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.

The existence of dipodic structure in English verse has been recognised by metrists only within a comparatively recent period of time. There have undoubtedly been two principal reasons for this failure of theory to take into account a very old and very deep-seated characteristic of English verse. Dipodic structure was, on the one hand, until the last forty years confined almost entirely to popular verse, while its sporadic occurrences in literary poetry were usually of such half-hearted nature as easily to escape the attention of the formal metrist. On the other hand, the study of dipodic verse has been handicapped by the lack of an objective method which could translate unsupported subjective feeling into scientific metrical proof. An attempt toward the establishment of such a method for the simplest form of dipodic verse is the object of this study.

Probably the chief reason for many of the linguistic irregularities of Old Northumbrian is the fact that the great bulk (about 98 per cent) of its literary remains exist in the form of glosses, in which a scribe is often so intent upon conveying the general meaning of a concept in the Latin parallel that he lets the outer dressing of the vernacular—the grammatical or syntactic form, even the spelling, of a word—take care of itself. The fact, however, that these glosses may be in consequence entirely untrustworthy as a basis for an acceptance or a rejection of linguistic rules need not detract from the interest that their anomalies may happen to afford us. Thus, in a recent survey of Northumbrian relics to observe the treatment therein of the instrumental case, there appeared no fewer than ten constructions which have not as yet been recorded in any systematic study of Old English case-syntax as a whole.

Erich Schmidt's thrilling discovery of the proto-form of Goethe's Faust came at a fateful hour. In the year 1887 the mechanistic evolutionism of the natural sciences still reigned almost unchallenged even in the field of literary criticism, which on the academic level at least was mainly philological in nature with occasional purple patches of “appreciation.” The philologist, regarding the Urfaust as a sort of “missing link,” pounced upon it and, in order to make it fit his hypotheses, tore it to pieces. The result was the famous “shred theory” of its genesis, the Fetzentheorie advanced by some of scholarship's most respected names— most notably perhaps, certainly most influentially, by Gustav Roethe, first chairman of the Goethe-Gesellschaft and disciple of Wilhelm Scherer. Even before the discovery of the Urfaust Scherer had of course made far-reaching conjectures regarding the original form and order of composition of Faust.In an essay first published in 1920 Roethe succeeded in reducing the Urfaust to no less than forty-one “shreds,” each of which, according to him, could have been written “at one sitting” (p. 676). Roethe's concept of the work is well summed up in the following words (p. 654): “Goethe, especially in his youth, was inclined to seize first upon that which he felt a strong urge to give form to and more than once he left it up to a later redaction whether the precious ‘patches’ (‘Fetzen‘) were to be sewn into a garment or not. The Urfaust, now, I regard as a provisional collection and redaction of such patches.” This might have been a harmless enough sort of game had not the players taken it upon themselves to cry down all attempts at esthetic interpretation which did not subscribe to their conjectures. Thus Roethe (p. 643) dismisses J. Minor's (not entirely consistent) effort to read the Urfaust as a work in its own right as unsuccessful because Minor slights problems of genesis. The idea that there might be some organic relationship between form and content seems to fill Roethe with a sense of the absurd—this approach he calls “a great, even mystic, overbending of the bow” (p. 677). No, for him the Urfaust remains “a tack, filled with little scraps of paper,” such as it had come down in legend, thanks to A. W. Schlegel.

The middle english poem King Robert of Sicily (King Roberd of Cisyle) is at one and the same time a metrical romance and an exemplum on the theme that the proud and mighty are brought low. The pious tale relates how a king, arrogant and boastful, is displaced from his throne by an Angel-usurper until the debased and beggared king learns proper humility. The story was widely known in the Middle Ages, both in Latin and in the vernacular tongues. Curiously enough, the poem has aroused almost no interest among English scholars, although the medieval English version achieved a well-merited popularity in its own day. It is indeed an affecting and carefully wrought narrative, sensitive to the tragic ironies of the pious “reversal.” Further study of this poem and its close analogues reveals the superiority of the English version; and its skillful synthesis of themes from folklore, Biblical commentary, and history not only encompasses a discriminating artistry, but provides fresh evidence of the process by which Biblical exegesis was transmuted into legend and into romance.

BOMBARDED BY THE DISCOURSE OF “TRAGEDY” FROM MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND GOVERNMENTAL OFFICIALS TRYING TO CHARACTERIZE post-Katrina New Orleans, I decided to reread William Faulkner. Ungluing myself from the computer screen, I hoped to distract myself with a literary version of another tragedy of the South. Faulkner's sense of the city's “paradox” and “foreign”-ness—in the case of this hurricane, the fury of climatic events that inexorably led to incomprehensible effects: much of its citizenry's forced migration, dispossession of property, and denial of the right of return as well as ecological catastrophe—was geographically and culturally resonant.

Intellectual historians often credit S⊘ren Kierkegaard as existential anxiety's prime mover. Arguing against this popular sentiment, this essay reads Kierkegaard not as the ex nihilo inventor of existential anxiety but as a modern practitioner of a deep-historical, dread-based asceticism. Examining a wide range of Middle English devotional literature alongside some canonical works of modern existentialism, it argues that Kierkegaard and the existentialists who followed him participated in a Judeo-Christian tradition of dread-based asceticism, the popularity of which had dwindled since the Middle Ages but never vanished. Following medieval ascetics, modern philosophers like Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre cultivated and analyzed anxiety in an effort to embody authenticity. By considering premodern ascetics early existentialists and modern existentialists latter-day ascetics, the essay sees the long history of existential anxiety as an ascetic tradition built around the ethical goal of living better through dread.

Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam” (29). What quickly becomes evident is that the plot (and perhaps the point) is the narration. In an extraordinary formalist feat (or coincidence), the narrative illustrates the materialist dialectic as proposed by Marx and Engels (122-38). The narrator's confession, which frames the novel, becomes linked to his material reality in an extreme and vivid form when the narrator is imprisoned and consequently generates the narrative from the knowledge that his bruised body allows his mind to piece together. He incarnates, in his slippery and changeable identity, the essence of social reality: dynamism. This dynamism, as the subject (and hope) of Marx and Engels's theorization, illustrates through Nguyen's vertiginous plot the Marxian dialectic. The dialectic holds that opposites—as Hegel pointed out—inhere in one another and that the process of change occurs through transformation of quantity to quality. It also shows, dramatically, how the law of the negation of negation operates. These aspects of the dialectic are cleverly developed through a process that implicates the reader and is nothing short of brilliant, recalling the poem that opens Charles Baudelaire's collection Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), at the end of which the poet addresses his reader as an “[h]ypocrite” (“hypocrite”) while also resembling him and being his “frère” (“brother”). Although Nguyen's narrator does not reach out to the reader in this type of direct address, he does establish complicity with the reader through the use of metaphor and revelations in the plot.

M. Etienne, in his study of the sources of Victor Hugo's first novel, Bug-Jargal, suggests that a kinship clearly exists between this, as well as earlier French stories of Negro characters, and Mrs. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. He is led to this conclusion because of certain indications of the popularity of Oroonoko in France during the eighteenth century, and because of the recurrence in French literature of the noble, romantic Negro. This very just inference as to the importance of Oroonoko is worthy of elaboration and emphasis because in this early English novel we can find the substance and technique of much of the littérature négrophile of the eighteenth century, a period in which the Negro emerges from his despised condition and takes on heroic qualities and possibilities; and also because this English story, of which the purpose might well have been didactic, written by “the first literary abolitionist … on record in the history of fiction,” as Swinburne called Mrs. Behn, was to have far-reaching consequences in French humanitarian thought.

One of the notable changes in English literature during the eighteenth century is a growth in altruism. It is a change which involves not only a breaking down of the old aristocratic indifference to the lower classes of society during the Restoration, but the establishment of a new ethical theory; literature displayed a broader human interest and assigned a new reason for its sympathy. It is usually assumed that the difference is due principally to the influx of French philosophy. This assumption at least minimizes the importance of a development which had taken place in the literature of England itself before the general interest in Rousseau. (The change, especially in poetry, is to be traced largely, I think, to the Characteristics (1711) of Lord Shaftesbury, whose importance as a literary influence in England has never been duly recognized. It has long since been established that his system of philosophy constitutes a turning-point in the history of pure speculation, especially in ethics; it has more recently been shown also that he is responsible for many of the moral ideas which inform the popular literature of Germany from Haller to Herder. But his influence upon the popular writers of his own country has received scant notice.

This essay combines a consideration of the two-decades-long publishing strategy of Goethe's last major prose work, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1808–29), with a reading of specific formal features unique to the final version of the novel. In doing so, it argues that Goethe's use of print and narrative work in concert to form what we might call a particular media imaginary–to reimagine the printed book not according to emerging nineteenth-century criteria of sovereignty, nationality, and permanence but instead according to values more in keeping with the technological capabilities of print media, such as transformation, diffusion, and connectivity. In his vigorous engagement with the material manifestations of his work as a key site of literary work, Goethe offers us an ideal place to explore the productive intersections that the disciplines of book history and literary history are opening up today. (AP)

“Uriel” is a poetic summary of many strains of thought in Emerson's early philosophy. Most interpretations of the poem have, however, emphasized its biographical significance. Stephen E. Whicher, for instance, has used the poem to illustrate the shock felt by the sanguine transcendentalist at the unfavorable reception of his Divinity School Address. But “Uriel” is important not simply because the “stern old war-gods” who “shook their heads” may be Andrews Norton and the Harvard Divinity School faculty, or because the “seraphs” who “frowned from their myrtle-beds” were the budding young powers of New England theology, assembled in 1838 at their “holy festival.” To be sure, one of the poem's highlights is its trenchant and witty satire of what Emerson called, in his Address, “historical Christianity.” That false faith, however, was but one manifestation of a pernicious mode of perception and discourse which the author found throughout history and contemporary thought. The poem was inspired not by a local animus but by a comprehensive, “meter-making” philosophical argument. It was probably composed early in 1845, well after the immediate animosities of the controversy over the Address had fallen into perspective. From that distance, Emerson generalized the biographical incident into a clash of opposing philosophies.

Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, like many other poems of its period, celebrates God's goodness to men and the plenitude of His creation. But one need only compare it with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works similar in theme—the quasi-scientific treatises of John Ray, William Derham, and Thomas Burnet, or James Thomson's The Seasons—to see how urgent and personally felt Smart's hymn of praise is. It was Smart's belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent—in effect, God sings the universe into being—and the poet's duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart's concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.

The once bleak situation of non-native English speakers in the U.S., who suffered in a monolingual English curriculum and faced discrimination because of their language, has somewhat improved. Passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1967 and its implementation through fifty-eight projects funded for eight million dollars by the U.S. Office of Education in 1970-71 have given bilingual opportunities to some of the five million American children who speak Spanish or some language other than English as their first language. However, major problems persist. There is need for international cooperation in bilingual activities. Funds are inadequate. Existing American programs cannot yet be reliably evaluated, and they are not reaching enough children. There is some formlessness in their general direction and national shaping. Higher education needs to (1) adjust teaching methodologies, evaluation procedures, and admissions policies until the present culture-biased tests can be replaced by linguistically valid, dispassionate instruments; (2) increase financial aid to non-native speakers of English; and (3) establish special bilingual teacher-training programs and materials-development centers. Development of comprehensive bilingual programs at the precollege and college levels is imperative, despite their enormous cost.

The Pastorella cantos of The Faerie Queene have been referred by scholars to various possible sources and analogues, including Ariosto, Tasso, Dorastus and Fawnia, Daphnis and Chloe, the Arcadia, the Greek romances, and the Diana. To these titles I now must add The Mirrour of Knighthood, parts 4 and 5 and sections of part 2.