bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nature and Self-Love: A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's “Passion primitive”
Authors: MacCannell Juliet Flower
Published: February 2007

Rousseau opposed both traditional and modern (empiricist) thinking when he made self-love the cornerstone of his system. Other modes of thought treat self-consciousness as constituted primarily by temporal desire. Rousseau raises love, for him the suspension of desire, to a position of ontological primacy in regard to self-consciousness. Like Pascal, he throws the empirical existence of the self into radical question and finds it to be as insubstantial and empty a concept as the Western tradition has found it—from Ecclesiastes and Socrates on. Rousseau declines the moralistic reproof of the self, however, and emphasizes its insubstantiality as its one strength, although a fictional one. The self exists only in the mode of a hypothesis (the fictional “as if”); it is a failure at being. But to amour (and to pitié) it makes all the difference and is worthy of their support.
Plato's Four Furors and the Real Structure of Paradise Lost
Authors: Fixler Michael
Published: February 2007

The four invocations to the Muse in Paradise Lost signal the stages of a compositional process coordinating the levels of the poem's inspiration and overall design. Using in downward sequence the four inspirational “furors” Neoplatonism derived from Plato's Phaedrus, Milton calibrated each narrative stage of his work to the thematic range governing that inspirational level, while the entire progression of the poem expresses the structural significance of this scalar paradigm. Such techniques were used by Dante and others and by Milton himself in Lycidas. But in Paradise Lost the inspirational pattern, as the spatial axis governing the poem's descending and ascending movements, combines with the narrative movements of the poem's temporal axis to shape a particular form that Milton considered essential to every art dedicated to the highest good and final end implicit in the divine scheme. It is this “universal form” that both metaphysically and structurally underlies Paradise Lost.
Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey
Authors: Gilbert Sandra M.
Published: February 2007

Because the myth of origins that Milton articulates in Paradise Lost summarizes a long misogynistic tradition, literary women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf have recorded anxieties about his paradigmatic patriarchal poetry. To these readers, the principal story that Milton seems to tell is the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also the garden of poetry. Parallels and doublings implicit in this story, moreover, link Eve, the archetypal woman, with the unholy trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death. For female readers sensitive to such implications, Milton may be what Harold Bloom defines as a “great Inhibitor.” From Wollstonecraft to Woolf, however, women writers have allayed anxieties aroused by this poet, whom Woolf called “the first of the masculinists,” by rereading, misreading, and reinterpreting Paradise Lost.
The Structure of Meaning in Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo
Authors: Lansing Richard H.
Published: February 2007

When it first appeared Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) was criticized for lacking structural coherence and for including digressive and superfluous narrative material. Such an appraisal, however, does not stand up under analysis. In arranging the individual episodes of the plot Lampedusa twice relies on a sophisticated pattern of chiastic ordering to throw into prominence the novel's central themes and to reinforce symbolic associations. The patterns of concentric symmetry compensate for the effects of the intentionally static quality of a plot that consists more of a sequence of moods and meditations than of specific actions. Lampedusa plays down linear development and compels the reader to seek the novel's unity in its thematic and symbolic structures. Seen from this perspective, IlGattopardo might well be celebrated rather than censured for the complexity of its structural coherence.
Presidential Address 1979: E Pluribus Unum
Authors: Perkins Jean A.
Published: February 2007

I have recently been indulging in a favorite fall pastime of MLA presidents, reading the presidential addresses of previous years, and the reminiscences of both Germaine Brée and Northrop Frye about earlier conventions set me to thinking about my own first MLA meeting in 1950. Though I do not recollect the particular meeting, what I do remember from that period is a feeling of collegiality, the sense of belonging that characterized our whole profession thirty years ago. Of course we were a much smaller organization then, with about six thousand members, as opposed to the nearly thirty thousand we have today.
The Poetics of Discontinuity: East-West Correspondences in Lyric Poetry
Authors: Yu Pauline
Published: February 2007

This article discusses some characteristic methods and structures shared by modern Western and classical Chinese poetry, focusing on the works of Georg Trakl and major poets of the T’ang dynasty. Among the similarities examined are the preference for concrete imagery over abstract, discursive statement; the paratactical juxtaposition of images, which leaves their logical, temporal, and grammatical relationships unspecified and often ambiguous; and the tendency for images to become “ciphers” that suggest, but do not support, metaphorical interpretation. There is also a reluctance to obtrude a first-person speaker onto the scene, and this has led some critics to label Symbolist-post-Symbolist and Chinese poetry “impersonal”; this essay argues, however, that the hidden subjectivity of even the most “impersonal” poem should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, the omission of subject does frequently increase ambiguities among the other elements of a work and contributes to the “poetics of discontinuity” common to the two traditions.
Conrad's Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness
Authors: Hawkins Hunt
Published: February 2007

In Heart of Darkness Conrad explicitly selected two criteria—efficiency and the “idea” of the civilizing mission—to judge imperialism. Although he himself did not ultimately espouse these values (which social Darwinists used to justify European expansion), he chose them because they were popular and well-suited to condemning the peculiar exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold ii. Unlike capital rich imperialism, which could seek long-term development, Leopold’s capital-poor imperialism resulted in hasty exploitation of surface resources through forced labor. Conrad’s story powerfully illustrated the special inefficiency and cruelty of such exploitation. As in his other colonial novels, Conrad went on to imply a further judgment against all types of imperialism, even England’s, because of their complicity, belligerence, and arrogant disruption of indigenous cultures.
Conflicting Names, Conflicting Laws: Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio
Authors: Feal Carlos
Published: February 2007

The most prominent feature of Zorrilla's Don Juan is theatricality: the character's awareness of incarnating a name or portraying a role that earlier Don Juans created. Don Juan's imposing name clashes with the name of the father (the Commander), triggering a conflict between love and the law. Vis-a-vis this conflict, Don Juan and Ines evolve in opposite directions: Don Juan finally wants to marry, thus accepting the patriarchal dictates that Ines defies by her love for her father's enemy and killer. Ines, therefore, is not the innocent virgin that critics, Zorrilla included, and Don Juan himself envisioned. Another basic tension is that between God and the father. Their supposed alliance is broken by Ines, who, against the Commander's will, intercedes supernaturally to save Don Juan. Paradoxically, in the name of Don Juan, Ines opposes men's law and consequently produces her own defense based on the feminine “law of the heart.”
Blake, Foucault, and the Classical Episteme
Authors: Stempel Daniel
Published: February 2007

The accepted periodization of English literary history, a linear alternation of convention and revolt, has made Blake the ancestral and archetypal romantic. But an examination of the language of his texts, using Michel Foucault's archaeological method, demonstrates the classical structure of his oeuvre, which is a variant of classical discourse as defined and described by Foucault. The deep structure of Blake's discourse is logical, but the logic is not that of general grammar; it is the logic of identity, not the logic of difference. The assimilation of Blake's oeuvre into Foucault's classical episteme enriches and expands Foucault's model of the period; it also offers a model of the transformation from classical to modern that may clarify some of the difficulties of Foucault's scheme of historical change.
Nietzsche's Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
Authors: Bennett Benjamin
Published: February 2007

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche holds that conscious art, in which symbols of truth are deliberately created, does not supersede myth but functions, rather, as its destiny and revealed essence. At its later stages, where it becomes fully itself, myth is closely related to artistic illusion in an eighteenth-century sense, illusion to which we submit while recognizing its illusoriness; myth is a constantly renewed creative effort by which we protect ourselves against the unacceptable truth of the utter emptiness of existence, a truth we also tacitly acknowledge precisely by striving against it. Only on this basis is it possible to understand both the reciprocity of Apollonian and Dionysian and Nietzsche’s conception of the role of his own work in the historical development of Socratic culture.
Nature and Art in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Woodring Carl
Published: February 2007

The polarities of the nineteenth century, from the glorification of nature to art for art’s sake, with an intervening positivism, bear upon our own time. Because civilization had driven nature from the individual, the Romantics sought reunion, through the imagination, with perceptible external forms. Photography, accompanying the simpler doctrines of realism and positivism, relieved the imagination of the burden of creating a world external to the mind. Darwin, by demonstrating that nature works by accident, displaced Wordsworth’s affective version of the Deists’ universe fitted to human needs. Naturalism and the replacement of nature by art rose together. Today the environmentalism of Wordsworth and the self-sufficiency of Wilde are each half alive.
“Coloured Images” in the “Black Dark”: Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction
Authors: Barge Laura
Published: February 2007

Although much comment on Beckett’s prose from How It Is (1961) through The Lost Ones (1970) has appeared, uncertainty as to the artistic intent of this innovative fiction has hindered definitive analysis. An understanding of the pieces as further developments of the Beckettian hero’s progressive withdrawal from an absurd macrocosm and descent toward the ever-receding core of the microcosmic self not only defines meaning in each piece but also reveals a thematic unity binding these works together and to the earlier fiction. Trapped in the mind but unable to escape a suffering awareness of the outer world, the figures portrayed undergo Beckett’s own particular brand of crucifying self-perception.
Translating Pablo Neruda's “Galope muerto”
Authors: Felstiner John
Published: February 2007

Pablo Neruda’s first noteworthy lyric was written in 1925, at a time of unrest not only in himself but in Chilean society as well. “Galope muerto” strains the mimetic capacity of poetry. Similes without a referent and present participles without a limiting verb leave the reader reaching for some hidden source, some inner principle of experience. A new verse translation can instigate and inform the close reading of “Galope muerto,” showing what Neruda was after: an image of dynamic form, to catch things consumed yet brimming with energy, contained yet astir with life. He moves from the “dead gallop” of his title toward indigenous American calabashes resting on the earth and yet swelling with life. Twenty years later, in his major poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Neruda reanimated the Andean site, drawing on the image of suspended energy that he first explored in writing “Galope muerto.”
The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Authors: Leicester H. Marshall
Published: February 2007

“Unimpersonated artistry,” the idea that narrators in the Canterbury Tales are intermittently replaced by the voice of the poet, is a notion common in Chaucer criticism. The idea arises from a confusion of voice with presence, and this confusion leads critics to posit preexisting characters and a preexisting poet whose combined traits constrain the meaning of the text. On the contrary, the poem is conspicuously textual, and the voices of the text create the characters and the narrator. Only by treating the pilgrims as the products, rather than the producers, of their tales can we construct their personalities. Similarly, we must construct the poet from his poem. The general narrator is not a naive “Chaucer the pilgrim” but a complex and sophisticated impersonator who withholds himself and directs us to the roles he plays in order to create himself as fully and complexly as possible in his poem.
The Apocalypse of the Old Testament: Daniel Deronda and the Interpretation of Interpretation
Authors: Carpenter Mary Wilson
Published: February 2007

Although critics have questioned the unity of Daniel Deronda, the double narrative structure of the novel has not been related to contemporary (Victorian) fictions of history. George Eliot's “Oriental Memoranda” notebook documents her interest in current histories of the Jews and suggests a context of universal history based on critical interpretations of the Book of Daniel. This exegetical “key” to interpretation reveals both the significance of Eliot's separation of the plot into two strands and the apocalyptic symbolism that links those strands together in a universal history of humanity in exile. Finally, this “key” suggests that circumcision, though never mentioned in the text, is nevertheless central to the vision uniting Jews with Christians. Daniel Deronda is George Eliot's “Book of Origins,” in which she seeks to deconstruct conventions of history that separate past from present and Jew from Gentile and to reenvision how “everything [is] … related to everything else.”
Faulkner and the Power of Sound
Authors: Zender Karl F.
Published: February 2007

Changes in Faulkner's depictions of sound during the course of his career reflect changes in his understanding of his relation to the world and of himself as an artist. In his early work, he uses images of sound to express a highly romanticized yearning for reconciliation with the world. As his career advances, regret over the passing of the world of his youth and distaste for the modern world replacing it lead him to emphasize the idea of sound as a hostile force, intent on invading the mind. In the postwar period, as he senses that his creative power is declining, he comes to envision himself and the world as engaged in a struggle for dominance, and he devises a variety of ingenious fictional stratagems with which to annul the world's sounds and to reaffirm his belief in the power of his artistic voice.
TheCanterbury Talesand the Arabic Frame Tradition
Authors: Gittes Katharine Slater
Published: February 2007

TheCanterbury Talesis the culmination of a frame tradition that originated and developed in Arabia, not in the West. The Arabic practice of enclosing tales within a frame may be explained by principles of organization peculiar to medieval Arabic literature, art, music, and mathematics: a preference for concreteness, a stress on autonomous elements, and a reliance on external organizing devices. Most Arabic literature emphasizes the individual unit; frames remain open-ended and inconclusive and rarely determine the subject or form of any included part. Although many Western characteristics are present in medieval European frame narratives like theDisciplina Clericalis, theDecameron, and theConfessio Amantis, those works, nonetheless, reveal themselves as continuations of the Arabic tradition. Even theCanterburyTales, with all its subtle artistry, retains qualities typical of its Arabic ancestors, notably the controlling travelpilgrimage motif, the pointedly random order of tales, and the prominent authorial personality.
Thinking in La vida es sueño
Authors: Soufas C. Christopher
Published: February 2007

Examining the epistemological assumptions governing Calderón's theocentric view of life provides an accessible framework to overcome the many difficulties in reading La vida es sueño as a document of human experience. Segismundo's problems arise from an incomplete understanding of himself and the world. A prisoner since birth, the prince overcompensates intellectually for a life of sensual deprivation. Alienated from both the world and the sensitive centers of his humanity, he thinks to excess because his principal conduit to the world, his imagination, has remained underdeveloped. Through his palace experiences and his three encounters with Rosaura, Segismundo learns to adapt his inappropriate thinking by understanding that he must dialogue with the world rather than construct arguments against it.
Nabokov's Invitation: Literature as Execution
Authors: Peterson Dale E.
Published: February 2007

Although Nabokov enjoyed high acclaim as a serious artist, his work never pretended to the high seriousness of “moral fiction.” Yet he obviously intended, through his forbidding forewords and enticing texts, to invite his readers to reflect on the engagement with “reality” that serious fiction encourages. With principled wit, his compositions shatter the durable illusion that “realistic” characters and readers can somehow cocreate the structures that hold them captive. Nabokov's characteristic refusal to finish off his compositions frees both characters and readers to create a posttextual existence. His novel Invitation to a Beheading, although often misunderstood as a transparent allegory, is an opaque parable that resists the complicity of writer and reader, of leader and follower, to execute identities and meanings. Nabokov's modernistic narrative—as much as, if not more than, the conventional moral fictions of mimetic realism—is an ethical form that values the irreducible density of human experience.
The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitors' Letters
Authors: Whigham Frank
Published: February 2007

Renaissance courtesy theory helped organize the pursuit and repression of social mobility in Elizabethan England; the letters of supplication written by courtiers seeking preferment record the practice of this aristocratic ideology. Such letters were governed by codified epistolary theory and by the oppressive exigencies of political connection and distance in a newly centralized nation-state. A sample set of these letters, from Toby Mathew to Sir Christopher Hatton, reveals an implicit rhetoric. Mathew presents conspicuously little “objective” argument in support of his technical qualifications for the post he seeks. Instead, the letters focus on depicting the suitor's personal and political graces and the patron's magnanimous power. Though these persuasions embody coherent arts of modest ostentation and flattery, they also reveal anxiety, and we cannot easily assess the reception their depictive products met. The congruent forms of erotic seduction, prayer, and self-enticement may offer important parallels.
Gawain and the Image of the Wound
Authors: Reichardt Paul F.
Published: February 2007

The wounded neck of the hero in the Middle English Gawain and the Green Knight constitutes a subtle yet significant link in the chain of signs that shapes the poem's meaning. As illumined by the long tradition of commentary on the wound as moral emblem, the site of Gawain's nick draws on the Christian doctrine of the Fall, ancient philosophy's idea of the soul's anatomy, and the implications of the literary motif of beheading in order to suggest the nature of the hero's culpability. Gawain's fault, as signified by his wound, involves the disruption of reason's reign in the soul and is associated with the scriptural theme of stiff-necked pride. Paired and contrasted with Gawain's wound are the sacred wounds of Christ, signs of the remedy for the hero's fault and the basis of a parallel between the moral concerns of Gawain and its companion poem Pearl.
Only Relations: Vision and Achievement inTo the Lighthouse
Authors: Matro Thomas G.
Published: February 2007

Roger Fry's notions of the artist's unique vision and of the aesthetic design that captures that vision have long been acknowledged as primary influences onTo the Lighthouse.Consequently, for most commentators, the novel's closing events signify the achievement of a transcendent “oneness” or a perceptual balance captured in art but rarely experienced in life. Examination of repeated patterns of style and narrative progression shows that the design of the artist Lily's vision—one of unresolved ambivalence and estrangement rather than unity—is no different from that of the other characters, and this vision is the one caught in Lily's painting and reflected in all aspects of the novel. Woolf exploits Fry's theories to probe the desire for unity or “oneness” in personal and aesthetic relations, but she finds refuge, finally, in the act, not the result, of invention, in perception itself “before anything is made of it.”
Reading Bon's Letter and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
Authors: Krause David
Published: February 2007

The old letter Mr. Compson gives his son Quentin to read in chapter 4 of Absalom, Absalom! cannot be easily interpreted. Faulkner refuses to authorize any assumptions about the origin, destination, or meaning of the letter that might simplify its reading; instead, he entangles its readers, both inside and outside the novel, in a web of competing readings, rereadings, and misreadings. Given the problems of reading, we cannot assume that a text like Absalom discloses the way it imagines its own reading(s) through the scenes of reading it represents. Still, the better we can see how Faulkner imagines various readings of texts within his text—through detailed readings of the readings of Bon's letter—the closer we can come to understanding what Faulkner reveals about the uncertainties and risks of reading, about what is and is not in his book, and about our own uncertainties regarding how we are and are not in the world.
The Pardoner's Invitation: Quaestor's Bag or Becket's Shrine?
Authors: Storm Melvin
Published: February 2007

Chaucer's Pardoner functions pivotally inThe Canterbury Tales, for he personifies illusory goals that can divert or halt the pilgrimage. A walking shrine, carrying spurious relics and questionable indulgences, he offers the pilgrims a meretricious equivalent of what they seek in Canterbury. His diversionary malfeasance gives thematic significance to his unsavory relationship with the Summoner and establishes a close parallel between Chaucer s pilgrimage framework and the rioters' quest in the tale itself. It is fitting that the Pardoner addresses his crucial invitation, at the end of the tale, to the Host, because the Host is responsible for guiding the pilgrims to Canterbury. The violence with which the Host responds is thus particularly appropriate, for he is confronting the man who threatens the impetus of the pilgrimage as a whole. (MS)
Patriarchal Structures in The Winter's Tale
Authors: Erickson Peter B.
Published: February 2007

From the perspective of sexual politics, The Winter's Tale is a remarkable achievement: it recovers the possibility of harmonious male-female relations from the destructive antagonism between the sexes in the tragedies. In particular, it expands the role of women, making the combined forces of Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita central to the dramatic action. This development is so moving that we tend simply to welcome it without inquiring into the centrality of women and the terms of the sexual reconciliation. I argue that such an inquiry must be made. A sentimental reading of the play looks exclusively at its positive aspects and fails to recognize that women s power remains strictly circumscribed within the patriarchal framework. Acknowledging this limitation provides for a multiple rather than a monolithic response to the play and makes it possible both to affirm and to dissent from the ending. (PBE)
Dulness Unbound: Rhetoric and Pope'sDunciad
Authors: Bogel Fredric V.
Published: February 2007

It has long been recognized that the American formalists' rehabilitation of Alexander Pope depended on a renewed interest in rhetoric. In fact, there is a remarkable structural congruence between the formalists image of Pope's poetry and their conception of rhetoric, for both are item-centered, combinatory, and ultimately unifying. A single model of unified diversity, then, governs not only the formalist image of Pope's couplet rhetoric and theodicean scheme but formalist conceptions of rhetoric and “organic form” as well. An alternative (and complementary) model of rhetoric, however, insisting on creation as an act of structuring through differentiation rather than through unification, can help us to a fuller understanding ofThe Dunciad, and especially of the place of Dulness in that poem. Such a model can also generate a poetics capable of granting to satire and mock forms an appropriately primary status. (FVB)
Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language
Authors: Dowling Linda
Published: February 2007

In the career of the once famous and now all but forgotten Oxford philologist F. Max Muller we may trace not only the changed assumptions about language brought about in the nineteenth century by comparative or scientific philology but also some of the subversive consequences of those assumptions for Victorian ideas of literature and culture. Muller succeeded with his audiences because he was able to reassure them that in the new linguistic order language remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. His highly idiosyncratic and unstable blending of Romantic idealism, linguistics, religious humanism, and pulpit oratory, however, ultimately assured his failure as a linguistic scientist.
E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative
Authors: Harpham Geoffrey Galt
Published: February 2007

The work of E. L. Doctorow is difficult to place on the map of postmodernism because he is equally concerned with narrative or representational technique and with issues of history, power, and identity. Doctorow has focused his concerns in the question of technology, representing in each of his major works technological principles that not only typify the historical epoch in which the novel is set but also characterize the representational mode of the novel itself. The differences among technologies in his novels produce an arc of development that moves from a critique of the coercive power of a system epitomized by the electrical circuit in The Book of Daniel to a celebration of the possibilities for imaginative and representational freedom created by the computer in Loon Lake. Concentrating on the technology of narrative, Doctorow has contributed striking redefinitions of the historical subject while testing and extending the resources of the contemporary novel.
Brief Remembrance of Things Past and Hopes for Things to Come
Authors: Stone George Winchester
Published: February 2007

We're short on charter members, this year, who can speak of the debates waged and principles established when the original forty men gathered in Hamilton Hall at Columbia College to set this learned and professional society afoot. But twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of our diamond jubilee, I wrote up a history of the MLA for the special anniversary issue of PMLA, relying heavily on a work by my predecessor, William Riley Parker. No need to repeat here the contents of that sixteen-page, double-column essay. No need to remind a present reader (as Chaucer used to say in almost any of his delightful exercises in occupatio) of the long record the MLA has in stimulating and helping other humanistic societies along the way or of its long-standing umbrellalike policy of providing hospitality at annual meetings for any number of special groups and interests, from the Milton and Melville societies to the National Council of Teachers of English, the College English Association, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. Now, I believe, it provides local habitation to some eighty-four such. To witness at any annual meeting these days six thousand humanistic scholars and teachers busying themselves for three days with their scholarly concerns is to sense the pulse beats (a little frantic to be sure) of a healthy and civilized activity in a troublesome world.
The Evolution of Literary Study, 1883–1983
Authors: Kroeber Karl
Published: February 2007

I was appalled by the invitation to write this essay. Although I have always urged students to become aware of the way they read, of why they read in that silly fashion, and of how they might read more rewardingly, I have never bothered much with the history of my profession. I have written principally on Romantic poetry and nineteenth-century fiction. So the MLA seemed to have adopted the position of Senator Roman Hruska, who, defending one of President Nixon's feebler choices for the Supreme Court, argued that even if what was charged against the nominee was true, nonetheless mediocre minds had as much right as any other group to be represented on the Court. My hesitation at serving as token incompetent was increased by the unanimous advice of qualified modernists, distinguished critical theorists, and kindly strangers on upper Broadway that the task was impossible within the space allotted.
English Studies: The World of Scholarship in 1883
Authors: Franklin Phyllis
Published: February 2007

The most productive approach to the world of scholarship in 1883 requires starting further back, about 1821, when individuals drawn by a passion for philology and English studies first sought to master a new field and become scholars. Passion is not too strong a word here. During the second and third quarters of the century, despite a lack of opportunity for formal training, despite isolation from European scholars, despite the difficulty of getting books and the absence of encouragement or likely reward, these scholars undertook enormous and very different kinds of projects. Their commitment and scholarship, which earned national and international respect, helped to define the American scholar as a specialist and to shape what they insisted was a discipline suitable for the undergraduate college curriculum. Active both outside and within the academy, they not only generated national recognition of the scholar's need for research libraries and higher education's need for scholars but established the value of teaching English in American colleges and universities. Because of their efforts, by 1883 the world of scholarship, at least in broad outline, was the world we now know. That is, though 1883 marks the founding of the Modern Language Association and therefore an important beginning in the professionalization of the discipline, it also marks the end of a pioneering era in American scholarship.
Criticism, Literary History, and the Paradigm: The Education of Henry Adams
Authors: Lesser Wayne
Published: February 2007

Literary historians have persistently regarded The Education of Henry Adams as a “paradigmatic” text. While “historical explanations“ stress the book's historical achievement, “critical explications” portray it as a failure of historical consciousness that achieves its success in the ahistorical arenas of aesthetic integration and imaginative projection. To relate the products of “explication” with the aims of “historical explanation,” I regard the work's true “paradigm achievement” as an inquiry into “historical being.” For Adams this achievement embodies disciplinary formulation and professional commitment and thus coordinates historical speculation and self-cultivation. One must assess the ethical density and cultural significance of the text before explaining its historical identity. The Education, despite its origin in epistemological chaos, makes the past eternally relevant to the present; for it is a personal and theoretical discovery of how the narrative structures of history and selfhood create the possibilities of individual and social life.
The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism
Authors: Eichner Hans
Published: February 2007

The replacement of the mechanical philosophy by an organic view of the cosmos is one of the most significant features of Romanticism. My article explains why the Romantics felt compelled to attack the mechanical philosophy and confirms Peckham's findings that the new organicism accounts for a large part of Romantic theory. This theory led to substantial progress in our understanding of the humanities. The Romantic world view is, however, no less flawed than the view it temporarily superseded: it is incompatible with the foundations of modern science.
Medieval Beasts and Modern Cages: The Making of Meaning in Fables and Bestiaries
Authors: Henderson Arnold Clayton
Published: February 2007

Animal fables pass from country to country and century to century, but not unchanged. Because fables have explicit moralizations, the innovative medieval fabulists (Marie, Odo, and Berechiah through Henryson) help us test what authors meant by meaning and what freedoms they took with tradition. We catch them thinking aloud. As they develop social satire, play with allegory, and dramatize style, they maintain a consistent reasoning process something like what we now call structuralist, but something, too, like Augustinian exegesis. We can partially learn to read like a medieval reader, yet we find even the explicit and documented meanings too various to be caught, caged, and cataloged by our theories. With fables as with their wilder cousins, the Nun's Priest's Tale, the Bestiary of Love, and unmoralized literature, neither we nor the medieval reader can anticipate when the author will double back to surprise us. Surprise, it seems, was itself a tradition.
Wordsworth and The Recluse: The University of Imagination
Authors: Johnston Kenneth R.
Published: February 2007

Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork, The Recluse, is often regarded as a nonexistent text. Though Wordsworth never completed the entire plan, its fragments constitute nearly twenty thousand lines of poetry that can be coherently interpreted. In their probable order of composition, the extant parts reveal a dialectical movement between Wordsworth's commitment to a public epic of secular redemption and his fascination with private poetry exploring his own genius. Three distinct episodes in this pattern can be identified in the active period of The Recluse's development (1797-1815). Each begins with Wordsworth's effort to write The Recluse, followed by a recoil into Prelude-type poetry, ending with the completion of some portion of The Recluse. In all three, Wordsworth's determination to give “Human Life” or society its due can be seen as at once the motivation and the stumbling block of his uneven progress toward The Recluse.
The Red and the White: The “Indian” Novels of José de Alencar
Authors: Wasserman Renata R. Mautner
Published: February 2007

Writing shortly after Brazil declared its independence from Portugal, Jose de Alencar considered that one of his major tasks was to help formulate a new definition of Brazilian nationality that would be distinct from, but equal in value to, the inevitable European models. Alencar uses some of the stereotypes of European romantic fiction to differentiate the American nation from others. His works, in their subject and in their stance toward Brazilian history and society, reproduce and confirm not only the prevailing national ideologies but also the inherent and characteristic contradictions of those ideologies. Alencar's “Indian” novels–O Guarani, Iracema, and Ubirajara–not only affirm the possibility and the value of the harmonious mingling of the cultures making up the new nation but also show that such harmony is not attainable in the terms in which it is posited. By validating national ideals and following them to their contradictions, Alencar's works show themselves to be firmly embedded in the fabric of Brazilian culture.
“Ritual” in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Community
Authors: Hardin Richard F.
Published: February 2007

Since the 1960s scholars have challenged earlier assumptions concerning ritual and literature. They have seriously discredited both the “ritual theory of myth” and traditional ideas on the relation of ritual to Greek and medieval drama. Although some critics still subscribe to theories of psychoanalysis and the “Cambridge anthropological school,” current anthropology offers superior theories of ritual, particularly those of Victor Turner, with their emphasis on community. Because literature and rites have similar emotional effects we have tended to equate them, but by so doing we confuse the liminal with the “liminoid.” Modern authors influenced by Frazer often invite this comparison. Rene Girard's theories of scapegoat and civilization have provided a new, if controversial, turn to ritual criticism. Rites share their symbolic nature with art, but their peculiar satisfaction lies in the experience of community.
Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language
Authors: Hauer Stanley R.
Published: February 2007

Throughout his life, Jefferson maintained an active but intermittent interest in the study of Old English. He collected a sizable library in the subject and advocated the utility of Old English to the professions, especially law. His major work, the Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, proposed radical simplifications in pedagogy and instituted at the University of Virginia the first college course of Old English ever taught in America. In several important ways Jefferson accurately predicted the future of Old English studies, and he rightly criticized the Latinate bias of contemporary grammars. Nevertheless, his ignorance of Germanic philology undermined many of his ideas on the grammar and phonology of Old English.
Vallejo's Venus de Milo and the Ruins of Language
Authors: Buelow Christiane Von
Published: February 2007

The critical reception demanded by an avant-garde artwork recapitulates in intensified form the hermeneutical problem of literary study, the relation of criticizing to criticized text. Walter Benjamin's dialectical concept of allegory, rooted in the interpretive practice of “critical decomposition,” provides a singularly productive model for analyzing the notorious difficulties inherent in an avant-garde text by the preeminent Peruvian poet, César Vallejo (1892–1938). In Trilce, Vallejo depicts Venus de Milo, the celebrated symbol of Romantic, symbolist, and modernista aesthetic perfection, but only to dismember the sculpture's self-sufficient totality and to propel it into a temporalizing linguistic fragmentation, into an allegorical mode of signifying.
Kenneth Burke's Divine Comedy: The Literary Form ofThe Rhetoric of Religion
Authors: McMahon Robert
Published: February 2007

InThe Rhetoric of Religion, Kenneth Burke refigures Augustine'sConfessionsas a Platonist comedy, structuring his book as an Upward Way that imitates and overgoes the textual ascent he analyzes in Augustine. He links that ascent to the principles of hierarchy, order, guilt, and victimage: the sacrificial principle of tragedy. Yet he counters the tragic motif with a comic criticism, teaching a tolerant charity and humble irony. His comedy thus tropes theConfessionson a large scale, converting it to logology. Burke teaches us about the tendency toward perfection obvious in the Upward Way, yet inherent in all symbols. In the political realm, this tendency aims toward perfect order and works to anathematize the opposition, exerting the principle of victimage. Burke warns us against this principle, which functions as much in the rhetoric of politics as in the rhetoric of religion.
The Politics of Johnson's Dictionary
Authors: DeMaria Robert
Published: February 2007

In definitions, occasional comments, and especially the selection of illustrative quotations, Johnson's Dictionary both conveys specific linguistic information and presents its readers with knowledge of the broadest kind. Like the abstract authority “the dictionary,” Johnson's Dictionary is an active instrument of the culture it reflects and helps to shape. As such, Johnson's book embodies a politics, while transmitting political views on every one of its quotation-filled pages. As a collection of quotations, the Dictionary tends to display an underlying political consensus founded on cultural assumptions winnowed from the arguments of combatants on a variety of different but, at a distance, analogous controversies. As a cultural act in its own right the Dictionary supports the growth of democracy and liberalism through its assistance to and dependence on the growing population of literate, book-buying, voting English citizens.
The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen'sQuicksand
Authors: Hostetler Ann E.
Published: February 2007

Published to critical acclaim in 1928 and praised by W. E. B. Du Bois as the “best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt,” Larsen'sQuicksandhas since been criticized for its focus on the narrow world of the black bourgeoisie. But her treatment of race, gender, and culture is far more complex than these pronouncements suggest. This essay shows how Larsen's emphasis on the aesthetic—objets d'art, clothing, fabrics, decor—highlights problems of cultural constructs and self-representation. Often compared with her prolific contemporary Jessie Fauset, Larsen goes beyond Fauset in both stylistic experimentation and psychological insight, daring to explore the failure of her protagonist to transcend cultural concepts of race and gender at a time when one-dimensional success stories were the rule in black women's novels of racial uplift.
What They Told Buchi Emecheta: Oral Subjectivity and the Joys of “Otherhood”
Authors: Ward Cynthia
Published: February 2007

While positive constructions of identity may be used in the service of historically oppressed groups, readings that isolate either “African” or “feminist” identity in the works of Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta highlight the problematics of both literary selfrepresentation and postmodern deconstruction of identity. An examination of Emecheta's autobiography Head above Water and her novel The Joys of Motherhood, however, suggests that Emecheta's works respond to a West African vernacular tradition of storytelling that resists the application of normative models of identity and instead demonstrates the importance of each individual to the community. This vernacular tradition, elaborated in Emecheta's work by a nonparadigmatic tension between “oral” and “literate subjectivity” (a tension potentially present to varying degrees in non-African subjectivity but “marked” in West Africa by multilingualism and the copresence of vernacular and literate languages), provides a critique of productivist, authoritarian discourse.
Taking Jane's Cue:Phyllyp Sparoweas a Primer for Women Readers
Authors: Schibanoff Susan
Published: February 2007

Skelton's poem begins with a radical view of reading in which the text “cues” readers to create (rewrite) texts in their own images, as does the work's fictional reader, Jane. Although Jane's rewritten text appears to be uniquely hers, the second section ofPhyllyp Sparowedeconstructs it to show how it was predetermined or “cued” by her past reading. The third section of the poem disempowers Jane further, deconstructing her physical person and reconstructing her as a text that Skelton the poet “scripts.” Although Jane soon escapes his control, he once again deconstructs her autonomy and power. This time Skelton points to another form of both licensing and limiting the reader, the interpretive community of male readers that enables Jane to challenge Skelton and simultaneously determines and shapes her criticism. Ultimately,Phyllyp Sparowerequires us to examine the nature of reading and the ways in which interpretive communities function.
Spenser's Poetics: The Poem's Two Bodies
Authors: Miller David Lee
Published: February 2007

Spenser's Faerie Queene is constituted by the fiction of a single transcendental body that is at once spiritual, politic, and aesthetic. The poem's allegorical structure reflects an implicit doctrine of “the poem's two bodies.” Its poetics is an aesthetic theology based on the motifs Kantorowicz discerned in Tudor “political theology”: perfect wholeness, secular perpetuity, and a doctrine of “assimilation.” Analysis of the negative moment in the dialectic of this theology shows allegory to be a strategy for summoning the poem's ideal body into representation as a sublimated negative image of its natural, or written, body. Spenser's image for this ideal body, the veiled hermaphrodite, confounds not only sexual difference but also the difference between metaphor and catachresis, or between mimetic and iconoclastic decorums. No purely mimetic critical reading can do justice to this structure, which demands that a reader “overgo” the text in the production of a historical or political “truth.”
Presidential Address 1985. A Rhetoric of Ritual: Or, Crisis and Community
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: February 2007

THE BALLROOM of the Chicago Marriott may strike some people as a strange place to observe cultic rituals. Yet the cultic aspect of the occasion we are celebrating this evening—the annual address of the outgoing president of the MLA—has often been noted by past speakers. Germaine Brée (1975) referred specifically to this “tribal ritual” of ours while Northrop Frye (1976) alluded more obliquely to the fate of divine kings in The Golden Bough, who vanish into limbo as axes grind ominously in the background.1 Even if our mode is merely ironic, the ritual proceeds, as Helen Vendler (1980) pointed out, according to “invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions.”
Manic-Depressive Psychosis and Critical Approaches to Virginia Woolf's Life and Work
Authors: Caramagno Thomas C.
Published: February 2007

Although recent scientific discoveries about the genetic and biochemical components of manic-depressive psychosis have radically revised our understanding of the etiology and psychodynamics of this illness, psychological studies of Virginia Woolf's life and work have generally remained tied to Freud's outmoded model of loss-induced neurosis. This model appeals to critics because it readily imposes coherence on often inconsistent biographical data, but it fails to account for psychotic breakdowns and tends to disparage Woolf with its emphasis on the infantile and evasive aspects of art. Since Woolf's symptoms do fulfill the manic-depressive paradigm, a consideration of how contemporary psychiatric theory alters our reading of her life may also explain the therapeutic value of her bold experiments in fiction as well as her profound insights into subject-object transactions and the pitfalls of interpretation in general.
“If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?”: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf'sOrlando
Authors: Knopp Sherron E.
Published: February 2007

Woolf calledOrlandoa “joke,” an “escapade,” and critics have taken her at her word. Although an enormous amount has been written about Woolf, the novel that celebrates her love for Vita Sackville-West tends to be ignored, dismissed as an anomaly, or explained as something other than what it is. But the things we joke about are often the things we care about too much to risk seriousness. The bold and dazzling achievement of Woolf's “joke” only becomes clear whenOrlandois set in the context of the love that inspired it and seen against the social, historical, and literary background in which it was conceived.