On a recent trip to nicosia, cyprus, i grabbed a city map from my hotel. The venetian walls of the old city formed a perfect circle on the map. But the northern part of Nicosia was blank—not a road named or landmark identified, not even the airport or the Venetian column that marks the center of the circular city—except for the notation “Area under Turkish occupation since 1974.” Of course, Turkey is a secular nation, but the divide between Turkish and European Cyprus is also a divide between majority-Muslim and majority-Christian populations. A member of the European Union since 2004, Cyprus is, like the rest of Europe, haunted by a spectral Islam that it has difficulty acknowledging, let alone assimilating into a broader cosmopolitan identity.

Unless and until the Modern Language Association changes its (unwritten) law that the presidency is usually a consolation prize bestowed upon an elder statesman, presumably because he or she has managed to live long enough to become emeritus (not for any merit, but by automatic fiat of the Board of Trustees), the presidential address will lead to reminiscence. We who no longer teach are particularly dangerous. All our academic lives, we have had captive audiences who could not choose but hear our auditions. Now that no one longer receives credit for listening to us, younger generations rightly avoid us ancient mariners, as in my youth I tried to duck American or Canadian relatives who wished to refight the Civil or the Boer Wars.

Characteristic of the Italian Language is the modern use of the conditional perfect instead of the present. This interchange of tenses is not permitted by either of her two living sister languages, French and Spanish. Nor does English admit such constructions: we are not allowed to say, for example, “He said he should have done it tomorrow,” but must say, “He said he would do it tomorrow.” In Italian on the other hand, there are numerous examples of this construction as the following quotations will illustrate:

Recently, a gifted undergraduate came to me with some urgent questions: Should he major in literature? And if he did, what practical benefits might he realize? I asked one question: “Are you in love?” By this I meant, “Are you in love with literature?” Then I inquired, “Does your heart skip a beat when you encounter your love? Do you ache when the two of you are separated? Do you resent anything that intrudes on you and your love?”

It is all too tempting on first acquaintance with Gide's La Porte étroite to see in it only the pathetically tragic tale of a young girl who believed too wholeheartedly that “virtue is its own reward.” Not too surprising, for this seems to be the reaction Gide intended to elicit. He protested against the view of some critics that he had “evolved” to a more sympathetic moral and religious attitude since 1902 and the publication of L'Immoraliste. He insisted repeatedly that he sought rather to make the work a criticism of a certain furiously deplorable protestantism, a puritanism that curiously evokes Jansenism, a misplaced sense of heroism which he characterizes as a sort of “cornélianisme gratuit.” This last must certainly apply to Alissa rather than to Jérôme.

Responding to a reader's inquiry about what second language to study, the Vanity Fair columnist “Dame Edna” stated, “Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named García Lorca, but I'd leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you… . Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German.” I am aware that Dame Edna is a ficticious persona, but I disagree with the so-called entertainment value ascribed to this column. Whom does it entertain? The readership of Vanity Fair is largely upper-middle-class and upper-class white. The Hispanic community, outraged by the remarks, demanded a retraction, reminding Vanity Fair that if the whole Hispanic labor force went on strike, the US economy would break down. Readers cited as well the number of radio and TV stations broadcasting in Spanish, sixty to seventy percent of whose audience can follow programs in Spanish and English (the United States' bilingualism, much to Dame Edna's grief, is not English-French). Additionally, more than half the students in schools and universities who enroll in a second language choose Spanish. The voices calling for retraction were not leaf blowers but architects, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, athletes, writers, moviemakers, painters, journalists, governors, and bankers. And, last and most obvious, Hispanics make up the largest minority group in the United States (at present some thirty-seven million, or thirteen percent, and probably some fifty million by 2010 [Klineberg]).

When “Six Cultures” appeared as part of the MLA Reports of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in 1961, we planned to make periodic revisions and we here publish revised and updated versions of the lists in four languages. Readers interested in French and Luso-Brazilian cultures may consult the original lists in the Appendix to the MLA Selective List of Materials (New York: MLA, 1962. $1.00) or they may obtain a reprint of the “Six Cultures” article by sending 50 cents to the MLA Materials Center. We reprint here the general introduction by Lawrence Wylie, Chairman of the original committee.

Cleanth Brooks wrote recently that the early story, “Fifty Grand,” “presents Hemingway's basic theme quite as well as The Old Man and the Sea.” “Nor do I think,” he continued, “that Hemingway in his most recent story now finds the world any more meaningful than he once found it.” For once Mr. Brooks was following rather than initiating opinion. Ever since The Old Man and the Sea was published, critics have admitted that in its effect upon the reader the book is somehow different from Hemingway's earlier work. Those who like the difference and those who do not have tried to account for it in many ways, most of them familiar to readers of the early reviews and of the surprisingly few later readings of the story. But to a man commentators have assumed that whatever the story's new impact—whatever the nature of that affirmative power most readers have felt—it reflects no essential change in Hemingway's view of an inscrutable natural order in which, ultimately, man can play no part. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that The Old Man and the Sea reveals Hemingway's successful achievement at last of a coherent metaphysical scheme—of a philosophical naturalism which, although largely mechanistic in principle, embraces the realm of human affairs and gives transcendent meaning to the harsh inevitabilities Hemingway has always insisted upon recording.

The similarity in structure and content between the South English Legendary and the Legenda Aurea was recognized more than fifty years ago by Horstmann, although he ruled out as wholly impossible the idea that the English author could have made use of the Latin collection.

The Alpha Bravo Universe is reported to be the title of a massive fiction that Norman Mailer has in hand, a three-part novel of which Ancient Evenings is the first part. The title has its origin, however, in a chapter cut from the final draft of a 1970 book, Of a Fire on the Moon. The discarded chapter, 1 argue, not only sheds light on the composition of the moon book but also clarifies the dualistic psychology that surfaced first in Mailer's 1957 essay “The White Negro” and that underlies all his subsequent writing. Fire represents his ambitious attempt to pare down his own stylized romantic personality and come to terms with contemporary technology. In the drafts and published text, we can follow his efforts to present American society in its totality and can distinguish between possibilities available to the romantic ego and those that no longer seem to be.

In the months since the emory conference, my relation to disability studies has changed. I attended the conference as a spectator, eager to probe the shape and problems of the field. My PhD is in medieval studies, and I was beginning a project on historical representations of disability, deformity, and miraculous healing. Now, as a member of the MLA's Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, I am involved in the post-conference evaluatory process and in other disability-related professional initiatives. Each stage of this journey has been informed by a growing awareness of what might in other contexts be articulated as a problem of field identity. When I read the conference title—Disability Studies and the University—and looked through the program, I found myself imagining conversations between the theme and the paper titles. That there was such a difference between what I envisioned and what I saw might be an index of my interpretive skills, but it might also indicate the challenges of defining and recognizing disability studies.

Reactions in France to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's phenomenally successful film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) tend to fall into two groups. According to one perspective, the film is a superficial and racially sanitized form of cine-tourism; according to another, it is a profound and sincere celebration of traditional French values. For both groups, the cultural work the film performs coalesces around close-ups of the face of Audrey Tautou, the film's star. This essay asks how Tautou's face and the close-up shot it exemplifies can say so much while showing so little. By drawing on the theoretical history of camera distance, it argues that the formal design of the close-up, which demands simultaneously an analytic and an affective response to the visual image, usefully informs the relations between political reactions to the film and French debates around the question of national identity at the start of the twenty-first century.

Two arguments about theory and comparative literature have been influential in recent years. on the one hand, there has been much talk of the “death of theory,” or the “end of theory,” or “post-theory” in the humanities. On the other hand, there is a “crisis” of comparative literature, perhaps a perennial condition, if it hasn't culminated in the “death of a discipline.” Under these circumstances, the question “What does the comparative do for theory?” assumes a poignant significance, which depends on what is meant by “comparative” and “theory.” To answer this question, I explore an epistemological category I call “comparativity”—that is, metacomparison or the theoretical potential of comparison—in contrast to the usual term “comparison.” If there is a crisis of comparative literature, it may be because we have moved too far from thinking comparativity as a way of knowing and engaging the world. Epistemology does not precede ontology, or ethics, or politics, but it is deeply involved in all of them. In this paper, I will argue for comparativity as at once an epistemological and metaepistemological mode of inquiry. Comparativity cannot be displaced or replaced by another disciplinary way of thinking, for comparativity is a trans- and metadisciplinary thought process, which by virtue of its self-critical reflexivity applies to all humanistic studies. My focus is therefore on the theoretical implications of comparativity.

The erudite and industrious Georg Rollenhagen is usually remembered only as author of the Froschmeuseler. Among the authors of the sixteenth century who are accorded at least a paragraph or two in our modern histories of German literature probably none has been so much ignored or become so mistreated a step-child. Study of his life and works reveals a seeming jack-of-all-trades, but he was a master of many. He was a man who spent his life in the narrow limits of a region between Berlin and Magdeburg, yet he created a great school and, more than that, wrote vivid pictures of his time and a long poem, an animal verse-epic, that everybody read.

Although Bulwer-Lytton, in the preface to Richelieu and in various footnotes, acknowledges certain sources for his drama, notably two French novels, he nowhere records any obligation to French dramas. At the same time he remarks that in handling historical data he has availed himself of that “license with dates and details which poetry permits and which the highest authorities in the Drama of France herself have sanctioned.” This statement in his preface raises a two-fold question: Who were the “highest authorities” whom Bulwer had in mind, and to what extent was he indebted to them? In such an inquiry no less than three French dramatists offer material for consideration.

In an age of questioning like ours, literary definitions can as little as anything else escape being called to the bar to give an account of themselves, and of their right to exist; and some, no doubt, would say that the case has already been decided against them. Personally, after having engaged in framing a few of my own, I do not share that view; and what I wish to do here is to consider briefly what gives literary definitions their validity, and what considerations ought to guide us in framing them. The task will involve some attention to the general speculative background against which purely literary problems are relieved, and may bring together some aspects which will derive at least relative novelty from their juxtaposition.