Knowing of Gloria Anzaldúa's work from her 1981 coedited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color when I came across Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) at a gay and lesbian bookstore, I immediately picked it up. It would not be altogether hyperbolic to say that amid the contingencies of life and reading, that was one of my luckiest finds.

In political thought, there is perhaps no more penetrating scrutiny of the significance of the factual than hannah Arendt's essay “Truth and Politics.” “Facts and events,” Arendt observes, are the “invariable outcome of men living and acting together.” As such, they “constitute the very texture of the political realm” (227). Concerning words and deeds of many actors, factual truth must be the basis for deliberations and opinions in the political space. “Freedom of opinion,” she continues, “is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation” (234). Yet facts are infinitely fragile things, for they occur in the ever-changing field of human affairs, “established through testimony by eyewitnesses—notoriously unreliable—and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries” (239). Facts can be manipulated, even denied outright by the powers that be. The lie, opposed to factual truth as error is to rational truth, represents a deliberate political action, since it aims “to change the world” (246).

Twenty years after its publication in 1942, Camus's short novel L'Etranger has preserved its wide appeal through its haunting intensity, strange simplicity, and virile freshness. However, the general overemphasis on the philosophical significance of the story, the failure to deal with certain literary aspects, and the obscure or ambiguous features of the novel seem to call for a new appraisal of Camus's masterpiece.

The preface to Alastor, though at times obscure, ill-expressed, and digressive, is so much briefer and clearer than the poem itself that its interpretation of the work has, not unnaturally, been accepted without too close a scrutiny of the verse it explains. According to the preface, Alastor is an allegory: it represents a youth who is happy in study and in the contemplation of nature until suddenly, thirsting for “intercourse with an intelligence similar to” his own, “he images to himself the Being whom he loves,”—one who unites all that the poet, the philosopher, or the lover can require. “He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.” The remainder of the preface is given over chiefly to denouncing “those meaner spirits” who, no less than “the luminaries of the world,” “attempt to exist without human sympathy” but with whom the poem does not deal. The sounding, irrelevant moralizing of this paragraph tends to conceal two important observations: “The Poet's self-centered seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin,” and the Power of human sympathy struck him “with sudden darkness and extinction by awakening ... [him] to too exquisite a perception of its influences.”

The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin's first collection of essays, is even more “deformed by assumption” than his autobiography admits. Architecture is defined as poetic for genteel tourists, who forget that the buildings whose beauty they admire required human labor and embody distinctions of class. Indeed, architectural poetry expresses a myth of class harmony: buildings blending into the landscape, landowners welcomed by loving tenants. Yet this vision, though apparently sanctified by nature, is threatened—by industrial landscapes, cities, and less appealing aspects of nature itself. Without poetry, architecture might seem little more than the sort of instinctive shelter building we observe in the lower animals, hence suggestive of biological kinship between human beings and “brutes.” At the heart of Ruskin's architectural dreams is a feared disappearance of all distinctions, biological as well as social—a pre-Darwinian nightmare.

… of antres vast and desarts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak, such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It has usually been assumed that Othello's adventures came to Shakespeare out of the pages of Mandeville or Pliny. There is, however, another possibility and one likely to offer a far more exciting invitation to a poet with Shakspere's keen sensitivity to visual impressions. There is a startling resemblance between the items in the passage quoted and the quaintly decorated Renaissance maps.

Of the many disputed terms in the Poetics, “imitation,” has always been one of the most fruitful of discussion and of misconception; and these misconceptions are particularly significant because, for whole periods, they were potent in moulding creative activity not only in literature, but also in painting and in music. When “ imitation ” is considered in the light of its technical use in Plato and in Aristotle, its real meaning emerges with some distinctness. Far from the naturalistic theory of a direct and slavish copy of objects and actions, Aristotle's is a distinctly idealistic conception, and signifies “ creating according to a true idea.” Thus, when we are told that Art imitates Nature, “ Nature ” is not a particular thing or act, but is the creative force of the universe. With this conception, we can justify Aristotle's declaration that music is the most imitative of all the arts: it is the most fluid; and its flux is governed most completely by the universal laws of unity, proportion, and symmetry. The conception is almost Platonic; and it makes Aristotelian appear in a sense almost diametrically opposed to the common meaning of the Latin imitatio and the English “ imitation.”

As Heinrich Zimmer—GGA (1890), p. 818, n. 1—saw correctly, the name Arthur is the regular derivative of the Lat. Artorius in Brythonic. Thurneysen—ZCPh, xx (1933), 136—remarks: “Zimmer hatte gesehen, dass Arthur die regelmässige britannische Entwicklung von lat. (Artor oder) Artorius sein kann”, the long Lat. o becoming u in Celtic.

Of Shakespeare's four great tragedies the Christian overtones of Othello have been least apprehended. Critics have seen in. it a noble soul caught in the toils of a diabolically cunning being, who tempts him to doubt the divine goodness of one in whom he has absolute faith, but they have failed to see the symbolic force of the characters and the action. For the Elizabethans, however, the noble soul of Othello, the diabolic cunning of Iago, and (he divine goodness of Desdemona would not have had a loosely metaphoric meaning. Desdemona, who in her forgiveness and perfect love, a love requited by death, is reminiscent of Christ, would have represented Christian values; Iago, who in his envious hatred and destructive negativism is reminiscent of Satan, would have represented anti-Christian values. The choice that Othello had to make was between Christian love and forgiveness and Satanic hate and vengefulness. When he exclaimed (III.iii.447—149), “Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow celli / Yield up, 0 love, thy crown and hearted throne / To tyrannous hate,” he was succumbing to the devil, and, like all men who succumb to the devil, his fall was reminiscent of that of Adam.

An annotated transcription, with commentary, of the texts of two letters (21 July 1762 and 3 October 1765) in Baretti's recently discovered commonplace book. The letters offer autobiographical insight into Baretti's various disappointments and persecutions on the continent. The first one provides the original to which Johnson's letter of 21 December 1762 (Chapman, No. 147), one of his best known, is the reply.

The MLA is a vital association whose aim is to maintain the study of languages and literatures as a necessary and basic component of our culture. Its evolution in the last few years, guided by the suggestions of the membership and implemented by the central MLA Headquarters’ Executive Director and staff, corresponds to the evolution in our cultural and educational situation. But in 1975 the Association, whether as a whole or via its individual members, has not taken any effective stand to counteract the deleterious effects upon the profession of an economic and cultural regression that is threatening the future of humanistic study in schools and universities. An overall effort to counteract the present trend is indispensable.

Recent work at the intersection of literary history and sound studies has taught us to regard lyric poetry as a sonic medium in its own right, but what sort of medium is it? This article unfolds lyric's intrinsic intermediality by way of the American composer Harry Partch and his brief collaboration with William Butler Yeats. Rekindling Yeats's turn-of-the-century dream of a new art uniting word and music, Partch's experiments setting poetry to microtonal music involved notating the subtle melodies of speech with new scales and instruments–homemade lyres, in fact. Built to compete with the phonograph, these new-old media pressed lyric to its absolute limit as a symbolic medium, clarifying both lyric's intermediality and its sensitivity to technological change. When Partch, who spent several years as an itinerant “hobo” in the 1930s, transplanted his Yeatsian speech-music to the transient shelters of the Depression-era West and began notating migrant voices, this compositional practice heralded unprecedented possibilities for the literary inscription of speech.

I'm gratified that the most widely circulated journal in literary studies has solicited the skill and attention of nine such erudite interlocutors, including both critics and creators, to formally respond to my book Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. It's also a bit of a surprise, albeit a pleasing one, since Why Comics? is my first single-authored book not aimed at the readership of PMLA.

Durch die geschichte der deutschen Literatur im hochsten ihrer Augenblicke geistert die Gestalt der Bettina Brentano, Frankfurterin italienischer Abkunft, ein Licht das sich als Irrlicht gab, eine ewig unruhige Flamme, nicht weit strahlend, aber unauslöschbar, auftauchend hier und dann wieder dort, lästig in seiner zitternden Unruhe, aber mit der Stetigkeit eines Naturgesetzes wiederkehrend, so füllt sie die erste Hälfte des vorigen Jahrhunderts aus. Man braucht sie nur für einen Augenblick wegzudenken und man fühlt sofort, was alles fehlen würde, wenn sie nicht da gewesen wäre. So viel Leichtes, Sprudelndes, Spontanes und Beschwingtes, das in der Literatur der Welt kaum eine Parallele besitzt, wurde uns nur in ihr geschenkt, so viel Seelensprache Dinge zu benennen, die noch ungenannt waren. Eine Virtuosin der Liebe, so scheint es, aber soviel sie von Liebe spricht, es ist nichts Lüsternes in ihr, nichts von Ungesundem, Falsch-Mondänem, nichts was an Elinor Glyn erinnern konnte. Wollte man nach einer Verwandtschaft in neuerer Zeit suchen, so wäre es die zur Grafin Fanny Reventlow, dieser ewig liebenden Sucherin nach dem Geistigen im Manne. Bettina war mehr, sehr viel mehr gegeben als der armen durchgegangenen Komtesse. Sie hatte kein Vaterhaus dem man zu entlaufen gezwungen war. Sie war relativ glücklich geboren, in ahnlichen Kreisen unter ahnlichen Verhaltnissen in derselben Stadt wie Goethe, sechsunddreissig Jahre nach ihm. Sie war Erbin alles dessen was er geschaffen hatte. Nicht gebunden in die patrizischen Sitten der alten Familien, der Gunderodes, Stallburgs, Adlerflychts und Lersners, auch nicht zugehorig zur Klasse der Ratsfamilien, die unter sich die hochsten Amter teilten und denen unter Grossvater Textors Regierung ein merkbarer Miasmus entströmte, aber wohl geboren genug um überall Zutritt zu haben. Wenn Peter Anton Brentano noch kleinburgerliche Zuge geblieben waren, seine Kinder waren Leute von Welt und Bettina war so sehr Dame, dass sie aus alien Regeln schlagen, ein freier Mensch und ganz sie selbst sein konnte, seit ihrer Heirat mit Achim von Arnim auch “bien aparantée,” so sehr, dass ihre jüngste Tochter ihre Heirat mit Herman Grimm der Familie gegenuber zunachst geheim hielt—ein Burgerlicher!

Caroline Levine's Forms has been received as a prototype and a manifesto, a sign of the new formalist times in American literary studies. In the cover endorsements for the hardbound edition, Amanda Claybaugh calls Forms a “book of a generation,” Bruce Robbins “a big, brilliant, necessary book”—large claims for a text of 150 pages. Levine's treatise promises no less than “a way to understand the relations among forms—forms aesthetic and social, spatial and temporal, ancient and modern, major and minor, like and unlike, punitive and narrative, material and metrical” (23). Levine claims to provide “a reading practice that does not fit any familiar formalism,” a practice that instead “draws from all” formalisms (21).

The divided self in James’s fiction may be regarded as an inevitable structural consequence of James’s desire to dramatize the problem of the free spirit in an enslaving world. But the divided self required by art is not essentially different from the divided self known to psychology, and an understanding of the anxieties of that self, particularly of the “obsessive imagery” James uses to depict those anxieties, enriches our understanding of James’s work. The fear of a world that threatens one’s being issues in an elaborate development of an escape motif; of imagery of seizure by the eye and by the world of appearances; and of imagery of petrification, reflecting a dread of being turned into a mere tool or machine. James’s vision of “the great trap of life” permits him to come to terms with his own limitations and culminates in a searching philosophic examination of the problem of free will and determinism.

Japanese modernity is often equated with Westernization, and the cross-cultural link is restricted to the Western influence on Japan. The translations of Western philosophy and poetry in the Meiji period (1868-1912), however, relate to native symbolist poetics, in a way that has earlier parallels: Japan's alchemical cultural interaction with China in the transformative cultivation of Zen in the medieval period and its complex responses to Neo-Confucianism in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). The consistent metatextual dynamics suggested by these parallels cannot be adequately described through influencebased comparative methods. This essay defines Japanese modernism as a creative conflict stimulated by the introduction of transcendence-based texts into fundamentally immanence-grounded aesthetic, epistemological, and semiotic systems.

Kafka’s writings have been illuminated by a spectrum of critical altitudes encompassing theological, psychological, ontological, and existential interpretations. In the present interpretation of Der Prozeß, language, reading, and writing subvert these categories while being bound to them. The Court functions as a literary text, extending and erasing itself and exacting an exchange of writing from its servants and wards. Joseph K., like der Mann in the parable of the doorkeeper, is excluded from the Law while claimed by it. This paradox characterizes K.’s experience. Like literary language, the Court seems to be identical to everyday existence, but, in the multiplicity of the often mutually negating legal interpretations that it entertains and in its anaerobic atmosphere, the Court defines itself as the negation of existence and its logic. Der Prozeß thus demarcates the border between literature and the life it seems to represent.