Reviews of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) regularly cite the vietnamese-french-american protagonist's self-characterization: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). A less-cited version of the same characterization appears later in the novel: “I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—” (325). Nguyen's unnamed narrator, a Northern Vietnamese spy with Southern sympathies, has exploited, betrayed, and even murdered his own. If the above statements are any indication, this Cold War history of slippery allegiances takes an existential toll. But the second statement adds a layer of intrigue. With rhyme, anaphora, and considerable theatrical aplomb, it transmutes ethnic duplicity into literary figuration and casts the narrator as another murderer with a fancy prose style. Murder and style, though, are not Nguyen's only connection to Vladimir Nabokov, whom Mark McGurl takes as iconic of the “codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of … ‘metafiction’” (9). Like Lolita and much of Nabokov's other fiction, The Sympathizer and many of Nguyen's writings hold up that special mirror of “modernist reflexivity.” For Nguyen, however, the chance to wield this mirror comes with the added responsibility of being a Vietnamese American author writing about Vietnamese America. Hence, if Nabokov's iction delivered “an elaborately performative ‘I am’” that enabled his “programmatic self-establishment” (10), Nguyen's equally performative “I am” instantiates not only an authorial program but also a political program of ethnic representation.

It has frequently been assumed that Keats, in revising the earlier version of Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, was liberating himself from the influence of Milton and, especially, of Paradise Lost. In the new induction to The Fall he abandoned the epic structure of the first Hyperion for a form that is both more personal and allegoric—that of a vision or dream. The change is sweeping, involving not only structure but style, and apparently reflects the poet's dissatisfaction with the epic nature of the earlier version. Valid reasons for that dissatisfaction are not difficult to find. The first two books of Hyperion, with their description of the fallen divinities and their conclave, in general parallel the action of the first two books of Paradise Lost. Whereas Milton in his opening books gradually introduces his main subject, the fall of man, Keats suddenly presents, in his third, the deification of the poet, Apollo, through an imaginative and supremely intense realization of human destiny and its suffering. That vision is largely subjective and personal and represents Keats's groping toward a new and more mature conception of tragic beauty, the relevance of which to the epic events that precede it is not, and perhaps never could have been, made clear. Nor is it apparent how he could have continued his narrative when its climax had already been achieved.

Second language acquisition research (sla) is the systematic exploration of the conditions that make the acquisition of a foreign language possible, both in natural and in instructional settings. Its objects of study are the biological, linguistic, psychological, and emotional makeup of language learners and the educational, social, and institutional context of learning and teaching. Whereas language as a linguistic system is studied through the metalanguage of linguistics (phonology, syntax, and semantics), language learning, as psycholinguistic process and sociolinguistic discourse, is researched through the metadiscourse of applied linguistics: psycho- and sociolinguistics, anthropological and educational linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and composition and literacy studies. These fields illuminate what it means to learn to speak, read, write, and interact in a foreign language, what it means to appropriate for oneself the national idiom of communities that share a history and a culture that are different from one's own. SLA provides the applied linguistic metadiscourse for the practice of language learning and teaching.

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.

One of the central tenets of liberal individualism holds that property rights and citizenship rights are based in self-possession, which is often defined as an original ownership of one's own labor potential. In this short essay I propose that the concept of self-possession rests on a prior assumption that selves are possessable objects—an assumption that was generated, before and alongside liberal political theory, in the practice of Atlantic slave capitalism. I will first consider how John Locke formulates the theory of possessive individualism in one of the most-cited passages of his Second Treatise of Government (1690). To shed light on that theory's implications, I will turn to A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of venture, a Native of Africa (1798), which recounts how Venture Smith, an eighteenth-century man enslaved as a child, came to possess himself, quite literally, by purchasing himself. Smith's account illuminates the tacit precondition of Locke's self-possessing individual: to be owned, the self must first be alienated, entered into the market, “thingified.” Juxtaposing Locke and Smith provides a snapshot of a larger project, in which I argue that Enlightenment thought was founded on—not merely proximal to—the Atlantic imperial context out of which it arose.

For the past two hundred years critics have been observing and commenting upon the resemblance of Racine's Andromaque to Corneille's Pertharite. It was in 1764 that the first vigorous assertion of this similarity was made:

Il me paraît prouvé que Racine a puisé toute l'ordonnance de sa tragédie d‘Andromaque dans ce second acte de Pertharite. Dès la première scène vous voyez Edüige qui est avec son Garibalde précisément dans la même situation qu’ Hermione avec Oreste. Elle est abandonnée par un Grimoald comme Hermione par Pyrrhus; et si Grimoald aime sa prisonnière Rodelinde, Pyrrhus aime Andromaque, sa captive.

We all know that linguist has lately become a magic word. Men who used to be merely English or Spanish professors find that when they are called by this term they are welcomed almost as equals by ecologists and astrophysicists; and scientifically trained administrators on public platforms, anxious to show the breadth of their interests but not feeling quite up to coming out in favor of poetry, are happy to be able to bow in the direction of departments that once seemed hopeless. For the first time within living memory there is even a good deal of money and patronage available for language students—as long as they are labeled linguists.

Proverbs and tales are closely related; a tale's lesson is declared at its beginning or summarized at its end by a general wisdom saying that can circulate and attach itself to different tales. Tale-based proverbs, in discourse, are either plot summaries or tag lines. They allude to stories in the cultural inventories of communities, and they are high signs between speaker and listener. Generally, by reminding the hearer of the circumstances of a familiar story, the speaker recommends a course of action or warns against it. Spanish Jews, exiled from Spain in 1492 and subsequently resident in North Africa and in the Ottoman Empire, shared a corpus of maxims, which have been assembled in collections. Some of these proverbs are inaccessible because their narrative contexts are forgotten; some survive because they contain powerful images that send clear messages without narrative context. Other sayings will be generated as new popular stories gain currency. (HG)

Some conception, explicit or implied, of the relationship between art and nature is basic to the writer's as well as the critic's view of his own function. But because of the fundamental nature of our own bias in this matter we find it difficult to recover the attitude toward art and nature held by a writer of an earlier period. In the case of the Renaissance, and specifically of Spenser, much of our difficulty stems from now widely held views of art and literature as a spontaneous, vital, organic flowering forth of nature conceived in its ideal potentiality, of literary insight as a synthesizing vision in which the aesthetic and the moral blend, of imaginative creation as the opposite of deliberate contrivance, “cold” artificiality, and external ornament. In accordance with such views, C. S. Lewis, in his discussion of the Faerie Queene in The Allegory of Love, speaks of the “exquisite health” of Spenser's imagination; he says that “most commonly” Spenser understands Nature as “unimpeded growth from within to perfection, neither checked by accident nor sophisticated by art”; he claims that with insignificant exceptions Spenser “uses art to suggest the artificial in its bad sense,” employing the central episodes of the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis to develop a crucial antithesis of sterile, deceptive, sinister artifice and fruitful, naive, genuine nature. I would like to show that Spenser's attitude toward deliberate artifice is considerably more positive, or at least ambivalent, than Mr. Lewis claims and that Spenser is much less consciously aware of art and nature as polar oppo-sites than a modern reader is likely to expect.

Les juifs sont fréquemment présents dans l‘œuvre d'Alfred de Vigny. Il ne semble pas, cependant, que le poète se soit expressément intéressé à eux. Ce serait plutôt à la suite d'influences plus ou moins précises et d'observations personnelles qu'il fut amené à représenter des personnages juifs dans ses œuvres. C'est ce qui explique sans doute le manque de consistance dans son attitude. Au début de sa carrière littéraire, Vigny fait preuve du mépris habituel à leur égard. Plus tard, notamment dans les ébauches de la Deuxième Consultation du Docteur Noir, il les peint de manière plus favorable. Certaines notes de Vigny sur les Juifs font même croire qu'il éprouva pour eux une certaine sympathie. Par ailleurs, certaines remarques éparses dans l‘œuvre montrent que Vigny, étant donné la fécondité de sa pensée religieuse, a réfléchi sur plusieurs points de l'histoire et de la philosophie du judaïsme.

A fruitful but unfrequented approach to the Lyrical Ballads is through the poetry of the magazines. The volume unquestionably belongs to 1798, and seen in relation to the popular verse of that day, its contemporaneous features are very striking. We have been asked to consider too exclusively the revolutionary aspects of the Lyrical Ballads. Revolutionary they unquestionably were, but not in every respect. Except that they were much better than other poems published in 1798, the Ballads were not such a “complete change” as some writers would have us believe. Even their eccentricity has been exaggerated. Actually, there is a conventional side to the Lyrical Ballads, although it is usually overlooked. It is by way of the general taste for poetry in the 1790's that this essay will approach the poems, and it will attempt to show that they not only conformed in numerous ways to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes, but enjoyed a certain popularity in the magazines themselves.

In the literature on Notes from the Underground the protagonist is always called “the underground man” (podpol'nyj chelovek), as if he were an archetypal entity, rather than “the narrator,” an accepted literary convention of the Icherzählung. The nomenclature is significant, for critics have treated the work as the turning point in Dostoevsky's development, ransacked it for philosophical, political, and sociological formulas, noted the profound psychology, but have never analyzed the Notes in detail as an artifact. By so doing critics distort the Notes structurally and substantively, because they concentrate on and overemphasize the first part of the work almost to the exclusion of the second, and because they accept and discuss the narrator's formulations in this part without analyzing them as the expression of a literary creation. The purpose of this study is to examine the unity of the Notes: to ascertain the relationships of its two parts; to indicate the thematic function of ordering episodes in a particular sequence; to note the recurrence of certain objects, the symbolism involved therein, and its effect on the unity of the Notes; finally, to assess the effect of artful integration on the apparent “meaning” of the work.

That Shakespeare read Montaigne's Essays is made probable by the fact that they were well-known to his contemporaries. He was only sixteen when the first two books were published in Paris. By the end of the century, before he had begun to write his greatest tragedies, the popularity of the work had already spread to England. Of this fact there still remain many signs: “Seven or eight of great wit and worth,” Florio tells us, had made attempts to translate the Essays; two separate entries of such a translation had been made in the Stationers' Register; “divers of his peeces” in English, Cornwallis writes, were going from hand to hand in manuscript; and Bacon had published Essays, in which not only the name, but several appropriations of thought, acknowledged and unacknowledged, show the indebtedness of their author to Montaigne.

Nine years before the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Sir William Craigie proposed his scheme of period dictionaries. Pointing to the many problems in the language still unsolved, and to the “large quantities of interesting material” daily set aside because of the limitations of space, he insisted that this was the only way to meet completely the needs of scholars in English language and of serious students of our literature. Neither he nor the others who have taken up his proposal have ever conceived of these period dictionaries as works to supplant the Oxford Dictionary. They could not because they approach the language with essentially different purposes. Sir William Craigie in his report of 1919 phrases quite clearly the relationship of these later dictionaries to their parent:

No person who has served as a state foreign language consultant can long ignore what is surely one of the most pressing and complex problems facing our profession: the preparation of teachers. During the three years when I was a state consultant, I spent about two-thirds of my time visiting schools and working directly with classroom teachers. I remember my first visit to a classroom vividly; I was introduced as, “the inspector from the state department of education,” a phrase indicative of the “high esteem” in which state department personnel were held.

Perhaps no other French poem of recent times has been so much discussed, commented on, and analyzed as Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre. Hence it may seem presumptuous on my part to propose to the reader another lengthy discussion of a work about which “everything has been said.” If I do so, it is because of a conviction that much remains still to be said. For whereas there have been proposals for the total reading of the poem which seem to be generally acceptable, these usually fail to do more than suggest the broad general meaning; they do not provide insights into specific passages or solutions to the many difficulties of detail. Moreover, they tend to concentrate on the problem of meaning to the exclusion of the problem of structure, and it is in the problem of structure that I am especially interested. I should wish to discover, in the following pages, not only a more nearly complete reading of Le Bateau Ivre but also the answer (or part of the answer) to a theoretical question that constantly arises in the analysis of symbolist poetry. The problem simply stated is this: How much of a symbolist poem is actually involved in the central symbol about which the poem is built, and what purpose is served by such parts of the poem as are not involved in that symbol? Hence my subtitle, “The Limits of Symbolism,” which does not mean to impose limits upon the poet or to suggest that any such exist in the nature of things, but merely to inquire into the operation of these limits in the case of Le Bateau Ivre.

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.

Among the penitentials of the middle ages, that by Thomas Chabham is of particular importance on account of its detailed classification of minstrels and players. In distinguishing different classes among these players and entertainers instead of condemning all alike, Chabham affords a notable illustration of the gradual growth in the Church of a tolerant attitude toward innocent amusements. M. Gautier, while recognizing the importance of this passage in Chabham's Penitential, raised the question whether “cette somme n'est qu'une compilation d'oeuvres antérieures, ou s'il y faut voir l'original de plusieurs autres Sommes de pénitence.” In order to decide this question it is necessary to consider such evidence as is available concerning the author and the date of the Penitential.

A rendition by nayif kharma of michael etherton's theatrical adaptation of john reed's english translation, the arabic version of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une vie de boy is at three removes from the original French. Under the title Al-khādim (“The Servant”), the play appeared in 1982 in the series Min al-masrah al-'ālami (“From World Theater”), published by Kuwait's Ministry of Culture. Since to all effects and purposes Etherton's theatrical adaptation is Kharma's original, it is necessary to begin by describing how the Zambian-born British writer who taught drama at the University of Zambia in the 1960s adapted his source, Reed's Houseboy, before discussing how the play was later Arabized.

The unity of Beowulf is at least secure in the person of the hero whose character and actions provide the basis for any critical examination of structure and theme. According to some, this is all that holds the epic together. Others see more than a sequence of disconnected episodes related to one person. In their view, the fights with Grendel and his dam are united to the dragon fight in the opposition of hero and king, youth and age, the beginning and ending of a life of achievement. It is in their spirit that I have attempted to take a fresh view of the subject with special reference to unity of theme and treatment. The suggestion is that this unity is to be found in the theme of redemption and judgment treated in a way which skilfully blends the Germanic hero with the Christian saint. The symbolism is not regarded as contrived or studied, but rather as of that kind which is the usual result of an author's finding an apt subject to illustrate his theme. A symbolic interpretation does not, after all, exclude a literal interpretation; it contains it. The dragon, for instance, can be both a universal symbol and a very literal and particular monster. We have surely become too literal-minded if we suppose that the audience of Beowulf could see no universal significance in the epic story because they accepted the literal truth of the narrative. The many symbolical interpretations of the Biblical narrative during the period which followed bear witness to the improbability of this view. Once the underlying theme of redemption and judgment is adopted and is seen to be the epic theme par excellence, the process of selection from myth and legend becomes somewhat clearer, and there is no longer the necessity to account for a gap between the Grendel fights and the dragon fight. The details in the fifty-year reign of the hero would have been irrelevant. An epic is surely not a biography nor a chronicle nor a mythology, although it draws upon all these.