bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Death(s) of Mithridate(s): Racine and the Double Play of History
Authors: Goodkin Richard E.
Published: February 2007

In writing Mithridate, Racine manipulates his historical sources to put into play two names—Pharnace and Xipharès, Mithridate's sons—and two forms of death—pharmakon ‘poison’ and xiphos ‘sword’—and to explore the relation between the heroic individual (Mithridate) and the two forms of death that come to be associated with these two sons. The pharmakon takes on a double valence: as a vaccination against the world seen purely as the domain of betrayal and as a potential cure for the living death that constitutes heroism. It is emblematic of the hero's duplicity, which the heroic name attempts to cover up and which only the revelation of the hero's inner feelings—his love for Xipharès, the “sword” ‘xiphos’ that penetrates the protective layers of heroism and touches the mutable being hidden within—brings to light.
“L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”: Classical Tradition and Renaissance Mythography
Authors: Revard Stella P.
Published: February 2007

Although critics have remarked on the connection of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” with classical ode and hymn and have identified Mirth as one of the Graces, they have usually approached these poems as re-creative pieces and overlooked the way in which their classical form and the presence of patron goddesses influence their development and meaning. Both poems, however, follow the formula of classical ode and hymn in which a patron deity is invoked and asked for gifts proper for that deity to confer. Because Mirth is the Grace Euphrosyne and Melancholy, as I argue, is the Muse Urania, goddesses associated in antiquity and in the Renaissance with poetical inspiration, Allegro and Penseroso ask their respective goddesses for power to compose poetry. The poems unfold in turn as though the goddesses were infusing their power, Mirth inspiring a light comic vision and Melancholy an epic and tragic mood.
History and Romance, Sympathy and Uncertainty: The Moral of the Stones in Hawthorne's Marble Faun
Authors: Michael John
Published: February 2007

Hawthorne attempted not only to change his readers' understanding of historical events but also to undermine their complacency about historical understanding. In The Marble Faun, he questions the positivistic assumptions and complacent moralism of nineteenth-century historiography by representing sympathy and estrangement as principles of knowledge. The story of Kenyon and Hilda, Miriam, Donatello, and the model, set amid the ruins of Rome, indicates that both the truths of history and the truths of the human heart are produced in narratives that reflect the affective links between the tellers of tales and the objects described. For Hawthorne history and romance are not morally or epistemologically distinct. Sympathy does not solve the problem of historical knowledge but reposes it in a form more proper to the ambiguities of romance as Hawthorne used the genre than to the certainties of history as traditionally conceived.
James as Playwright
Authors: Rocha Mark William
Published: February 2007

Members of the association are invited to submit letters, typed and double-spaced, commenting on articles published in PMLA or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. Footnotes are discouraged, and letters of more than one thousand words will not be considered. Decision to publish and the right to edit are reserved to the editor. The authors of articles discussed will be invited to respond. It is a boon to Henry James scholarship to encounter a critic like Julie Rivkin, who values James's years in the theater as a playwright. Yet in reading “The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors” (101 [1986]: 819–31) I wasn't entirely clear about what this valuation was as the context of Rivkin's discussion.
Poetics against Itself: On the Self-Destruction of Modern Scientific Criticism
Authors: Seamon Roger
Published: February 2007

Modern critical theory is commonly thought of as a collection of diverse methods, schools, systems, and approaches. There is, however, a significant pattern in the diversity. This pattern is generated by the conflict between the widespread effort of twentieth-century theorists to make criticism scientific and the internal resistance to that effort presented by the hermeneutic impulse. The scientific tradition is characterized and unified by a set of common theoretical principles and by a common sequence of transformations that each school within it undergoes. The result of these transformations is that every proposed scientific model for criticism changes into an interpretive method and the project of scientific criticism is subverted.
Baudelaire's Theory of Practice: Ideology and Difference in “Les yeux des pauvres”
Authors: Friedman Geraldine
Published: February 2007

Baudelaire's poetry dramatizes the self-effacing quality of dominant discourse so well that until recently critics have failed to engage his interest in ideology. In the prose poem “Les yeux des pauvres,” the traces of that self-effacement allow us to read the ideological implications of what seem to be the text's purely aesthetic and ethical dimensions. By staging encounters with social and sexual difference, “Les yeux” challenges the principle of reflexivity underlying its announced aesthetic of the correspondences. In questioning the logic of the same that governs the mystified speaker's figuration and psychology, the text asks whether and how an Other can escape the confines of the official egalitarian ideology of post-1848 France, which tends to cast alterity in its own image.
Ibsen and Feminism
Authors: Gelber Michael Werth
Published: February 2007

In an age of mandarin critical theory, Joan Templeton ignores the basic principle of literary discussion: keep your eye on the text. In her essay on A Doll House (“The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen,” 104 [1989]: 28–40), she tells us much about Ibsen and his critics but little about his play. She should have followed, at the very least, the advice she enjoins on others and examined ‘“the hierarchical oppositions on which … [the work] relies‘” (34). Since “the moral center of A Doll House” in her view is the “conflict … between masculine and feminine,” Templeton should herself have “risen to … [the] challenge” (35, 34) and explained the many forms that the conflict takes.
“Say First What Cause”: Ricoeur and the Etiology of Evil inParadise Lost
Authors: Tanner John S.
Published: February 2007

Paradise Losttraces evil through three inceptions—Satanic, Adamic, and historical. Each origin seems to envision a different etiology: Satanic evil springs exclusively from the self in an instant of radical “Pelagian” freedom. Adamic evil emerges from the ambiguous interplay between self and seductive environment. Historical evil contaminates the whole race by means of necessary “Augustinian” inheritance. Ricoeur's analysis of the “Adamic Myth” and original sin clarifies etiological traditions Milton assimilates from Christian symbol, myth, and dogma. Through Ricoeur, we can identify the contrasting modalities of evil (inherited and imitative, physical and moral, ontological and existential, necessary and free, communal and individual) fused inParadise Lost.Ricoeur's work reveals Milton's text to be a subtly inclusive etiological myth, one whose complex genesis of evil recovers Scripture's fullness of meaning in a new mythopoesis.
Rape versus Mans/laughter: Hitchcock'sBlackmailand Feminist Interpretation
Authors: Modleski Tania
Published: February 2007

In film studies the work of Alfred Hitchcock has often been considered misogynist, and feminist critics have assumed that the female spectator can enjoy the films only by adopting the position of a masochist or the perspective of a man. An analysis ofBlackmail, however, reveals that women's relation to the text is much more complicated than has generally been supposed. The film is constructed as an elaborate joke on the heroine, who, as in the Freudian paradigm, is ultimately transformed into an object between two male subjects; nevertheless, because much of the film stresses her subjectivity, a reading that insists on woman's point of view and experience becomes possible. This reading, which activates the wordrape—a term seldom used in analytical discussions of the film's central episode—has serious implications for feminist critics in their struggle for interpretive truth.
“And I Mon Waxe Wod”: The Middle English “Foweles in the Frith”
Authors: Moser Thomas C.
Published: February 2007

The tiny lyric “Foweles in the Frith” may be the oldest surviving love song written in English. Endlessly anthologized, this late thirteenth-century poem has in recent years become the object of intermittent academic debate between an old school that views it as a secular love song and some later critics who see it as some sort of religious complaint. Actually, it could have been understood variously by a medieval audience. It works well as a simple spring love poem sung by a man about a woman, but there is also evidence for reading it as a lament for postlapsarian humanity or as a specifically Christological complaint. As one critic has noted, for a medieval exegete the precise relation between a text's littera and sensus was far from “automatic”; barring the discovery of an original poetic context for “Foweles,” any unitary solution to the lyric's meaning will probably remain elusive.
William Bradford's American Sublime
Authors: Laurence David
Published: February 2007

William Bradford's tableau of the Pilgrims' landing at Cape Cod supplies a conventional point of departure for American literature. Yet, in the customary ordering of literary history, the passage is doubly anomalous. Written in 1630, it presents, at least one hundred years too soon, an example of what Kant later called the dynamical sublime; and it anticipates, some two hundred years too soon, episodes from the canon of nineteenth-century American literature that criticism describes as characteristically American. The essay considers the formal motives and rhetorical coercions behind this double anomaly to show how the sublime, as it emerges in Bradford, signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The level of aggression Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal lends his writing a recognizably American bent. The passage shows us a scene of writing at once singular to Bradford and distinctly American.
Voice in The Prelude
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: February 2007

Members of the association are invited to submit letters, typed and double spaced, commenting on articles published in PMLA or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. Footnotes are discouraged, and letters of more than one thousand words will not be considered. Decision to publish and the right to edit are reserved to the editor, and the authors of articles discussed will be invited to respond.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading J. Douglas Kneale's “Wordsworth's Images of Language: Voice and Letter in The Prelude” (101 [1986]: 351–61), I would like to quarrel with one of its basic concepts and with a few passages. Kneale establishes a false dichotomy between “speaking” and the “engraved or inscribed or imprinted word” in that he ascribes “voice, audience, and hence the idea of a rhetor” (351) only to speaking. Using Bakhtin in opposition to Saussure and Derrida, I would argue that both the spoken and the written consist of utterances and that every utterance has voice as one of its characteristics. This voice is invested in the utterance by both the utterer and the hearer or reader. This false dichotomy leads to certain mistaken emphases, such as the concept that all writing is a “dead letter” in contrast to a “living voice” (356). A legal will exemplifies the living voice present within the “dead letter” of a text. And how much stronger is the voice of the Wordsworthian narrator within the written text of The Prelude each time a reader reads the poem and renders it once more an utterance invested with a voice that mingles Wordsworth's initial voicing with the reader's own conception of the narrator's voice and the dual perceptions of the utterance's meanings—the author's perception integral to the formation of the utterance and the reader's perception brought to that utterance from his or her own cultural context.
Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime
Authors: Redfield Marc W.
Published: February 2007

Theoretical accounts of the “postmodern” have recently invoked the aesthetic category of the sublime, but without attending to the rhetorical complexities that the category names and conceals. This essay opens by considering disturbances legible in Fredric Jameson's proposal of a postmodern sublime, then goes on to consider narratives by Thomas Pynchon that interrogate and allegorize the burdens of such a proposition. From the early short stories to V. and Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's texts develop increasingly complex stagings of the sublime, putting into question the psychological and epistemological consolations that these scenarios exist to afford.
Modern Mimology: The Dream of a Poetic Language
Authors: Genette Gerard , Morgan Thaïs E.
Published: February 2007

In Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie ‘Mimologics: A Voyage into Cratylusland,’ Gérard Genette introduces his readers to a new genre of discourse that cuts across disciplinary boundaries: mimologism. Beginning with the “founding text” in Plato's Cratylus, Genette explores the twists and turns of the debate between mimeticists and conventionalists over the origin and nature of language. The terms mimologism and Cratylism describe the position of Cratylus and all those in his wake—aestheticians, poets, and philosophers of language—who believe, “rightly or wrongly,” that “there must be a relation of reflective analogy (a relation of imitation) between ‘word’ and ‘thing,‘ that motivates, or justifies, the existence and the choice of the former.” At the same time, the “Cratylian desire” for perfect harmony between word and thing expresses itself unconsciously in “reveries,” or mimologics, in which the dreamer—whether Schlegel, Renan, Proust, or Saussure—muses on the mimetic potential of language (Genette 9).
Doing, Making, Meaning: Toward a Theory of Verbal Practice
Authors: Hernadi Paul
Published: February 2007

All discourse evolves in all three dimensions of verbal practice: doing, making, and meaning. While there are special links between speaking and action, between writing and creation or production, and between quasi-verbal thinking and signification, we should avoid reducing any instance or type of discourse to nothing but action, creation, or signification. The analogous triad of intersubjective culture, objective nature, and subjective identity likewise points to three complementary modes of existence: the social, the physicobiological, and the personal. At any given time, we tend to experience human beings, including ourselves, in just one mode: as players of socially assigned roles, as physically situated and genetically determined organisms, or as free and responsible selves. Yet we should not turn any of these ways of experiencing into a master doctrine designed to debunk the other two as mere delusions.
The Social and Historical Significance of the First English Literature Professorship in England
Authors: Court Franklin E.
Published: February 2007

The 1828 appointment of Thomas Dale to the Chair of English Language and Literature at London University (England's first) was also the first attempt, inculcated by the powerful Henry Brougham and University Council utilitarian allies, to institutionalize the university study of English literature. The “search committee” deliberations, the record of how Dale taught his courses, and the reasons for his premature resignation should be weighed in discussions of the ideological impact of formative nineteenth-century English literature programs on literary theory, on the socialization of literature, and on the development of the literary canon. The founding impulse behind Dale's appointment was social reform rather than ideological control or the academic investiture of culturally desiderated readers and was primarily the result of Brougham's desire to democratize literature and encourage national literacy by popularizing and legitimizing the “reading habit.”
The Genre and Place of the Intimations Ode
Authors: Sitterson Joseph C.
Published: February 2007

The Intimations Ode appears at the end of Wordsworth's collected poetry, and both the placement and the ending of the poem implicitly encourage us to expect an assured closure. I argue that Wordsworth deliberately suggests and then refuses such closure, that while the odic tradition generically warrants the attempt at closure, the Intimations Ode's refusal is unique. The overall temporal sequence that Wordsworth gives the poems and the frequency with which narratives and odes end groups of poems show that he consistently includes lyric in a larger narrative plot, an inclusion that also occurs within the Intimations Ode itself. Seeing Wordsworth's ode as a narrative and in relation to earlier English odes helps us understand that its uneasy coexistence of statement and uncertainty, which many critics consider its greatest weakness, is actually its greatest strength.
The Politics of Emerson's Man-Making Words
Authors: Leverenz David
Published: February 2007

Emerson's prose speaks to American expectations for becoming a man. His most forceful rhetoric unmans the manly types, particularly his censorious father, with an imperious nonchalance. Emerson's “man-making words” also transform the class conflicts that intensified the ideology of manhood from 1825 to 1850. Dreaming of a new elite, Emerson challenges social definitions of manhood and power. He does not, however, question the code that joins manhood with power at the expense of intimacy. When power fails him, as “Experience” recounts, his seeming candor masks an evasive note of depressive accusation directed at the women who take care of him. To emphasize Emerson's class and gender politics deflates his reputation somewhat. As “representative man” he represents only a liberal tradition that mystifies conflicts. Yet we can see him more clearly as a man, struggling with himself as well as with his time.
Castration, Speech Acts, and the Realist Difference: S/Z versus Sarrasine
Authors: Petrey Sandy
Published: February 2007

Roland Barthes's S/Z brilliantly details the way Balzac's Sarrasine undermines traditional understandings of realism's reference to the world. Considered through J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, however, Sarrasine appears not only to detach names from their referents but also to assert the irreproachable validity of every naming process sanctioned by the linguistic community in which it occurs. According to Austin, successful representation depends not on faithfulness to objective reality but on conformity to social conventions. Balzac's narrative illustrates Austin's point by depicting an unsexed castrato successively given opposite sexes in different communities. As exemplified in Sarrasine, the realist project insistently negates language's referential ground while just as insistently affirming its supreme representational authority.
Bernini and Roman Commedie Ridicolose
Authors: Cope Jackson I.
Published: February 2007

Gianlorenzo Bernini's single surviving playscript offers a satire on Bernini's own fame as a creator of scenic stage marvels as well as a satiric analysis of his younger painter-playwright rival from Naples, Salvator Rosa. But Bernini's play also raises general issues about the relations of amateurs and professionals in the leveling context of carnival, about the effect of printing on a subgenre of the improvisational scenarii of the commedia dell' arte as printed texts established a popular reading audience in seventeenth-century Rome, and about the concept of “popular” in the relations of class and genre implicit not only in Bernini's satire but in much of the seventeenth-century generic mixing that took place far outside the exemplary conditions of the Roman commedie ridicolose.
Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's “Clay”
Authors: Norris Margot
Published: February 2007

Traditional allegorical readings of Joyce's Dubliners story “Clay” have tended to collude with the story's rhetorical aim of aggrandizing the figure of Maria. The estimation of the “old maid” is indeed the story's crux, and the exigencies of desire compel the manipulative textual strategies that render the story ambiguous and produce conflicting interpretations. The story thereby achieves a fine dramatization of the precarious ontology of the old maid, a dramatization in which the fragmented reader (whose ear and eye are in conflict) participates as a principal actor.
Beowulfand the Varieties of Choice
Authors: Galloway Andrew
Published: February 2007

Much scholarship has explored the concept of wyrd ‘fate’ in Anglo-Saxon literature and thought; this essay examines the visions of human choice.Beowulfespecially presents choice in a wide range of spheres, from what we might call the spiritual and moral to what we might distinguish as the military and political. Indeed,Beowulfsynthesizes traditions of choice in Anglo-Saxon culture to present a unique perspective, tracing inner resolve to its causes and consequences in the social world. And so the essay surveys ideas and expressions of choice in Anglo-Saxon homiletic poetry and prose, heroic verse, and chronicles, examining the powers and paradoxes of each to outline a central yet little-studied aspect of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture.
Boris Eikhenbaum's Unfinished Work on Tolstoy: A Dialogue with Soviet History
Authors: Any Carol
Published: February 2007

The Russian formalist and Tolstoy scholar Boris Eikhenbaum is best known for his work in developing an intrinsic poetics. After his formalist period, however, Eikhenbaum turned, in his work on Tolstoy, to extrinsic approaches, initially privileging author and reader and later focusing on social context. This essay argues that Eikhenbaum's choice of particular extrinsic approaches was suggested, indirectly and unexpectedly, by Soviet political culture in the Stalin years. An examination of the relation between Eikhenbaum's literary theories and Soviet political reality is followed by an evaluation of Eikhenbaum's postformalist Tolstoy scholarship.
Taking the Pencil out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England
Authors: Dolan Frances E.
Published: February 2007

The categories of art and nature organize both elite defenses of poetry and popular discussions of women's use of cosmetics in early modern England. The two discourses, for all their diversity, can be seen to constitute a single debate that complexly associates the limits on creativity with the feminine. By tracing the shifting evaluations and interrelations of nature and art in the relevant texts and the changing ways in which the categories are gendered, I show how the identification of either as feminine often accompanies an insistence on constraint and impairment. When these discourses —whether they privilege art or nature—cast doubt on human creativity, they do so by allying it with female agency, which, while granted a role, is invariably constructed negatively. (FED)
Where Are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon
Authors: Friedman Ellen G.
Published: February 2007

Jean-François Lyotard has argued that the master narratives sustaining Western civilization in the past have been delegitimated and can no longer be presented. Although a sense of loss for these “missing contents” marks modernist and postmodernist literature, this sense seems more evident in texts written by men than in texts written by women. Women's texts that convey these missing contents do not look backward toward past master narratives. Rather, what is missing is the “not yet presented,” that which has not yet come into range. This pattern of bifurcation in modernism and postmodernism suggests that male texts are more readily adopted into the canon than female texts are because their nostalgic stance toward the past binds them, as female texts generally are not bound, to the long reach of the male Western narrative tradition. (EGF)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity
Authors: London Bette
Published: February 2007

While a strong feminist tradition has virtually revolutionized the reading of Frankenstein, giving the work's feminine subject new visibility and centrality, this approach has simultaneously obscured access to the text's theatrical display of masculinity. Yet an understanding of the deployment of the male body (in the novel and in the cultural construction of Mary Shelley) might challenge current understandings of both the gendering of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's place in the gendering of literary history. The spectacle of masculinity haunts late-nineteenth-century Shelleyan iconography and informs the gendered narratives that shape such influential studies as James Rieger's twentieth-century textual and biographical reconstructions of Frankenstein and its author. Given this history, a feminist critique can profit from a reading of Frankenstein's insistent exhibition of masculinity, for the male spectacle unfixes gender hierarchies, illuminating the fractures and contradictions underlying masculine authority. (BL)
B/O—Barthes's Text/O'Hara's Trick
Authors: Bredbeck Gregory W.
Published: February 2007

Barthes's principle of jouissance provides an erotics of reading that counters essentialist textuality. Yet much feminist inquiry has also found implicit phallocen-trism in the concept. I use the poetry and poetics of Frank O'Hara to reread Barthes's Pleasure of the Text. Gay male sexuality, I claim, offers a model that refuses to privilege the phallus. Moreover, O'Hara's poetics symbolically embraces the gay male body and demonstrates an absolute jouissance. I juxtapose O'Hara's poetry with an ironic myth of gay male sexuality, the “signifying clone.” The comparison shows that both this sexuality and O'Hara's poetry reconstruct “meaning” as an ex post facto decision—in contrast to traditional androcentric notions of meaning as an a priori truth. I suggest that the material experience of sexualities can provide a basis for a theorization that unwrites the homogenizing transcendence of the androcentric phallus. (GWB)
Epochal Allegory in Galdós'sTorquemada:The Ur-Text and the Episteme
Authors: Brownlow Jeanne P.
Published: February 2007

In the four-part novelTorquemada(1889-95), Galdos allegorizes the philosophical complexities of his age with a powerful negotiatory energy. Historical exigencies modify his miserly protagonist's figurai force by submitting the venerable sin of avarice to a secular revision that appropriately reflects the nineteenth-century positivist episteme. Since Dante'sDivine Comedyprovides the structural framework and the typological authority for the protagonist's successful social ascent, a sense of cognitive disjunction is inevitable. Comte's synthetic Religion of Humanity crosses with the medieval value system implied by Dante's Christian allegory, leaving the capitalist moneylender in a state of mortal anxiety and moral confusion. The epistemological dimension of Galdós's macroallegory equals in scope and signifying intensity the most famous twentieth-century models for allegorizing modern history —the archaeological, the tropic, the dialectical, the deconstructive—and underscores the role of positivism as a precursor of these oracular practices. (JPB)
Resurrection à la Russe: Tolstoy's The Living Corpse as Cultural Paradigm
Authors: Wachtel Andrew
Published: February 2007

This essay explores the sociocultural ramifications of a literary theme—fake suicide and resurrection—in Russia through an analysis of Tolstoy's drama The Living Corpse. Written in 1900, the work illustrates Tolstoy's theory that a play must have a central thematic “knot.” The knot Tolstoy chose was central not just for his play but for Russian culture in general. This knot engages four kinds of subtexts: it derives from a contemporary trial, it polemically attacks Chernyshevsky's notorious novel What Is to Be Done?, it marks a dialogue with the religious philosopher Fedorov, and it represents a development of ideas that Tolstoy had been exploring for almost fifty years. Subsequently, Tolstoy's reworking of the suicide-and-resurrection theme served as a point of departure for such twentieth-century authors as Mayakovsky, Erdman, Nabokov, and Bulgakov.
Leda and the Modernists
Authors: Sword Helen
Published: February 2007

Read as a fable of divine inspiration, the myth of Leda and the swan offers a model of creativity that is both compelling and problematic; while it affirms the visionary poet's privileged position as mediator between a divine force and humankind, it does so only by insisting on the artist's victimization and feminization. Apparently well aware of this paradox, Yeats, Rilke, Lawrence, and HD, in their revisionary accounts of the myth, all foreground the dialectical relation between passivity and authority— between spiritual annunciation and literary enunciation—that informs their own, and indeed any, visionary poetics. At the same time, however, these modernist poets resist a strong identification with Leda herself, disassociating themselves from her role as victim even while seeking to participate in her revelatory “knowledge” and “power.”
The Expressive Power of Language: On the Function of Rhetoric for Knowledge
Authors: Gadamer Hans-Georg , Krajewski Bruce
Published: February 2007

Recently, it seems, some of my colleagues have been trying to “save my soul” from such dishonest things as rhetoric! They think that hermeneutics is no noble pursuit and that we must be suspicious of rhetoric. I had to reply that rhetoric has been the basis of our social life since Plato rejected and contradicted the flattering abuse of rhetoric by the Sophists. He introduced dialectically founded rhetoric as in the Phaedrus, and rhetoric remained a noble art throughout antiquity. Yet one wonders why today everybody is not aware of it.(55)
Updating Karl Popper
Authors: Llosa Mario Vargas
Published: February 2007

TRUTH, FOR Karl Popper, is not discovered; it is invented. It is, therefore, always a provisional truth, which lasts only as long as it is not refuted. Truth is in the mind, in imagination and reason—not hidden like a treasure in the depths of matter or in the stellar abyss, waiting for the perspicacious explorer to unearth or detect it and to show it to the world like an imperishable goddess. Popper believes that a truth is fragile, continually under the drumfire of tests and experiments that heft it, that try to undermine it (to “falsify” it, according to his vocabulary) or to substitute it for another—a process that has generally happened and will inevitably continue to happen in the course of that vast pilgrimage of humanity through time that we call progress, civilization.
Vanity Fair through Plate Glass
Authors: Miller Andrew
Published: February 2007

Material goods in William Thackeray's work constantly circulate and incessantly dispirit, eliciting and frustrating the desires of characters. While these commodities present themselves as metonyms of enduring fulfillment and utopian pleasure, the images of contentment they provide are repeatedly undermined. This pattern, derived from Thackeray's own economic experience of loss, represents not a private obsession but the effects of the Victorian economy working through Thackeray's biography and his literary products. Vanity Fair, which represents this pattern most fully, derives its narrative energy from its characters' desires, and it suffers, as a result, an analogous disenchantment: the narrative itself, this essay argues, takes the form of the commodities Thackeray describes, and writer and reader experience the text in the way that the characters experience commodities.
The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance
Authors: Blount Marcellus
Published: February 2007

Recent cultural criticism and literary theory draw extensively on vernacular languages, performances, and rituals as paradigms for reading African American prose texts. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “An Ante-bellum Sermon” draws on the African American vernacular sermon and the performance of the black preacher to create a “preacherly text” that reconstructs the African American author's strategy for achieving authority with a racially divided audience. The conventions of dialect fashion a mask that evokes stereotypical minstrel images, so that Dunbar's preacher can subversively inscribe a political and racial discourse within the confines of the dominant nineteenth-century American popular culture. Dunbar's preacherly text is always double-voiced and disguised, taking full advantage of linguistic indeterminacy and using indirect verbal strategies to speak the unspeakable. In this way, “An Ante-bellum Sermon” provides us with a model for theorizing about the persisting rhetorical strategies of African American poetry.
Death and Vocation: Narrativizing Narrative Theory
Authors: Robbins Bruce
Published: February 2007

Literary critics mistrust periodization, that basic act of literary history, because they are suspicious of narrative. Where does this suspicion come from? And why has it arisen, paradoxically, together with the growing authority of the concept of narrative itself? This essay places the rise of narrative theory in the contexts of professionalism, decolonization, and the nineteenth-century novel. Gérard Genette's account of the triumph of “discourse” over “story” parallels the upward mobility of many nineteenth-century novelistic protagonists. Even denying that narrative theory can be narrativized, as Jonathan Culler does, has similarities to the vocational crisis in George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda.Each of these narratives functions as a rhetoric of professional legitimation, leading outward from some account of “the ‘storiness’ of the story”—the role, for example, of death for Walter Benjamin and Frank Kermode—to a sense of vocation anchored in the concerns of an extraprofessional public.
Virtue and Manners in Macpherson's Poems of Ossian
Authors: Potkay Adam
Published: February 2007

Macpherson's Poems of Ossian derived its extraordinary popularity from its power to resolve, in imaginary terms, the vexing ethical contradictions of the mid-eighteenth century. The poems effectively reconcile the age's nostalgia for the ancient polis ideal with its modern taste for polite manners. In the character of Fingal, the passionate fierceness of the citizen-warrior combines with the delicate affections fostered by domesticity, precommercial civic virtue joins with politesse, and the traditional attributes of masculinity merge with those of femininity. The abiding irony of Macpherson's text, however, is that its “feminization” of male heroes is offset by the dramatic elimination of all heroines, suggesting a certain male resentment toward women as sponsors of men's acquisition of manners.
Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain
Authors: Herzberger David K.
Published: February 2007

Historiography in Francoist Spain (1939-75) sought to affirm the morally and historically correct role of the regime within the flow of Spanish history. As an important vehicle of dissidence, the novel of memory stands in sharp contrast to Francoist history: it explores the past largely eschewed or appropriated by the regime and contests the so-called truths that Franco shaped through the discourse of myth. This essay examines the role of subjective memory as a challenge to historiography and discloses the narrative strategies novelists used to counter the government's myths. Unlike Francoist historiography, the novel of memory lays out history as a series of disruptions and undermines the referential illusion of truth and wholeness in our understanding of the past.
“Mountaigny Saith Prettily”: Bacon's French and the Essay
Authors: Hovey Kenneth Alan
Published: February 2007

In the 1620s the disgraced Francis Bacon turned increasingly to France for an audience. Yet his 1625 volume of essays, which offers wry homage to Montaigne, seeks to undermine the authority of France and particularly of Montaigne. In the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon opposed the unlimited skepticism of “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” and rejected the Democritean tone of the rest of Montaigne's essays. In “Of Truth,” the first of the 1625 essays, he restates these views more forcefully, covertly depicting Montaigne as a “jesting Pilate.” In “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” he voices more vigorously his opposition to the unlimited openness of Montaigne, an opposition first expressed in the De Augmentis (1623). Furthermore, he ascribes the extremism of Montaigne to French society in general and, in “Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates,” acclaims England as a land paradoxically “great” in its “middle” people. Still the French remain, he believes, more likely to listen.
Some Versions of Homer
Authors: Levine Suzanne Jill
Published: February 2007

“Las versiones homéricas” (“Some Versions of Homer”) was first published in 1932 in Discusión, a volume of essays reflecting Borges's principal preoccupations at the time: Argentine reality, Eastern philosophy, and literary and rhetorical issues. Doubtlessly belonging to the last category, “Some Versions of Homer” is the first of a series of pieces that question translation's marginal status and resituate the translator's activity at the center of literary discussion. These texts include “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939), which is one of Borges's first “ficciones” and which George Steiner, in After Babel, calls a summa of all translation theory (70). “The Translators of the 1001 Nights” (1935) and “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald” (1952) are among other noteworthy Borgesian discussions of the historical paradoxes and metaphysical mysteries of translation.
A Language Policy for Lancastrian England
Authors: Fisher John H.
Published: February 2007

Until after 1400 the official language of England was French. Colloquial English began to be used in court circles in the fourteenth century, but government and culture continued to be carried on in French and Latin until the advent of the Lancastrian administration of Henry IV and V, who reigned 1399–1422. Historians of the language have not made a connection between this political development and the introduction of writing in English, but the interest of Henry IV and V in promoting English is demonstrable. Immediately after 1400 there was an acceleration of publishing in English. The kings and their ministers, especially Henry Beaufort and Thomas Chaucer, may have commissioned the publication of the writings of Gower and Chaucer and the compositions of Lydgate and Hoccleve as a means toward achieving the sort of prestige for English that the English public had previously accorded only to French.
Hunting the Fox: Equivocation and Authorial Duplicity in The Prince
Authors: Fallon Stephen M.
Published: February 2007

Machiavelli's chapter on fortuna, which distills the teachings of The Prince, promises success to the prince who will adapt to the times. But when Machiavelli adds that one can never adapt, he implicitly withdraws the promise and leaves the prince naked before fortune. While others view this chapter as the shoal on which the text's optimistic teaching runs aground, I argue that the failure is strategic; like Machiavelli's anomalous treatment of Cesare Borgia, it points to the coherence underlying an apparently inconsistent text. In appropriately Machiavellian fashion, the work is not, as it purports to be, a handbook on princely success. Instead, it represents a characteristically audacious attempt to reconcile self-serving aims: to secure the author employment, to spur the Medici on to the task of unifying Italy, and, paradoxically, to draw his prospective employers and the potential instruments of Italian glory—once they have served his threefold purpose—to their ruin.
A 1951 Dialogue on Interpretation: Emil Staiger, Martin Heidegger, Leo Spitzer
Authors: Staiger Emil
Published: February 2007

THE ART of interpreting literary works written in German is not an accomplishment for which contemporary literary critics can claim a monopoly; it is an old field, older than formal German literary criticism itself. Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schiller in his letters about Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe in many reviews, Herder and Lessing in a number of articles produced interpretations of great sensitivity, often using methods that might now be excusably mistaken as modern. Dilthey, Scherer, Haym, and Hehn were also masters in this area, although they themselves might have had different notions about this characterization of their work. There is probably no literary historian of importance who did not address the problem that engages us. To be sure, as a scientific movement with all the usual polemics and the programmatic formulations, interpretation—that is, intrinsic text criticism, the criticism of style—began to assert itself only ten to fifteen years ago. Not until recently has it become clear that the investigator is to be concerned exclusively with the word of the poet and is to attend solely to what is present in language. Biography, for example, is outside the domain of his work. Life is not concerned with art, as Goethe believed and wanted others to believe. Under no circumstances is a poem to be interpreted by the use of biographical data. Similarly, the personality of the poet is also without interest for the philologist who takes his own role seriously; it is psychology that occupies itself with the puzzle of art's occurrence. No less does Geistesgeschichte miss the goal: it surrenders the literary work of art to the philosophers and then only sees what any thinker understands much better than any poet does. The positivist, who inquires about the difference between what is inherited and what is learned, misuses the scientific law of causality and appears to forget that creativity, precisely because it is creative, can never be deduced. Overall, then, the nature and distinctive value of the poetic world are slighted. Only the critic who interprets without looking to the right or to the left and especially not behind the poem does the problem full justice and maintains the integrity of the science of German literary studies.
Heldris de Cornuälle's Roman de Silence and the Feudal Politics of Lineage
Authors: Kinoshita Sharon
Published: February 2007

The thirteenth-century French text Le roman de Silence is the story of a count's daughter, Silence, brought up as a boy because the king has prohibited female inheritance. Whereas previous readings emphasize the gender politics of the heroine's success as a male and the explicit thematization of issues of textuality, I focus instead on the work's representation of the feudal institutions of marriage, lineage, and the transmission of property. Under the cover of Silence's cross-dressing and refeminization, the text renegotiates the way bodies mattered in the thirteenth-century imaginary, redefining the function of the medieval nobility as genealogical reproduction rather than military service. While the story of the protagonist's parents euphemizes this politics of lineage, by the end of the tale the king's only recourse is Silence.
Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural inBeloved
Authors: Barnett Pamela E.
Published: February 2007

The title character in Toni Morrison'sBelovedembodies the history and memory of rape. In fact, her supernatural form is the shape-shifting witch, derived by African Americans from the succubus, a female rapist and nightmare figure of European myth. Beloved functions like a traumatic, repetitive nightmare: in addition to representing characters' repressed memories of rape, she attacks Sethe and Paul D. Morrison also uses the succubus figure to represent the effects of institutionalized rape during slavery. Beloved drains Sethe of vitality and Paul D of semen, and these violations represent dehumanization and commodified reproduction. Finally, by portraying a female rapist figure and a male rape victim, Morrison foregrounds race, rather than gender, as the crucial category determining the domination or rape of her African American characters.
Money, Desire, and History in Eduardo Mendoza's City of Marvels
Authors: Resina Joan Ramon
Published: February 2007

Eduardo Mendoza's City of Marvels recuperates the historical novel while subjecting it to the conventions of romance. These generic strategies relate to the manifest self-made man's rise to economic might between the two Barcelona World's Fairs and Barcelona's development as a modern metropolis—and to a later celebration: the 1992 Olympic Games. The depiction of the adventures of capital and the production of marvels responds to the bourgeoisie's role in Spain's modernization and to money's mediating function as a symbol of desire. The accomplishment of marvels involves the conquest of time and the substitution of illusory timelessness for historical contingencies. Timelessness mediated by money negates history through the production of ersatz historical images, which reinscribe an idealized past as the object of desire. A restoration—the figurative replication of historical events—is the response to nostalgia for a missed historical opportunity by a subject seeking myth's illusory power.
Conversations with Bakhtin
Authors: Bocharov Sergey , Liapunov Vadim
Published: February 2007

In the summer of 1961, three brilliant young scholars at the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow set out by train to see Bakhtin for the first time, in the far-off provincial town of Saransk, where he taught Russian and foreign literatures at the University of Mordovia (until declining health forced him to retire in August 1961). The three devoted admirers were Sergey Georgyevich Bocharov (the author of the following article), Georgy Dmitryevich Gachev, and Vadim Valeryanovich Kozhinov (the enterprising and resourceful leader of the group).
Racine, Laurent, and the Palais à Volonté
Authors: Herzel Roger W.
Published: February 2007

It is generally believed that the appearance of Racine's stage never varied, that all tragedies performed in seventeenth-century Paris were staged in a neutral, anonymous setting known as the “palais à volonté.” However, an inventory of stage settings kept by Michel Laurent, the décorateur at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where Racine's plays were first performed, shows that Racine, like Molière but unlike most other authors of tragedy, demanded visual backgrounds that were specific and appropriate to the action of the plays. Abstract and universal decors indeed had a place in the seventeenth-century theater, and they became common after Racine's retirement, but they were used for practical reasons that have little to do with the modern conception of “classicism.”
Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men: The Abjection of Feminine Imagination in Lessing's Laokoon
Authors: Gustafson Susan E.
Published: February 2007

In his Laokoon essay, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing concludes that “[b]ei uns scheinet sich die zarte Einbildungskraft der Mütter nur in Ungeheuern zu äuβern” ‘in modern times the susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself solely in monsters.‘ In contrast, masculine imagination yields beautiful statues, beautiful men, and subsequently harmonious cultures. The idealization of classical sculpture displaces the generative power of the mother, who, if not totally impotent, is the source of the fragmented, deformed body. The Laokoon text incorporates and abjects the fragmented body of the woman. It is ironic that she represents both the void and the only object capable of filling the subjective vacuum. Stable masculine subjectivity is contingent on the abjection of woman and yet unattainable without her recovery. Accordingly, the Laokoon is based on the abjection of the feminine while simultaneously stuffed full of fragments of the woman's body and imagination. Lessing's aesthetic project fosters the circumscription of feminine imagination by the myth of the unifying function of masculine fantasy.