Victor Hugo, le poète le plus éminent de son époque, était aussi un des romanciers les plus en vue de la jeune école romantique. Auteur dramatique, la richesse et la fécondité de son imagination étaient renommées. Sa réputation de penseur et d'artiste était grande. De moindres personnages eussent été satisfaits. Pas Hugo. Son ambition convoitait une réputation d'érudit. La parution de Notre-Dame de Paris en 1831 lui permit d'ajouter cette nouvelle fleur à sa couronne.

The scientfic confession of faith of the Neo-Grammarians, already upon various occasions fragmentarily announced, has found its first systematic presentation in Paul's ‘Principien der Sprachgeschichte,’ which has just appeared in a second revised and enlarged edition. Inasmuch as this book reflects the views of a number of distinguished scholars who claim to have revolutionized linguistic science, it demands our attention a priori and necessitates an exposé of its fundamental views and presumptions : for this much commended New Method of the school of neo-grammarians must finally take its stand upon linguistic principles entirely different from those of earlier enquirers. It is these principles which determine the method even should they be as yet but half realized. A non-partisan critic will be little disturbed if the members of the new school boast of feeling greater earnestness on behalf of science than others, or if in any other way they recommend their new tendenz. He will endeavor, before all things, to follow out the historical development of the new principles, he will test their worth and authority, from which the propriety of their application would readily appear.

Philosophical poetry is seldom original; and ever since the assertion by Alexander Dalrymple, in the eighteenth century, that “Sir John Davies' poem on the Immortality of the Soul is chiefly taken from Nemesius,” there has been speculation as to the source of that once popular work. Grosart, in editing Davies' poems, rejected Dalrymple's statement as “absolutely untrue, an utter delusion,” and claimed for his author the merit of “deep and original thought.” But other critics have generally ignored this claim and suggested various sources for the poet's inspiration. Courthope again named Nemesius as the most probable. In a volume devoted exclusively to the study of this poem, Professor E. H. Sneath maintained that Davies was influenced by four thinkers: Aristotle, Cicero, Nemesius and Calvin. A German scholar more recently denies any influence of Nemesius, but thinks Davies derived his ideas from a study of Aristotle's De Anima modified by a reading of religious commentators, notably Thomas Aquinas. The latest and best suggestion, although it has been presented only in a brief and casual manner, is, that Nosce Teipsum is a re-statement of the Neo-Platonic tradition which permeated Christian thought in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

A unque la temática religiosa constituya una de las facetas más ricas de toda la creación galdosiana, no cabe duda que ésta alcanza su apogeo en el autor, como cantera de materia novelable, entre 1876 y 1878. En cuatro Novelas de primera época, publicadas entre los años citados, concentró Galdós toda su extraordinaria capacidad de concreción literaria sobre esa problemática de actualidad insoslayable: Boña Perfecta (abril, 1876), Gloria (diciembre, 1876; mayo, 1877), Marianela (enero, 1878) y La familia de León Roch (junio, octubre y diciembre, 1878).

In literary studies, our current use of global is often implicitly or explicitly invested in the notion of an ever-widening network of communications, of unprecedented linkages among previously disconnected or distinct cultural units. Where things were formerly separate and unrelated, they are now believed to be increasingly connected through multiple contacts, in processes that are rendered cosmopolitan, international, and cross-cultural. The underlying assumption in much of the talk about globalization is that of inclusionism—of the possibilities of including, of incorporating things into a kind of coexistence that was once out of the question. If we translate this state of affairs into religious terms, globalization would probably appear in the form of the command “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

On the one hand, the gift presents itself as a radical Other of the commodity—and therefore also of work, insofar as the latter is understood as an investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit. On the other hand, the idea of the gift seems constantly to be drawn back under the horizon of rational exchange, and to be thus endlessly re-revealed as a secret ally of both work and the Work.

—Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work and the Gift

I have put together all these details to convince you that this recommendation of mine is something out of the common.

Quae ego omnia collegi, ut intellegeres non vulgarem esse commendationem hanc meam.

—Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, book 13

LAST FALL I FOUND IN MY OFFICE MAILBOX AN ENVELOPE FROM A SOPHOMORE ENGLISH MAJOR WHO HAD ASKED ME DURING THE SUMMER for a last-minute letter of recommendation for a scholarship competition. The envelope contained a handwritten thank-you note—and a gift certificate for a local restaurant. I e-mailed the student to thank her and to tell her that I couldn't accept the gift certificate since the letter I had written for her was part of my job as a teacher. She insisted; I insisted. She said that several teachers had turned her down before I agreed (from a hotel in Germany) to write for her. I felt rueful, as well as grateful to her for the token of gratitude that I couldn't accept. Eventually she won the debate: I accepted the printed piece of paper and took my daughters out to a free lunch.

Es gibt meines Wissens noch keine zusammenfassende historische oder theoretische Untersuchung über die dichterische Namengebung. Mir sind ausser kleineren Aufsätzen, die das Thema mehr plaudernd und feuilletonistisch behandeln, nur wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen über die Namen bei einzelnen Dichtern bekannt, z.B. bei Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Dickens, Raabe, Fontane. Gelegentliche Bemerkungen und Beobachtungen zu dem Thema finden sich natürlich überall verstreut. Es wäre sicher eine dankbare, wenn auch schwierige Aufgabe, die Frage, nach welchen Rücksichten und Prinzipien die Dichter ihre erfundenen Personen getauft haben, einmal im weitesten zeitlichen und räumlichen Umfange zu beantworten; die Unterschiede der Zeiten, der Völker, der Sprachen würden sich in diesem Spiegel klar auffangen lassen.

In identifying cinematic qualities—including Eisensteinian montage—in Faulkner's major fiction, scholars have conceived of film as an exclusively visual medium. This essay provides evidence of Faulkner's familiarity with Eisenstein's cinematic praxis by examining the similarities between the novelist's 1934 film treatment of Blaise Cendrars's Sutter's Gold and one that Eisenstein produced in 1930. It then argues that there is a striking continuity between the two treatments in the realm of sound—in particular, the imagining and inscription of film sound. Most surprising is the manner in which Faulkner's sonic experimentalism, clearly influenced by Eisenstein, works its way into the novel on which he was working at the time, Absalom, Absalom!. Informed by screen writing and film-sound technology, Faulkner's high-modernist novel contributes to emerging scholarly interest in the auditory culture of modernism.

Saint-Exupéry, whether by artistic design or by stylistic spontaneity, wreathes the pilot, the generic hero of his four novels, Courrier Sud, Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes, Pilote de guerre, in an aura of such hyperbole that the reader, raised on the banalities of the “nouveau roman,” might find such exaggeration naive if not ludicrous. Yet the legend of the Saint-Exupéryian hero is not cased in a rigid matrix. In these four works—the first two fiction, the others essentially true narrative—the imagery that forms the substance of the myth of the pilot undergoes a subtle transformation: legendary, mythological, and mystical in Courrier Sud, it is subtly and successively altered. In the final pages of Pilate de guerre the metamorphcsis is complete, the myth is dissipated in a profession of fraternal faith, and, through its hero, man is seen in his true perspective, more realistic but no less heroic.

Although a great deal has been written on the relation between Nietzsche and Wagner, no detailed study has been made hitherto of the period indicated in the title of this paper. And even here a comprehensive treatment of the relation is not attempted. Only one phase of it is considered. The question proposed is: What was Nietzsche's opinion of Wagner's music-dramas when he wrote the final version of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik? A chronological survey of Nietzche's notes, letters, and shorter essays of the period has been made, as far as they bear on the nature of tragedy in general and more specifically on its relation to music. His ideas are discussed in their development and in their relation to the theories of Wagner and of Schopenhauer on music and poetry, in the hope that at least a few of the lines in the vexed and vexing Nietzsche–Wagner record may be deciphered more clearly.

From a Middle-English poem narrating the events of the Trojan war, we learn that formerly in England, when folk gathered “at mangeres and at grete festes,” they listened gladly after meat to the “fair romance” of Horn, which “gestours” were then wont to recite; and, having this romance before us, we can readily understand the reason of its popularity: it interests us, as it did our forefathers, not only because it tells a tale of an ever-pleasing type, but also because it purports to record native English tradition.

Ruskin is no longer a controversial figure. Most contemporary critics, of art, of society, of literature, ignore him.

Ruskin's own weaknesses are responsible for much of this neglect—not least the flood of words which overflows the thirty-nine volumes of Cook and Wedderburn. No single volume, not even Unto This Last nor Praeterita, can be recommended without qualification, nor any single phase of Ruskin's work. His art judgments are often arrogantly inept, as toward Claude and Whistler and Renaissance architecture; his aesthetics is contradictory, homiletic; his social criticism is sometimes antiquarian, proposing quixotic reforms. The fervors of Ruskin's style offend current taste, with our preference for tight, flat, and uncommitted exposition.

Todo estudio y crítica referente al Poema de Mio Cid hace constar un hecho característico del mismo, su realismo. Sin embargo, creo que, por unas u otras razones, no se ha llegado a señalar claramente la verdadera importancia y alcance de ese realismo, o mejor dicho, su auténtica significación. Mi intención, en las líneas que siguen, es tratar de ponerla de relieve. Espero, con todo, no “imitar al pilluelo que, al ver una pared recién blanqueada, siente necesidad de mancharla escribiendo en ella alguna inconveniencia,” como don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, maestro en todo lo referente al Poema como en tantas otras cosas, ha dicho de los posibles cidófobos posteriores a su magno trabajo. No voy a tratar del Cid especialmente como personaje humano e histórico—aspecto al que don Ramón se refiere con las anteriores palabras—sino de la trama material y realista que el Poema ofrece a los ojos de quienes lo leemos hoy. Hay que tener en cuenta para ello, también, que otro rasgo bien conocido del Cantar es su verismo, “que rebosa por todas partes,”hasta el punto de que incluso “en menudos pormenores coincide el Poema con los datos históricos.” Milá y Fontanals lo consideraba como “fidelísimo espejo de un orden de hechos y costumbres que no serían bastantes a suplir los documentas históricos.” Sera inevitable, pues, que en algunos puntos de este trabajo me refiera también a la persona del Cid, quien, después de todo, si no puede ser considerado como un santo, tampoco como hombre sin honor ni ideales.

To have been elected to the presidency of this great Association of men and women of good will, of knowledge, talent, and rare discrimination, constituting what is probably the biggest congeries of first-class brains in this country, is the crowning honor of any teacher's career and an awe-inspiring experience. Your president for 1960, as he prepares to vanish into oblivion after his one address in sovereign capacity, first wishes to express his gratitude to those who selected him, and his apologies for the pretentious title announced. In this country, from the beginning and throughout her entire history, action has prevailed. Yet the nation has never showed much aversion for words. Politicians, preachers, college presidents, generals, men of affairs spreading relaxation through warmed up after-dinner anecdotes, members of those faculty committees to whom, in these days of trial and error and perseverance in error, the Almighty seems to have relinquished the running of the world, all indulge their propensity for eloquence. Those whom Homer might have called the shepherds of people, in Moscow and Havana and equatorial Africa, strike back at our garrulous nation with massive retaliation. Torrents of words may flow in the sumptuous hotels where our Association once a year congregates late in December (just before the inebriating vigil through which we shall pray for a virgin year to wash out our unfulfilled promises and our harrowing regrets over unwritten articles). But your President is severely restrained by the petrifying gaze of the Executive Secretary, and prevented by tradition from falling back upon the worthiest of all themes for any academic address: the eulogy of his predecessor. His predecessor, whose steel whip sheathed in velvety skin had long guided this Association, is comfortably assured of immortality as it is. An in domitable Samson Agonistes whom no Delilah or Pamela can ever betray, he hardly needs our words of gratitude, however deeply felt, to pursue his wrestling, in Washington, with the “innumerable force of spirits armed / that durst dislike” the power of foreign languages in the dubious battle now raging on our planet.

In British Museum Addit. MS. 34360 on folio 22 occurs one stanza of rime royal entitled “The question of halsam.” It is smooth in meter, well-balanced in thought, and practically perfect in stanza form, comparing very favorably in these respects with other minor lyrics of the early fifteenth century. The popularity of this poem is attested by its presence in many manuscripts of that century and by the fact that Caxton printed it together with a second seven-line stanza also ascribed to Halsham. Both of these lyrics are found in Bodley 3896, f. 195a (MS. Fairfax 16), which affords not only the earliest, but the most authentic text of these pieces:

The worlde so wide / thaire so remuable
The sely man / so litel of stature
The grove and grounde / of clothinge so mutable
The fire so hoote / and subtil of nature
The water neuer in oon / what creature
That made is of these foure / thus flyttyng
May stedfast be as here / in his lyving

The more I goo / the ferther I am behinde
The ferther behinde / the ner my wayes ende
The more I seche / þe worse kan I fynde
The lighter leve / the lother for to wende
The bet y serve / the more al out of mynde
Is thys ffortune not I / or infortune
Though I go lowse / tyed am I with a Lune

A solution to the mystery of Pearl must meet certain tests if it is to answer the questions: What is typified by the jewel and the jewel-maiden, and how are they related? What is the symbolic import of the story? Specifically, as J. P. Oakden has indicated, the gem must stand for something which the poet could represent as a pearl and at the same time as a maiden who had died in infancy and had been redeemed by Christ. Further, says Oakden, it must signify something that the poet (or his protagonist speaking in the first person) “lost, mourned, and could recover through the grace of God, strengthened by partaking of the Blessed Sacrament.”