bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf
Authors: Osborn Marijane
Published: February 2007

Dorothy Whitelock describes family and national feuds in Beowulf as “sub-plots” to the monster fights. But the theme of feud history is more complex than that. There are the Scandinavian fights, some of them perceived and all relevant within the heroic world of the story, and the Great Feud of sacred history, associated in its beginnings with the monster fights in Denmark and in its end with the dragon fight in Geatland. This cosmic feud, introduced in the “scripturizing” passages of the poem, is not perceived within the world of the story. By distinguishing between the kind of knowledge available in that world and the kind available to his audience, the poet foregrounds the theme of the Great Feud and aligns the noble pagans of the poem with God, thereby “redeeming” the cultural identity of an audience for whom the Scandinavian matter of Beowulf is ancestral lore.
Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus' Bed and Chaucer's Art
Authors: Carton Evan
Published: February 2007

The relationship between speaker and hearer, between auctour (author and authority) and reader, is central to Chaucer's work. In the Canterbury Tales, speaking and hearing are conceived as equally creative functions whose practitioners jointly constitute meaning. Troilus and Criseyde, too, is constituted and sustained through a union of speakers and hearers whose verbal intercourse generates sexual intimacy. Pandarus' activity is paradigmatic for each partner; each manipulates language to gain control over events and over others while seeking absolution from responsibility by pleading subservience to external authority. In recognizing the complex interdependency of authoring and reading, Chaucer denies autonomous control to the one and insular passivity to the other and suggests that complicity is the essence of linguistic exchange and of worldly experience. Consideration of the evasions, insinuations, signals, and strategies comprised in communication in Troilus and Criseyde supports this position and generates a substantially new reading of the poem.
Repression and Sublimation of Nature in Wuthering Heights
Authors: Homans Margaret
Published: February 2007

Although most of Wuthering Heights takes place indoors, readers sense that nature is a major element in the novel. Nature is present in figurative language, which accounts for the impression of realism, but why does Bronte choose an indirect mode of presentation over a direct one? The figurative uses of nature form a highly abstract symbolic system, distinct from “real” nature, while “real” nature is unrepresentable. Psychoanalytic theory may account for this discrepancy, if the text is treated as if it were a psyche. Nature, or the destructive reality it represents, is so threatening that it must be repressed, while the figurative use of nature is a sublimation, redirecting the dangerous force into a safe and constructive channel. Analysis of the heroine, Cathy, helps to confirm this reading. Similar forces are at work in her psyche, but unlike the author she cannot sublimate and succumbs to nature’s power.
Tradition and Monstrosity in El obsceno pâjaro de la noche
Authors: Caviglia John
Published: February 2007

In its obscure complexities, El obsceno pájaro de la noche conceals the tale of the Bildung of an author, which passes through four stages. In the first, the protagonist attempts to find his identity in society, symbolized by the mask. In the second, he turns to his own psychological resources, only to find chaos and monstrosity. In the third, like the figure of the old woman in the novel, he abandons his own individuality for hearsay and the commonplace. Finally, he ends in a solipsistic isolation represented by a nonce symbol, the Imbunche—a creature that has had all its orifices sewn shut by witches. This novel proposes that the author, who has become identified with language, has lost touch both with his inner self and with his ambience.
Dom Juan and the Manifest God: Molière's Antitragic Hero
Authors: Lawrence Francis L.
Published: February 2007

Molière’s Dom Juan goes beyond surface travesty of the legend to develop its profound comic sense. The hero’s failures in action are farcical; his failures in consciousness are antitragic. Dom Juan limits himself to the sensual perceptions of the present moment, thus becoming incapable of remorse or dread. The obvious presence and the repeated warnings of Divine Providence he ignores or treats with contempt. His willful continuation of a life of error, carried to the point of offering God as a scapegoat for his crimes, cuts him off from his virtuous ancestry and from the possibility of conversion. A series of miracles confirms his rejection of anagnorisis. The catastrophe of Dom Juan’s damnation includes the entire comic vision of the work in a mixture of the burlesque and the grotesque.
Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion
Authors: Sherwin Paul
Published: February 2007

A consideration of “Bright Star” and “Ode to a Nightingale” prepares for a reading of Hyperion as a poem of revisionary strife. Keats intends a progress poem that will put Milton, and secondarily Wordsworth, behind him. Entering the threatening ancestral space of Miltonic epic, Keats endeavors to make it his own by correcting Milton's errors in vision and thereby subduing the phantom he raises. Milton, however, will not maintain his place in the past; he returns, uncannily, to subvert Keats as powerfully as Keats subverts him. The impotence and anxiety of the Miltonic Titans are expressive of Keats's failure to write the poem he wishes. His surrogate, Apollo, is waiting to dawn but cannot. Engulfed by a knowledge that is equivalent to the Miltonic legacy, Apollo and Keats are halted at the threshold, in the dark passage that Keats explores in the great odes and in The Fall of Hyperion.
La Vie de Saint Alexis: Narrative Analysis and the Quest for the Sacred Subject
Authors: Vitz Evelyn Birge
Published: February 2007

This essay examines various aspects of the “Subject-Object” relation in narrative, with respect to La Vie de Saint Alexis. The model of this relation proposed by A. J. Greimas is contrasted with that of Bernard de Clairvaux. The two theorists, one secular, one Christian, have different understandings of the content and the structure of the Subject-Object relation: of desire, of narrative “transformation” and “closure.” Bernard's model is more applicable to the Alexis. Alexis, God, the public, and Alexis' family must all be considered Subjects of this text, in that events must be viewed with respect to their desires, or Objects. The saint, God, and the faithful public are all necessary Subjects in hagiography, and their functions help define the genre. The importance of “transcendent” Subjects—of God (on the vertical axis) and the public (on the horizontal)—is characteristic of medieval narrative.
“A Loaded Gun”: Dickinson and the Dialectic of Rage
Authors: Cameron Sharon
Published: February 2007

A comparison of narrative and lyric conceptions of temporality in Dickinson's poetry sheds light on that group of her poems in which a story is begun only to be violently broken into and disrupted. Defining life as a series of alternatives, the poems establish a dialectic, but seemingly for the sake of dismissing it as inadequate. The dismissal is frequently one of rage at all that is temporal, all that has a history whose requirement is sacrifice and choice. Such Dickinson poems can end in disorder, and they are examined here in the context of other lyrics that equally seem to pin their hopes on the belief that a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead.
The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction
Authors: De Maria Robert
Published: February 2007

Critical writings may be seen as fictions about literature and reading and writing. One hero of these fictions is the ideal reader. The sort of ideal reader a critic creates indicates the literary form of his criticism. Dr. Johnson's ideal reader is an everyman, and Johnson's criticism imitates allegorical epic literature in its concern with mankind in general. Dryden's division of readers into classes, headed by “the most judicious,” is an aspect of the dramatic form of his critical literature. Coleridge's lyrical mode of criticism centers on a reader so close to his author that he becomes his tautegorical representative. Northrop Frye's criticism is a kind of comic romance leading to an apocalypse in which his heroic ideal reader redeems cultural history and experiences it as part of his present life. The criticism of these four writers embodies and imitates, as it asserts, a vision of literature.
The Context of Browning's Painter Poems: Aesthetics, Polemics, Histories
Authors: Delaura David J.
Published: February 2007

The neo-Catholic apologist Alexis Rio argued in 1836 that the idealism of medieval art was destroyed in the fifteenth century by a growing “paganism” and “naturalism.” Browning’s refutation in “Pictor Ignotus” of Rio’s defense of the Italian Pre-Raphaelites involved a severe distortion of the historical record. Rio’s thesis was widely debated in the late forties; above all, Charles Kingsley, whose definition of a “Protestant” realism was a direct response to the new ascetic theory, was a source of Browning’s more complex views of the fifties. “Fra Lippo Lippi” answers Rio, though its sensualism is only one component of Browning’s unstable doctrine. Browning’s polemical designs, which led him to play fast and loose with historical fact, explain both the iconoclasm and the conformity of the poem. Elsewhere, Browning’s endorsement of realism was limited by fear of an art that proclaims beauty to be its own self-sufficing end.
Literary System and Systemic Change: The Prague School Theory of Literary History, 1928–48
Authors: Galan F. W.
Published: February 2007

Structural linguistics is commonly held to be preoccupied with static language systems at the expense of language history. Yet in the 1920s the Prague Linguistic Circle resolved the structuralist dilemma of a system that ceases to act systemically the moment it undergoes a change. Language changes must be studied not in isolation but with regard to the whole system. No language system, however, is perfectly self-contained, nor can language changes be perfectly predictable, for language must adapt to concrete situations. Similarly, literary history appears largely systemic, but only a semiotic conception can explain its immanent development while simultaneously taking into account extraliterary influences. Prague structuralism thus studies both the internal, systemic changes of literary forms and the sociological aspects involved in their reception by the reading public. Finally, structural literary theory explains the role of individual artists, whose originality is seen as the dialectical antithesis to the systematic literary structure.
Bertran de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in Dante's Comedy
Authors: Barolini Teodolinda
Published: February 2007

The figure of Sordello, who appears in Purgatorio vi and guides Dante and Vergil to the valley of the princes, has long puzzled critics, since his stature in the Comedy seems greater than his historical achievements warrant. He is noted chiefly for a planh with political overtones, the lament for Blacatz. Of the Comedy’s lyric poets, the other known especially for political poetry is Bertran de Born, among the “sowers of scandal and of schism” in Inferno xxviii. By comparing Dante’s treatment of these two “political poets,” we see that they are used within the poem in a way that necessarily transcends their historical identities: they have become emblematic, respectively, of the good and bad uses to which poets can put their verse in the service of the state.
Shylock, Iago, and Sir Thomas More: With Some Further Discussion of Shakespeare's Imagination
Authors: Matchett William H.
Published: February 2007

The association of ideas as manifested in Shakespeare’s image clusters, discussed by Caroline Spurgeon and Edward Armstrong, was used by R. W. Chambers as a test of authorship for the Sir Thomas More fragment. Some unstudied associations tie Iago to one side of Shylock and the More fragment to another, providing further evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship and the probable date of composition. Image clusters similarly suggest that King John preceded Richard II; and King Lear, Timon of Athens. Our consideration needs to be broadened beyond exclusively verbal terms: Shakespeare’s imagination is fully theatrical. Association is not a mere stimulus-response limiting of the imagination; it provided flexible and wide-ranging systems of intermeshing concepts at Shakespeare’s most creative moments.
The Development of Milton's Poetics
Authors: Samuel Irene
Published: February 2007

Although Milton wrote extensively on poetics, we cannot get his views by simply piecing together his scattered statements; they changed and developed to the end of his writing life. But central from early to late years were questions of the poet’s inspiration, relation to his audience, and possible usefulness. Perhaps the core of his poetics is best described by the Greek word paideia; for however distinctively Christian, Milton was too thoroughly the heir of humanism to disavow classical teaching and Renaissance commentary on poetics. Still, only his final poems in their implications can suggest his final theory.
Private Faces in Public Places: Auden's The Orators
Authors: Firchow Peter E.
Published: February 2007

Though at present it is critically unfashionable to view the early Auden as part of a literary group, during the thirties Auden and a number of his friends considered themselves intimately bound by personal, literary, and political ties. The notion of a group plays an extraordinarily important role in Auden’s early poetry. The underlying sociopolitical structure of The Orators is that of the group—much of its considerable obscurity is attributable to this fact and to the related circumstance that its primary audience was the Auden group. Two keys to understanding The Orators, namely its foundation on the psychological “theories” of Homer Lane and on the anthropological research of John Layard, were provided only years later by Auden’s friends, Isherwood and Spender. Moreover, its emphasis on groups has an important political significance which has often led to its being considered a quasi-Fascist work, not least by Auden himself.
Blow-Up: A Reconsideration of Antonioni's Infidelity to Cortázar
Authors: Peavler Terry J.
Published: February 2007

Antonioni’s Blow-Up is one of the most significant and controversial films of the 1960s. Its success brought increased international recognition not only to its director but to Julio Cortázar, the author of the story that inspired the film. Because of the extreme complexity and ambiguity of both Blow-Up and its source, “Las babas del diablo,” critics have been unable to agree in their interpretations of either work, and they agree even less on the extent of Cortázar’s influence on Antonioni. A close analysis of the two works, with careful focus on the relationship between the creators and their protagonists and on the tension between the narratives and their self-conscious forms, reveals that many of the difficulties in interpretation are due to a priori assumptions of readers and viewers alike and that the similarities between the film and the story are far greater than has been supposed.
Swift's Laputians as a Caricature of the Cartesians
Authors: Renaker David
Published: February 2007

The prevalent view that Book III of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes the Royal Society overlooks the fact that this book contains two satires, one on the Laputians and one on the Balnibarbians. The first of these satires gains point if we regard it as aimed at the Cartesians, interpreting Laputa as France, the land of the Cartesians, and Balnibarbi as England, the land of the Newtonians, characterizations made by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques. The Laputians’ fear of the extinction of the sun is fully justified by the cosmology of Descartes’s Principes; their musical mania exaggerates only slightly that of the Cartesian popularizer Marin Mersenne; their influence on the Balnibarbians, inspiring them to build the Academy of Lagado, represents the influence of Descartes on the Royal Academy, an influence that has been hitherto underestimated.
Repetition and Excess in Tiempo de silencio
Authors: Firmat Gustavo Pérez
Published: February 2007

Luis Martín Santos' Tiempo de silencio displays a peculiar vulnerability to commentary. The novel both invites interpretation and “thematizes” the invitation. In this essay I offer a reading of the novel that explores—and exploits—such vulnerability. More concretely, I offer a reading anchored in two related notions, repetition and excess, for in and through them the work discloses its hermeneutic complexity. Accordingly my discussion moves from substances to events; it moves, that is, from a consideration of how excess is embodied in certain emblematic substances (Secs. 1 and 2) to a consideration of the repetitiveness of the novel's events (Secs. 3 and 4). Such an exercise should not only shed new light on one of the most significant Spanish novels of this century but also, implicitly, raise important questions about the relationship between a commented text and its commentary.
Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction
Authors: Miller Nancy K.
Published: February 2007

Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.
Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility
Authors: Pease Donald
Published: February 2007

The proponents of modernism, in their putative wish to be free of inherited patterns, release a compensatory reaction, an anxiety over the sense of a lost relationship with tradition. In this context, the critical dogma lamenting the “anxiety of influence” may be seen as one modernist's attempt to regain a relationship with the past at the expense of the equally recalcitrant doctrine of originality. But this most recent defensive reaction only represses an even deeper anxiety over the loss of the present moment in the inevitable formal quality of literature. As a way out of this impasse, the modernist poet Hart Crane returned to William Blake and Walt Whitman, whose poetry of pure possibility does not mediate the present into a durative past but recovers it as a possible present, a coming again of what is ever more about to be.
Truth and Calliope: Ezra Pound's Malatesta
Authors: Harper Michael F.
Published: February 2007

Among critics who accept the Aristotelian distinction between “poetry” and “history,” those who recognize that Pound's Cantos aspires to “history” generally consider it bad history and “impure” poetry; critics who value it as poetry usually dismiss its claim to history. But Pound's aesthetic recognizes no essential difference between poetry and history; a poem, for him, is a report of its author's experience, and by reading historical documents as attentively as poetry, one can penetrate to the reality behind them, too. A good literary critic is therefore the best historian. The Malatesta Cantos show this theory in action; Pound's Sigismundo, derived from a critical reading of primary sources, seems more plausible than the one found in most secondary sources. These cantos show that Pound's attempts at writing history should be taken more seriously than they have been and that his achievement as an epic poet should be reevaluated.
Boswell's Johnson, the Hero Made by a Committee
Authors: Reichard Hugo M.
Published: February 2007

The life of Boswell’s Johnson, with its manifold successes, is largely decided by others—the interested volunteers who, governing singly or collectively, control most of his conversation, writing, charities, frolics, trips, meals, and encounters. Johnson is a character whom experience befalls and who (between interruptions) is lost in “languor and dejection.” He is aware that “external authority” is his prime mover. His operating unit is himself plus one (or more). This dependence on his associates bears on the pessimism of the protagonist Johnson and perhaps has implications as well for the author Johnson and for his own volumes. Boswell is most original, potent, and subtle in rendering the part that other characters perform in the making of his hero, showing their role to be an ultimately integrating and exalting force both in individual scenes and in Johnson’s career as a whole.
Latin American Documentary Narrative
Authors: Foster David William
Published: February 2007

Latin American fiction has historically been characterized by its testimony on sociopolitical issues, and the contemporary novel offers important examples of the documentary narrative. Indeed, Latin American authors appear to have made richer—and earlier—use of documentary narrative than have more commonly cited American writers. Through an examination of five representative narratives, by Rodolfo Walsh (Argentina), Elena Poniatowska (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Hernán Valdés (Chile), and Miguel Barnet (Cuba), this study examines such major features of Latin American documentary narrative as complementary and contrapuntal juxtaposition, irony, authorial editing and commentary, foreshadowing and echoing of events, and disjunctive interplay between various levels of the text.
Kafka's Rhetorical Moment
Authors: Koelb Clayton
Published: February 2007

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.
Newman'sApologia pro vita suaand the Traditions of the English Spiritual Autobiography
Authors: Peterson Linda H.
Published: February 2007

Although some readers argue that theApologia pro vita suais not true autobiography, Newman in fact draws on models of spiritual autobiography in two traditions—one English and Protestant, the other Augustinian and Catholic. In the early chapters, Newman patterns his account on Thomas Scott'sForce of Truth, presenting his own religious development as a series of encounters with theological texts but replacing the typological hermeneutics of Scott (and of most other Protestant autobiographers) with an interpretive method derived from ecclesiastical history. In later chapters, as he narrates his conversion to Catholicism, Newman takes Augustine'sConfessionsas a model, invoking characteristically Augustinian figures to signal a turn to a Catholic literary tradition. More comprehensively, he adapts the multiple forms of confession that organize Augustine's work to shape his final statement of faith and to integrate the narrative and expository modes that distinguish theApologiaand autobiography as a genre.
From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento
Authors: Gilbert Sandra M.
Published: February 2007

Though some Victorian readers believed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's partisanship for “the cause of Italy” led to a failure of inspiration, I argue that for a complex of reasons Italy became the embodiment of this woman poet's aesthetic and utopian desires: through her commitment to Italy's revolutionary struggle for political identity, Barrett Browning reenacted her own struggle for identity, a risorgimento that was, like Italy's, both an insurrection and a resurrection. Moreover, by using metaphors of the healing of a wounded woman/land to articulate both the reality and the fantasy of her own revitalization, Barrett Browning located herself in a re-creative female poetic tradition that descends from Christine de Pizan to H. D. Infusing supposedly asexual poetics with the dreams of a distinctively sexual politics, these women imagined nothing less than the transformation of patria into matria and thus the risorgimento of the lost land that Christina Rossetti called the “mother country.”
La Mort de Pompée: Roman History and Tasso's Theory of Christian Epic
Authors: Sellstrom A. Donald
Published: February 2007

Corneille's La Mort de Pompée represents a contamination of sources—the one Latin and avowed (Lucan's epic poem, the Pharsalia), the other modern and unavowed (the theory of the Christian epic as found in the Discorsi of Tasso). Into the historical, Lucan framework dealing with Roman civil strife the playwright inserts a Tassoan interlude during which the Romans band together against a non-Roman enemy and Cesar adumbrates an ideal policy whereby Rome would accept what amounts to Cléopatre's conversion to Romanness. The tensions between the Lucan and the Tassoan elements in the play are not resolved, nor could they be, and critical readings that try to remove the play's ambiguities only partially sift the evidence. The absence of clear-cut resolution in Pompée may or may not be intentional; in any event, it is central to the structure and meaning of the play. (ADS)
Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's1984
Authors: Patai Daphne
Published: February 2007

In1984, Orwell rejects moral justifications for the exercise of power and confronts it as an end in itself. When viewed in this way, the pursuit of power takes on the contours of a game. The concept of play throws light on O'Brien's role in1984, and a perspective borrowed from game theory clarifies Winston Smith s participation in the contest between tormentor and victim, showing that both share a frame of reference and fundamental values. Examining these values leads to a critique of Orwell's androcentrism and misogyny. Only in a culture that disparages the female while accepting the male as the model for the species could it have gone unremarked that1984concerns the interaction of two men. Orwell saw that the pursuit of power posed dangers to humanity but could not see this activity as merely an extreme form of conventional masculine behavior. Caught in this contradiction, Orwell despaired.
The House of the Seven Gables: Reading the Romance of America
Authors: Thomas Brook
Published: February 2007

The House of the Seven Gables contains a contradiction that seems inherent in the form of the romance as Hawthorne defined it. While Hawthorne uses the form to shape a vision of the future by treating the possible, not the probable, he acknowledges that vision as a product of his imagination and thus undercuts its authority to represent an actual world. The romance we call America seems to contain a similar contradiction. The American dream, to shape an alternative society based on the vision of a possible world, rests on documents that declare self-evident truths and claim the authority of natural law. But Hawthorne's romance suggests that the foundation of authority for both his romance and his country is not natural but rhetorical. To explore this contradiction and the possibility of transcending it, I propose a social reading of Hawthorne's romance and a rhetorical reading of the American social system.
Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure
Authors: Schleiner Louise
Published: February 2007

Measure for Measure has inspired widely divergent readings, in our century having been seen as either doctrinal (embodying Christian teachings) or “dark” and satiric. The play's prominent biblical and theological allusions do evoke a parallel between the duke and God, as testing master, redeemer, and judge; the parallel, however, is comic, not didactic, showing that the duke is not God but a ruler who makes a quixotic attempt in his government to imitate God (as rulers theoretically were obliged to and as King James had claimed he would), with mixed and humorous results. The duke is fallible, meddling, and laughable but beneficent, inventive, and in large measure successful in helping his subjects.
The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin
Authors: Emerson Caryl
Published: February 2007

Mikhail Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky is well known. Less familiar, perhaps, is Bakhtin's attitude toward the other great Russian nineteenth-century novelist, Leo Tolstoy. This essay explores that “Tolstoy connection,” both as a means for interrogating Bakhtin's analytic categories and as a focus for evaluating the larger tradition of “Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky.” Bakhtin is not a particularly good reader of Tolstoy. But he does make provocative use of the familiar binary model to pursue his most insistent concerns: monologism versus dialogism, the relationship of authors to their characters, the role of death in literature and life, and the concept of the self. Bakhtin's comments on these two novelists serve as a good starting point for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bakhtinian model in general and suggest ways one might recast the dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on somewhat different, more productive ground.
The MLA and the Study of Foreign Languages
Authors: Mead Robert G.
Published: February 2007

In surveying the contributions of the Modern Language Association of America to the teaching and study of foreign languages in our country, especially during the last three decades, I hope to recapture the mood and spirit of past events and to pay tribute to those colleagues who took leading parts in them. This is not an easy task, but it is a welcome and a challenging one. Many of these colleagues are deceased, others are retired, and few if any of us during those intensely active years, I suspect, gave much thought to the task of gathering materials and memories for a chronicle of the MLA's role in the development of foreign language study. But it was an inspired and inspiring time—one happier than the present for education in our country—and I am grateful for the opportunity to set down a brief, personal, and inevitably incomplete memoir.
The Profession and Society, 1958–83
Authors: Heilbrun Carolyn G.
Published: February 2007

Scanning the last twenty-five years in the profession and in society, I wonder: what historian could deal with that time in any comprehensive way? But I wish to speak of those years—in which we witnessed such profound social change—not with the detachment of a historian but rather as a participant who, as a woman, welcomes much that has changed and regrets much that has not. Looking back, I find that the profession has changed less than society has. Academics are a conservative lot—old professors have a tenure more durable than society's institutions, whether for the control of money, or women, or sexuality.
Presidential Address Arts and Scandals 1981
Authors: Booth Wayne C.
Published: February 2007

In gathering here tonight, we tell each other a little sustaining story. Just by going through our traditional motions, we imply a narrative, one that might begin something like this:
The Conflict of Interpretations and the Limits of Pluralism
Authors: Armstrong Paul B.
Published: February 2007

The debate about validity in interpretation has pitted monism against pluralism. Some theorists insist that any literary work has a single, determinate meaning, and others argue that there are no limits to the readings a text allows. Neither view adequately describes the field of conflicting interpretations. Critics can and do have legitimate disagreements about literary works; yet we can also say that some readings are wrong, not simply different. The hermeneutic field is divided among conflicting systems of interpretation, each based on different presuppositions that decide what its procedures will disclose and what they will disguise. But several tests for validity–inclusiveness, efficacy, and intersubjectivity– act as constraints on reading and regulate claims to legitimacy. While these tests have limitations that prevent them from resolving all hermeneutic disagreements, literary criticism is nevertheless a rational, disciplined enterprise– though an inherently pluralistic one.
Scripture and Poetic Discourse inThe Subjection of Women
Authors: Aiken Susan Hardy
Published: February 2007

Although critics have largely overlooked the literary properties ofThe Subjection of Women, the essay's effectiveness as theory is inseparable from its poetic dimension. To persuade an unsympathetic audience of a radically subversive thesis, Mill weaves into his argument a poetic subtext modeled on the preeminent mythos of the Western world, the biblical account of history from the fall to paradise. At the same time, aware that Scripture has historically been used to authorize patriarchal values, he exploits the self-critical impulse inherent in biblical hermeneutic traditions, formulating a thematics of language, writing, and interpretation that allows him to turn patriarchal discourse against itself. He dismantles the very myth he employs in order to remake it as a vehicle for his liberating vision.
The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch'sSecretum
Authors: Kahn Victoria
Published: February 2007

Critics of Renaissance literature have recently claimed that the active role of the reader in the production of meaning is only recognized in the sixteenth century. While numerous counterexamples can be found in classical and medieval literature, this essay focuses on the active role of the fictional reader in Petrarch'sSecretumin order to demonstrate the limited applicability of such a claim to the early Renaissance. While critics have interpreted the exchange between Augustinus and Franciscus as the dramatic representation of Petrarch's divided will, they have failed to note that this dividedness is conveyed as well by the intertextuality of the work. In his willful misreading of Augustine'sConfessions, in his allusions to his own earlier letter on the ascent of Mont Ventoux, as well as in his use and abuse of citations and moral exempla, Petrarch dramatizes his conception of the will itself as a faculty of interpretation.
Nobel Lecture 1986: This Past Must Address Its Present
Authors: Soyinka Wole
Published: February 2007

A rather curious scene, unscripted, once took place in the wings of a London theater at the same time as the scheduled performance was being presented on the actual stage, before an audience. What happened was this: an actor refused to come on stage for his allocated role. Action was suspended. A fellow actor tried to persuade him to emerge, but he stubbornly shook his head. Then a struggle ensued. The second actor had hoped that, suddenly exposed to the audience in full glare of the spotlight, the reluctant actor would have no choice but to rejoin the cast. And so he tried to take the delinquent actor by surprise, pulling him suddenly toward the stage. He did not fully succeed, so a brief but untidy struggle began. The unwilling actor was completely taken aback and deeply embarrassed—some of that tussle was quite visible to a part of the audience.
Women's Speech and Silence in Hartmann von Aue's Erec
Authors: McConeghy Patrick M.
Published: February 2007

The speech behavior of Erec and his wife, Enite, in Hartmann's late twelfth-century Arthurian epic seems to support the view that women in strongly patriarchal societies are expected to speak with men rarely and to employ appropriate negative-politeness strategies to minimize the imposition. When Lady Enite breaks the rules, her husband imposes, on pain of death, a command of silence. She repeatedly disobeys but saves her life by using the requisite strategies to beg for forgiveness. Her impudence is nevertheless punished with demotion to servant status. On closer analysis, however, one must agree with Erec that he has merely been testing his wife and note that Hartmann is advocating a far more active and vocal role for women in the marriage relationship than first meets the eye.
The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
Authors: Rolleston James L.
Published: February 2007

An essay on language that Benjamin wrote in 1916 provides access to his “arcades project” (Das Passagenwerk), the materials on nineteenth-century Paris that he collected from 1927 until his death, in 1940. The arcades, glass-and-steel structures enclosing spaces between houses into exotic commercial zones, function as Benjamin's emblems of capitalist modernity. Rhythms of ceaseless production and obsolescence not only absorb all counterideologies (revolution) but control the language of possible experience. By juxtaposing documents on objects, technologies, and dreams with glimpses of allegorical clarity in Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, and others, Benjamin seeks to establish a text that will both embody and unmask the myth of history that obscures these rhythms. His goal is a structure of quotation that will speak for itself. Such speaking requires and makes possible “awakened” readers, able to translate the repetitious syntax of commodified individualism into a usable political language.
The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen
Authors: Templeton Joan
Published: February 2007

One of modern feminism's most crucial literary texts has incited a systematic backlash that would save its author from feminism, denying that mere gender can have a place in Ibsen's universal art or claiming that Nora Helmer is too inconsistent, frivolous, dishonest, abnormal, or unwomanly to be a feminist heroine. The argument that Nora represents not Woman but Everyman is a gender-based tautology in itself; applied to the play's thoroughgoing feminist text it becomes doubly nonsense. The confused notions that Nora's critics have about feminism and its relation to art lead them to uphold equally illogical positions, and their charges against Nora, which repeat those of her foil and husband, constitute both a serious misreading and, unintentionally, a kind of spurious deconstruction that denies the play's coherence and worth. Finally, research on Ibsen's life proves that, all claims to the contrary, his intentions in A Doll House were thoroughly feminist.
Masks, Margins, and African American Modernism: Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery
Authors: Bérubé Michael
Published: February 2007

What little critical discussion exists on Harlem Gallery (1965) has focused on the question of whether high modernist verse is appropriate to African American art. But Tolson's work is itself “about” modernism—and modernism's relation to African American culture; it is thus better read for its idea of an African American avant-garde than for the question of whether its technique is recognizably “modernist.” The poem's ideological commitment to modernism eventually involves the delegitimation of separatist populism, and Harlem Gallery achieves its argumentative (ideological) “certainty” largely by refusing to specify the historical and cultural position of the avant-garde it invokes—an avant-garde that had, by 1965, become part of the cultural lingua franca. In critical retrospect, however, Tolson's charged advocacy of modernism places him close and yet opposed to Houston Baker, whose Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance can be read as a postmodern, revisionary redefinition of what Tolson took African American modernism to be.
Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American Literature
Authors: Benston Kimberly W.
Published: February 2007

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.
Twice Bitten: The Fate of Africa's Culture Producers
Authors: Soyinka Wole
Published: February 2007

Let us anchor ourselves, for a start, to some acceptable terrain of cultural definitions. I shall use an example from our not too distant encounters. Few will disagree with me today, if I propose that we reject the concept of culture as realized in that manifestation known as Festac 77 [Festac: Black and African Festival of the Arts, Lagos, Nigeria, February 1977]. For, in the main, our people were offered a narrowed-down, reductionist aspect of culture in a gargantuan orgy of ill-organized spectacles. That negative reference is meant to limit the field, to eliminate decisively what often imposes itself on public consciousness as Culture with a capital C, or as something pronounced into being by a Ministry of Culture. What Nigeria exhibited was Culture as a sum, not even of parts, but of spectacular parts. Now, “spectacle” need not be superficial. Revelry can attain profound Dionysiac proportions, involve an inner ennoblement, almost cathartic—but it requires a consciously organizing hand, with an integrated motif around which even disparate acts of revelry are drawn. In those extravagant fields of “Festacian” revelry, however, such complex, enriching offerings were relegated to token, or symbolic, expositions, starved of funds and given scant coverage even in the media, and were finally relegated to the archives of that supracultural monstrosity known as the National Theatre. The theater of which nation, by the way? Of Nigeria? Or of Bulgaria, from where the concrete carbuncle was lifted, then grafted onto Lagos marshlands? What, in that general's cap or Christmas cake of a structure, constitutes even a fragment of Nigerian or African architectural intellect, modern or traditional? But more on that building in another place.
Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism
Authors: Bialostosky Don H.
Published: February 2007

If a dialogics, inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, were recognized as an art of discourse on the level of the arts of rhetoric and dialectic, it might shape a critical practice different from those governed by the more familiar arts. Tzvetan Todorov's recent essay on dialogic criticism and Merle Brown's account of F. R. Leavis's “collaborative exchange” in criticism contribute to the invention of such an art; further efforts to rationalize it seem desirable and possible in the present critical conversation.
Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot
Authors: Warhol Robyn R.
Published: February 2007

Narrative theorists generally assume that narratees in novels are distinct from actual readers, as narrators are from authors. In early novels by Stowe, Gaskell, and Eliot, however, “engaging narrators” encourage actual readers to identify with the “you” that appears in narrative interventions. These novelists explicitly hoped to stir actual readers' sympathy for real-world sufferers, possibly even to move readers to action. An engaging narrator, unlike a “distancing” one, calls the narratee “you” (not “the reader”); assumes that the narratee sympathizes with the story; claims that the characters are “real”; and consistently directs the actual reader to consider the parallels between the fiction and “real life.” Since these strategies seem to originate in certain nineteenth-century women's texts, narrative theory's omission of them may have implications for gender criticism.
The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors
Authors: Rivkin Julie
Published: February 2007

Strether's final gesture of renunciation, like his various attempts to live vicariously through those around him, follows from his own position of ambassador—both for Mrs. Newsome and for Henry James. The logic he invokes in the closing scene to justify his renunciation denies the ambassador any direct profits in his own person but permits him to delegate to others his desire to “live all [he] can.” This Jamesian logic of delegation conforms to the Derridean “logic of the supplement” and governs both the novel's fictional and its compositional plots of the deviation from authority and the mediation of experience. In particular, it regulates the novel's central thematic conflict between a New England theory of representation as the preservation of an original and a Parisian theory of representation as a potentially infinite dispersal of delegates without a guiding origin or authority.
“Turning and Turning”: Coleridge on Our Knowledge of the External World
Authors: Jackson H. J.
Published: February 2007

As a conceptual framework, the ascending spiral does not originate with Coleridge, but it appears in his work in a prominent and distinctive form. Although he used the figure at first to describe the external world—and modified it for that purpose during the 1820s—Coleridge soon connected it with the human world of the mind as well. Attempts to put it to work as a principle of development in his writings include the revisedFriendof 1818 and theAids to Reflectionof 1825.
“The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor”: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado about Nothing
Authors: Cook Carol
Published: February 2007

The comic conclusion of Much Ado about Nothing, which ends with the conventional closure provided by multiple marriages, leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated. The language of the play sets up a complex association of the word, the sword, and the phallus and represents the “merry war” between the sexes as a masculine struggle to maintain control of representation. To read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated. Masculine privilege is contingent on the legibility of women, whose ambiguous “seeming” gravely threatens the men of Messina and provokes them to use various defensive strategies against it, from the exchange of tendentious jokes to the symbolic sacrifice of Hero. The play itself is implicated in these strategies insofar as the characters' plot to recuperate Claudio through the fiction of Hero's death is also the plot of the play.
Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis: Ovidian Lovers at the Fontaine d'Amors in Guillaume de Lorris'sRoman de la rose
Authors: Harley Marta Powell
Published: February 2007

The essay returns readers of theRoman de la roseof Guillaume de Lorris to the well of Narcissus, or the Fontaine d'Amors, and explores Guillaume's reliance on two additional Ovidian myths, those of Hermaphroditus and Attis, in his re-creation of the Narcissus setting. An examination of the evidence for Guillaume's familiarity with the two myths precedes the discussion of the contributions that the Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis myths make to Guillaume's depiction of romantic sexual love. The essay rejects the notion that Amant's fall into love represents a transcendence of Narcissus's tragedy; instead it urges that Amant himself falls into a destructive passion that has its origin in self-love.