the freedom of Japanese writers to raise such issues ever again.
Proust in the Tearoom
Authors: Hayes Jarrod
Published: February 2007

In French, the words tasse ‘teacup’ and
théière ‘teapot’ also denote a public rest
room where men have sex—a “tearoom” in English—and prendre le
thé ‘to have tea’ means “to have homosexual sex.” Most of
the narrative of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps
perdu is said to result from having tea with a madeleine.
This essay examines the possibility that the passage in which Charlus
engages in tearoom sex may imply that there are other such tea parties in
the novel. More broadly, I consider the importance of coded or secret
languages in the production of sexual knowledge. Revealing the tearoom's
secret opens up a Trojan horse (to use Monique Wittig's term) of
interpretive uncertainties in the novel, as well as a contagion of doubt
concerning heterosexual masculinity and male subjectivity.
“When I Acted Young Antinous”: Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theater
Authors: Barbour Richmond
Published: February 2007

Critics of sex and gender in Tudor-Stuart theater generally subordinate the polymorphic eroticism of Jonson' plays to the rigor of his finales. But his meantimes and endings are dialectically intervolved. Delay, embodied in boy actors, is vital to his dramaturgy. For example, wooing Celia, Volpone imagines that he is playing young Antinous, retarding phallic threat with feminized display. In Volpone's deferrals and sartorial excitements, early modern spectators beheld a pattern of their own pleasures, in which sexual and social lusts commingled. Proposing that Jonson was more flexible than many have supposed, I analyze the convergence of homo- and heteroerotic desire on the figure of the pretty youth. Arguing that Epicoene's versatile appeal illuminates the charms of boy actors, I suggest that female spectators may have enjoyed boys, and the female roles the boys performed, without disturbing men's territorial enjoyments. In this way boy actors were crucial to the construction of an erotic community in the playhouse.
Presidential Address 1993: Multiplicity and Mortality
Authors: Marks Elaine
Published: February 2007

The epigraph for this address, which sets both theme and tone, is the first tercet of a love sonnet by the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard:

Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma dame;

Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons,

Et tôt serons étendus sous la lame….

Time moves on, time moves on, madam;

Alas, not time, but we are moving on,

And soon will be stretched out beneath the stone….

Mesdames et messieurs, chers amis, chers collègues, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and colleagues, I had hoped that the various Canadian laws concerning the obligatory use of both French and English on commercial products, in official government documents, on street signs in the province of Ontario, and in some schools would carry over to the 109th convention of the Modern Language Association of America and, for the occasion, to the whole of North America. For instance, I would have welcomed the obligation to deliver my address in French and in English, not translating sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph but using both languages in individual sentences, so that my salutation this evening would have been “Mesdames and gentlemen, dear friends et chers collègues.”
On Yury Lotman
Authors: Kristeva Julia
Published: February 2007

When did the Berlin Wall come down? However much this event took us by surprise in the autumn of 1989—indeed, no one foresaw either its rapidity or its consequences—I believe that the fissures in the wall began to be clearly felt in the early 1960s. A few unknown scholars—thinkers expressing disturbing ideas in hermetic idioms—were regrouping, like a colony of ants, to carry out subversive labors. Too complex for the already nascent media culture, their work was, of course, invisible from Paris or New York; but the masters of the Kremlin were not unaware of its undermining effects.
Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie's “Introductory Discourse”
Authors: Henderson Andrea
Published: February 2007

In the preface to her first volume of plays, the Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie claims that one is naturally driven to classify persons into character types, and she argues that this classification should be based on the passions individuals express rather than the fashions they wear. Despite this anticonsumerist stance, however, Baillie's project is shaped by the logic of late-eighteenth-century consumerism: Baillie conceives of passions as items susceptible to inventory, display, and sale. Her interest in establishing a human taxonomy grounded in ostensibly natural and subtle discriminations of character allies her works with other popular consumer goods of the period, from clothing fashions to studies of physiognomy. Moreover, like the aesthetic of the picturesque, Baillie's aesthetic encodes a peculiarly consumerist form of desire, a desire that can never be satisfied because it aims at acquisition rather than possession. In Baillie, the feelings and desires on which modern subjectivity is founded do not spring from deep within but are formed by, and find their meaning in, the public world of the marketplace.
British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness
Authors: Cullingford Elizabeth Butler
Published: February 2007

Frank McGuinness'sCarthaginians(1988) uses the historical relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the contemporary struggles between Britain and the nationalist community in the North of Ireland. The play, an elegy for thirteen Irish civilians murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday (30 Jan. 1972) in Derry, draws subversive power from a trope that since the eighteenth century has focused imaginative Irish resistance to British colonial rule. I first explore the history and the gendering of the trope, from early English myths of Trojan descent and medieval Irish genealogies through eighteenth-century antiquarians and philologists, nineteenth-century novelists, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. I then examine poems from Seamus Heaney'sNorth, Brian Friel's playTranslations, and McGuinness'sCarthaginiansto show how the pressure of history has revitalized the Rome-Carthage trope, which functions as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality.
Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand
Authors: Rosenshield Gary
Published: February 2007

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.
Sorceresses, Love Magic, and the Inquisition of Linguistic Sorcery inCelestina
Authors: Valbuena Olga Lucía
Published: February 2007

In recent years critics have contested the traditional understanding of Celestina's “enchantment” of Melibea as diabolically assisted. Yet rhetorical, feminist, and poststructuralist readings have not explained Celestina's discursive practice in the wider context of other Spanish sorceresses of language. I argue that Celestina's protracted appeal to Melibea and allusion to a prayer or charm of Saint Apollonia correspond to the language and methods of other Spanish and New World sorceresses investigated by ecclesiastical courts and the Inquisition. I draw from unedited conquest-era documents to compare Celestina's “linguistic sorcery” with that of women who transformed Catholic prayers and narratives of saints' tortures into erotically charged love philters for subduing men. Like the women examined by inquisitors and inspectors (visitadores), Celestina, far from requiring diabolical intervention in her discursive practice, draws on the culture's language of submission as she explores the continuity between suffering and ecstasy.
“But One Expects That”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Shifting Light of Scholarship
Authors: Dock Julie Bates , Allen Daphne Ryan , Palais Jennifer , Tracy Kristen
Published: February 2007

When feminist critics of the 1970s rediscovered “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they constructed an interpretation of the story and the history of its publication and reception. Subsequent critics lent authority to an emerging set of accepted “facts”: nineteenth-century audiences read the tale as a ghost story rather than as a critique of the sexual politics of marriage; Gilman fought valiantly against hostility from the entrenched hierarchy of male editors who refused to publish her work; and irate male physicians censured the story once it appeared. By reexamining the documentary evidence on which those “facts” are based, we examine the role that ideology plays in gathering and interpreting evidence. Gilman's story serves as a fine but certainly not a unique example of how scholarship is as grounded in historical biases as the literature it seeks to illuminate.
A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and Evidence
Authors: Wilkinson James
Published: February 2007

Contemporary historians' definition of what constitutes historical evidence has expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s, but so have their doubts about the interpretation of evidence, especially for difficult and evanescent sources such as collective memory. As the ambitions of historical practice have challenged the limits of interpretation, the use of novel sources has necessitated recourse to “foundationalist” assumptions, without which errors in historical witnesses cannot be detected or evaluated.
Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative, and Desire inMiddlemarch
Authors: Rischin Abigail S.
Published: February 2007

Eliot'sMiddlemarchreveals the effective alliance among ekphrasis (a literary response to a visual work of art), narrative, and the portrayal of desire. The novel's richest example of this dynamic occurs in the Vatican Hall of Statues scene, when Will Ladislaw and his painter friend Naumann observe Dorothea poised beside a celebrated antique statue, “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra.” Capitalizing on this statue's history of mistaken identity, Eliot affirms the power of visual art for literary representation by using the statue in three important ways: as a catalyst for the birth of desire, as a prefiguration of the novel's romance plot (through narrative references to the myth of Ariadne), and as a vehicle for representing female eroticism, which the statue's long-standing association with Cleopatra underscores.
The Dialectic of Orality and Literacy: The Case of Book 4 of Augustine'sDe doctrina christiana
Authors: Schaeffer John D.
Published: February 2007

Some critics cite book 4 of Augustine'sDe doctrina Christianaas a source of the anti-rhetorical style of Renaissance English prose. However, such critics do not recognize that book 4 offers instruction in extemporaneous oral performance. Nor do contemporary critics note Augustine's pervasive orality, though a substantial critical literature addresses this fact. The relation of orality to literacy was complex in late antiquity, particularly as illiterates converted to Christianity, a text-based religion. Augustine's prescriptions can be seen to illustrate the development of “innerness” among Christians. Book 4 shows how Scripture reading, prayer, and style can be marshaled to produce extemporaneous oral performances that provoke interior religious experiences. Modern criticism of book 4 that views oralily and literacy as simple opposites and that privileges literacy can lead to misreading. As a document imbricated in the complex relation of literacy and oralily, however, book 4 makes a different kind of sense.
Telegraphic Realism: Henry James'sIn the Cage
Authors: Menke Richard
Published: February 2007

In setting his 1898 taleIn the Cagein a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of Victorian realism. WithIn the CageJames proves to be more alert than such predecessors not only to the social and technological mechanics of telegraphy but also to the significance of mediation—in telegraphy as well as in realist fiction. Analyzing the conjunction this essay calls “telegraphic realism” indicates the ways in which a medium's imaginative possibilities may change over time and suggests the connections between the histories of media and of literature.
Visual Thinking and the Picture Story inThe History of Henry Esmond
Authors: Fletcher Robert P.
Published: February 2007

This essay argues that Thackeray's unillustrated three-volume novelThe History of Henry Esmondis shaped by modes of perception and representation nascent in the visual culture of nineteenth-century England and epitomized in the comic strip. Through one of Thackeray's own picture stories, it first describes the ekphrastic basis of his narrative imagination and then contextualizes his visual thinking by relating his journalistic reflections on images in society to recent cultural histories of visual experience. Subsequently, the essay demonstrates thatHenry Esmond, a seemingly monumental historical novel, is structured by the fractured syntax of the comic picture story and that the picture story's revisionist impulse decenters the autobiographical subject, Henry Esmond, and highlights the heuristic function of his narrative. The argument concludes by revisiting Thackeray's meditations on the picture story, the railroad, and modernity, suggesting that his texts—both picture stories and this bildungsroman—foreground a transformative vision and thus reveal the contingency of subjectivity.
De Quincey's Crazy Body
Authors: Youngquist Paul
Published: February 2007

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition. The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” relates details of the philosopher's life and diet that corroborate this critique. Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality. From the opium eater's perspective, the beautiful and the sublime occur as effects, not of representation, but of incorporation, giving rise to the possibility of material thought. A specialized diet also challenges the norms of public medicine, such as those expressed in Thomas Beddoes's Hygiea, which grounds public health in private reflection and responsibility. De Quincey's Confessions affirms a subjectivity that is the effect of daily dosing.
Men and Coats; or, The Politics of the Dandiacal Body in Melville's “Benito Cereno”
Authors: Nixon Nicola
Published: February 2007

At the conclusion of “Benito Cereno” Herman Melville “elucidate[s]” a curious “item or two,” including Cereno's ultragentlemanly apparel. This return to the issue of Cereno's clothes reiterates the Yankee Delano's preoccupation with Cereno as a dandy, restaging Delano's tendency to focus unswervingly on the apparently complex markers of class superiority signaled by such genteel refinement—and, within the logic of that preoccupation, to ignore the seemingly transparent truth presented by the naked black body. Melville mobilizes the figure of the dandy. I suggest, to interrogate the Yankee's veneration of social form, a veneration at odds with the North's smug self-figuration in 1855 as homogeneously democratic and classless, as morally superior to a South reviled for its social inequalities and slaveholding. By orchestrating the encounter between Yankee and dandy, Melville maps a peculiarly northern political field, pointing to an obfuscatory rhetoric of “apparent symbol[s]” that articulates the slave only polemically and ignores him otherwise.
Four Views on Ethnicity
Authors: Hutcheon Linda , Bhabha Homi K. , Boyarin Daniel , Gölz Sabine I.
Published: February 2007

When I went from being a Bortolotti to being a Hutcheon, my social and cultural interactions within a predominantly Anglo-Saxon environment changed; my ethnic identity became encrypted, silenced, unless articulated by choice—a pointed lesson in the constructedness of concepts of ethnicity. Like me, Cathy (Notari) Davidson, Marianna (De Marco) Torgovnick, and Sandra (Mortaro) Gilbert are crypto-Italian teachers of English. What we do not share, however, is nationality: they are Italian American, while I am Italian Canadian. I therefore may have a somewhat different experience of ethnicity and its encrypting.
Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other
Authors: Attridge Derek
Published: February 2007

Innovation in cultural practice is both an act and an event whereby the other is brought into and comes into being. I call the private aspect of this processcreationand the public aspect, by which innovation gives rise to further innovation,invention.A related phenomenon is the responsible encounter with the human other; in both, the subject's modes of understanding undergo change as the subject registers and affirms the singularity of the other. A further domain to which this account applies is reading, another act-event in which a responsible response entails an innovative affirmation of innovation. Responding to the literary work involves performing its verbal forms. The responsibility invoked in all these instances is responsibilityforrather thanto, since the other is brought into existence (and transformed from other to same) by the subject's response. The ethical obligation implied here is, as Levinas argues, prior to any philosophical account we could give of it.
Aesthetics and Ethics in Gadamer, Levinas, and Romanticism: Problems of Phronesis and Techne
Authors: Haney David P.
Published: February 2007

Aristotle's distinction between phronesis, or ethical knowledge, and techne, or productive knowledge, is relevant both to Romantic and to modern discussions of the relations between aesthetic and ethical experience. Wordsworth and Coleridge try in different ways to negotiate between the two kinds of knowledge, advocating the ethical force of poetry while acknowledging its status as techne; in contrast, modern criticism tends either to accept the ubiquity of techne or to revive phronesis while undervaluing the tension between the two. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas provide a way to link phronesis to aesthetic autonomy through the means-end unity of phronesis and the ethical claim of the other, although Gadamer overemphasizes the autonomy of the artwork and Levinas under-emphasizes the ethical possibilities of the aesthetic. Wordsworth and Coleridge present the ethical encounter with the other as in tension with techne, but they also show that tension itself to be ethically significant.
Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison, Burke, and Emerson
Authors: Albrecht James M.
Published: February 2007

The allusions to Emerson in Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Manare usually read as a scathing indictment of Emersonian individualism. Yet even as Ellison satirizes the Emerson canonized in Lewis Mumford'sThe Golden Day, the career of Ellison's narrator extends a pragmatic tradition of individualism leading from Emerson through Kenneth Burke. Though often accused of ignoring tragic limits, Emerson describes the self as existing only within the material limitations of culture—and thus as always socially implicated and indebted. While Emerson claims that the pursuit of one's own most vital work is a moral end that fulfills one's social duties, Burke and Ellison demand more complex scrutiny of one's ethical connections to others. Burke insists that the social context of our individual acts requires a comic ethics of identification: we must identify with others across social conflicts and recognize how our individual acts may be identified with those conflicts. Ellison's narrator progresses toward this Burkean ethic: in his final confrontation with Mr. Norton (who has recommended Emerson to him), the narrator adopts a mode of communication that asserts the democratic connection of all Americans at the same time that it confronts the systemic discrimination that separates them.
Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics: Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection
Authors: Butterfield Bradley
Published: February 2007

Like today's masses, the characters in J. G. Ballard's Crash are fascinated by what Jean Baudrillard calls the accident, especially when it involves the death of a celebrity. Ballard's characters, however, reenact their accidents as sexual rituals of a marriage between technology and death that are beyond the realm of moral judgment, making Crash sci-fi, hypothetical, unrealistic. Calling Crash “the first great novel of the universe of simulation,” Jean Baudrillard has drawn heavy criticism for missing the alleged moral point, both in Crash and in the still-real world. As a fiction writer, Ballard is given a wide moral berth, but when Baudrillard's theory turns sci-fi, the question of ethical boundaries is broached, and leniency is less likely. In defense of Baudrillard, I read him, like Ballard, in the Nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which I argue is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.
Un Amour de Hahn:Of Literature and Life
Authors: Mehlman Jeffrey
Published: February 2007

Where has french theory gone? But what was “french theory”? A misnomer for the vicissitudes of a certain number of French readings of German-language texts once they arrived on North American shores? Or was it, at its most succinct, the fate of reading itself as mediated by all that attracted a half century of French thinkers to confront the limit case of Mallarmé? It was the latter proposition that attracted me inLiterary Debate: Texts and Contexts: Mallarmé wending his way through postwar French thought like a radioactive tracer through the tissue of an organism. If “theory”—or philosophy—in France had in some sense gone “literary,” it was, it seemed to me, in and through a relation to the writing of Mallarmé. But our interim,PMLA's question suggests, is in some ways a posttheoretical one. What that probably means is that with the passing of certain major figures from the “theoretical scene,” we are living in a period in which the most revealing genre might well be literary biography: a dogged and occasionally humbling reality check against the headier excesses of speculation. It was with that thought in mind that I turned to Jean-Luc Steinmetz's recent biography of Mallarmé and ended up spinning this fable—of literature and life—around the single greatest surprise his work afforded me. In its effort to assemble an array of peripheral data into what Roger Caillois used to call a “cohérence aventureuse,” what follows, I would suggest, bears an essential relation to what is still, in some quarters, called theory.
The “Three Ages” of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come
Authors: Andrew Dudley
Published: February 2007

The october 1999 job list prepared by the society for cinema studies has just appeared: fifty-one teaching positions involving film. What does it mean that only ten of these are situated in designated film programs, while thirty-six are hosted by departments of literature, primarily English? It means, among other things, that departments of literature are redefining and deregulating themselves. They may have cautiously welcomed film for a half century but hardly at this scale: fifty-one open positions suggest hundreds of positions permanently in place and thousands of students studying this subject each year. The confidence the humanities shows in this field is shared by most of my students, who are younger than cinema studies and must sense it to be, if not august, at least well established, rather as English seemed when I majored in it and assumed it to be as old as England. However, any census of course catalogs reveals cinema's uncertain location and function from campus to campus, posing questions of general expectations and standards—indeed, putting in question the definition of cinema studies. Evidently universities want to offer film. Bravo! But in what manner and for what purpose? What “qualifies” the hundreds of applicants applying for these fifty-one positions? Where did they gain their expertise or self-confidence?
Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic
Authors: Gamer Michael
Published: February 2007

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.
Freud's Uncanny Narratives
Authors: Lydenberg Robin
Published: February 2007

Critics who work at the intersection of psychoanalysis and narratology frequently examine Freud's “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). A close reading of the anecdotes interpolated in Freud's essay suggests that while narrative is often motivated by an effort to contain charged material, something always escapes that control, threatening to proliferate without stopping. The dual containing and dispersing effect of narrative is reflected in Freud's doubling of himself as narrator and protagonist; in his ambivalence toward women, the maternal, and creativity; and in his attraction and resistance to literature. Although Freud often appears to reduce literature to an illustration of psychoanalytic laws, the subversive literariness of language and the instability of the subject emerge dramatically in the uncanniness of his own narratives.
The Making of the English Canon
Authors: Kramnick Jonathan Brody
Published: February 2007

This essay discusses the origins of the literary canon in mid-eighteenth-century England, looking in particular at the changing reputations of Shakespeare and Spenser. Situating the writing of English literary history within the context of the cultural market, print culture, and nationalism, I argue that the mid-century model of literary history both represents the dialectical outcome of previous decades of thinking through the problem of cultural change and puts in place the terms for the modern narrative of the literary canon. An earlier aesthetics of gendered and sociable refinement separated itself from a Gothic past later recovered as the singular moment of literary achievement. The Gothic account was then challenged by a rethinking of consumption as reading abstracted over time. Together, Gothichistoricismand abstract reading formed the antithetical basis on which critics established the modern canonical account of English literary history.