George Gascoigne was more than “the first conscious purist in his art.” With wit and energy he sought to solve a wide range of urgent Elizabethan literary problems. To his credit stand the first English prose comedy, translation of the first tragedy from the Italian, the first mask and regular English satire, the first critical English treatment of prosody.

During the year 1818, while Washington Irving was at work on the sketches and stories of The Sketch Book, he wrote to his friend Brevoort: “I have been for some time past engaged in the study of the German language, and have got so far as to be able to read and splutter a little. It is a severe task, and has required hard study; but the rich mine of German literature holds forth abundant reward.” The first of the “abundant rewards” which he won from the “rich mine of German literature” are to be seen in his use of German materials for the four so-called short stories in The Sketch Book (1819–1820). At the end of his Dresden diary, which came to a close on July 11, 1823, he wrote, perhaps with himself in mind:

Solitary miners of literature in Germany—men working hours and hours each day in dull little towns.

Terza Rima is a series of threes, the two outer lines of each riming with each other, the inner line riming with the two outer lines of the next three; in homely terms, like a pile of paper cones set into each other. The first rime in a canto and the last therefore occur only twice, but all the rest three times; none is dropped before a new rime is begun, or, except at the beginning and end of a canto, is confined to a single terzina. A consequence of this structure is that, while (if the sense permits) one or more terzine may be cut off at the beginning or end of a canto without detection of the loss, this is impossible anywhere else; the alternation of rimes and the linking with the preceding and following terzine would be upset. Accordingly omission of lines or passages occurs in the manuscripts with notable rarity.1 This result of the verse form no doubt is well known to some, but, so far as I find, it has never been mentioned in print.

Although a good deal has been written about L'Etranger in the light of Camus's philosophic insights in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the verbal similarities between these two works have been used only sporadically in interpreting the novel. Carl Viggiani, whose essay on L'Etranger appears to have dealt most fully with the symbolic undercurrent of the novel and Meursault's relation to Sisyphus has concentrated almost solely on detached archetypal motifs while largely neglecting any sort of progressive or “novelistic” development of the protagonist as he moves from his mother's funeral to his final jail cell. I propose to demonstrate such a consistent development by viewing Meursault's adventure as a parable of mental awakening or coming to consciousness which corresponds in detailed thematic and imagistic ways to the adventure of the mind in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

That preciosity is only a relative term will be readily endorsed by anyone who has studied the critical literature devoted to Jean Giraudoux. Some critics hurl the word as a reproach and condemnation, while others give themselves pains to plead or explain Giraudoux's case. Each, as well as the author himself, feels certain that preciosity is the word which will label and pigeon-hole him exactly; but alas, each proceeds to suggest a different nuance until the subject becomes quite confusing. The word preciosity itself suffers as many interpretations as classicism or romanticism, so a precise definition is out of the question. Originally associated with the seventeenth century arbiters of taste in language and etiquette, the term has since broadened its scope considerably. Literary historians have found it a convenient label for subtlety and refinement wherever these qualities may appear. Hence they do not mean an isolated phenomenon, but a fundamental characteristic of some minds, adapting and transforming itself according to time and place. Words such as gongorism, euphuism, concettism, conceptualism, or marivaudage are mutations or varieties of preciosity. According to popular usage, however, précieux means only précieux ridicule, synonymous with artificial or affected. In analyzing the preciosity of Jean Giraudoux from our own point of view, we shall find occasion to examine a great variety of critical opinions.

The construction of Degrés is based on a series of texts taken from Western literature and ranging from Homer to Keats. These are grouped in different ways around a brief sequence of events, and it is the responsibility of each reader to elaborate on the scanty story by using the information offered by these texts, to the extent of his knowledge, awareness, and willingness to participate in the creation of the novel. An analysis of the texts extracts the information each contains, then correlates relevant fact and possible interpretation in order to show clearly the two major themes of the novel: the relationship of Vernier to his nephew Eller, and the vast possibilities open to man in the world; and the three styles of presentation: as a structure, a personal experience, and a retrospective fact. Butor teaches his readers to understand his work by attempting to break down mental barriers between different fields of experience and force people to draw on the full range of their knowledge at all times.

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.”

In the discussion we must start with two really striking facts, both very little known even among scholars close to Modern Hebrew; at least these scholars are not aware of their importance. In the first place you may have heard that Hebrew is a revived language, the language of the Bible come to life again in Israel. This is only partly true. Modern Hebrew—I know of no parallel in this respect—is a recreated language, a new Hebrew dialect, made of several ingredients. Most of them go back to the various layers of Hebrew in the past. Still, it is—and I am exaggerating deliberately—a kind of invented language, a kind of Hebrew Esperanto.

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.

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.

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.

What happens when i watch a creature suffer or when i share in my dog's joy? what is the power of these emotions, what do they teach me about living with animals and engaging ethically with their differences? While these questions may still seem sentimental to some, they have become increasingly relevant to those who study animals. Emotions have made a remarkable comeback in recent animal literature and philosophy. Rehabilitated by a new wave of theorists, they have found their way into some of the most provocative contemporary reflections on animal ethics. Josephine Donovan, Jacques Derrida, Ralph Acampora, Donna Haraway, and others have all granted compassion theoretical pride of place. They share a critique of the rationalist bias of the justice-and-rights tradition and suggest that compassionate attention to animals is the “ground upon which theory about human treatment of animals should be constructed” (Donovan, “Attention” 174). For many such contemporary thinkers, then, compassion—a deeply affective way of sharing another's emotion—is the fundamental means of forging the ethical bond we have with nonhuman animals. Replacing the “calculable process” of current animal-rights theories with the emotional encounter of the other's living—and dying—reality, compassion offers a new understanding of responsibility and relationships (Wolfe, “Exposures” 19).

In Speculum, xvi (1941), pp. 149–166, A.C. Krey devoted to William, archbishop of Tyre, an article most welcome to students of French medieval romance. Rousing our interest in the work of this great chronicler of the crusades, he makes us read it, and reading it we find what we least expected: a historical background for Chrétien's Conte del Graal.

In October 2006, the Harvard University task force on general education issued a preliminary report describing and justifying a new program of general education for Harvard College. Contending that “[g]eneral education is the public face of liberal education,” the task force enumerated what a person liberally educated in the twenty-first-century United States should know—or, perhaps better, know how to think about in reasoned and nuanced ways (Preliminary Report 3). The report called for seven semester-long courses in “five broad areas of inquiry and experience”: Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change, The Ethical Life, The United States and the World, Reason and Faith, and Science and Technology. In addition, the task force suggested that students be required to take three semester-long courses that “develop critical skills”: writing and oral communication, foreign language, and analytic reasoning (6). Not surprisingly, “Reason and Faith” generated some of the most heated discussion—and it was the first suggested requirement dropped by the task force, replaced in December 2006 by a new category, “What It Means to Be a Human Being.” By the time of the final report, this too was gone, replaced by “Culture and Belief,” an area of inquiry that may include the study of religion but is broader in scope than what was initially proposed (Report of the Task Force 11–12).

In 1940 Djuna Barnes, author of the notorious but weak-selling Nightwood (1936), received a commission from Harry A. Bull, editor of the New York-based society magazine Town & Country, to write a short reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. The Nazi occupation of the erstwhile world capital of the avant-garde gave Town & Country's well-heeled readership reason to be nostalgic for Paris's glamorous recent past. As for Barnes, despite her dwindling book sales, she still had some celebrity—especially among those American readers who remembered her risqué onetime best seller Ryder (1928)—as an artist, journalist, and character of the Paris scene. Struggling with alcoholism and illness, and fiercely private, but desperate for money, she accepted the commission (Herring 242-50). Drawing on material in a notebook she had carried while working as a journalist in the 1920s (Caselli 116), as well as an unpublished 1939 essay, “Farewell Paris,” Barnes took her miniature memoir through several drafts over the course of 1940 and 1941.

As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” () culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.