Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick and the crocodile's pursuit of Captain Hook have attained almost mythic stature. Nearly everyone, from nursery child to scholar, has heard of the Great White Whale and of the Ticking Crocodile. Each aquatic monster has swallowed the amputated limb of a dark and terrible captain. Each captain has replaced his limb with an unusual but useful prosthetic device. Each brooding victim is at last destroyed by his nemesis after a relentless oceanic quest.

This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic, My Brother also overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.

Rabelais's book opens with a cryptic allusion to a “sustantificque mouelle” hidden under the surface hilarity of his story and ends (if it was he who ended it) with an equally cryptic pronouncement by an oracular bottle. The penetration which is urged at the beginning—through fiber and bone to the marrow of truth which they protect—is evidently consummated at the end, the physiological turning into a geological image as Pantagruel and his friends penetrate the underground sanctuary where, in a flood of miraculous light, one may hear the word of truth, which is Trinch. The opinions of critics on this pronouncement range from considering it an absurd joke to a grave and specific allegory of one thing or another. Similarly, the substantific marrow which Rabelais promises us at the beginning is taken by some as a joke which hides a truth and by others as a joke that hides nothing but another joke. Most agree that there is a mixture of joke and seriousness in Rabelais's book, but some insist on a complete disjunction between the comic and the serious, while others argue for a close interpenetration.

Two indispensable prerequisites for successful research in Romance etymology are sustained attention and patience. The worker is at liberty to select problems that suit his personal taste, to assemble a wealth of pertinent data, to examine solutions proposed in earlier inquiries, to cherish the idea of having found the clue to issues previously deemed insoluble. Yet this preparatory work, no matter how meticulously planned and conscientiously carried out, may not yield immediate results: the easily accessible data not infrequently form a vicious circle, the explanations of pioneer workers more often than not serve to confuse rather than to enlighten the present day explorer. With his entire apparatus of research ready for action at a moment's notice, the etymologist, in a state of protracted suspense, must withstand the temptation of prematurely declaring his work concluded. Patiently, humbly, yet with unfailing alertness, he must await the moment of great satisfaction when a chance find (perhaps a passage in a not readily available book or a record in a new dialect glossary) may supply the one unexpected form, usually a precious relic, which helps him to break the vicious circle and step out into the open. This newly discovered form will prove a priceless aid in the reconstruction of the bridge between Latin and Romance; not one of those hazardous suspension bridges on which some nineteenth century etymologists were fond of performing their acrobatics, but a solid, pleasant bridge, allowing for comfortable walking and an enjoyable view of the surrounding landscape. The history of Spanish terco and its cognates is apt to show how radically such a casual find can advance our knowledge.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying
changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked?
—Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives”

The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear.

—Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”

In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

Old French, until the end of the Gallo-Roman period, was physiologically characterized by articulatory laxness to a high degree. This laxness of articulation chiefly manifested itself by intensifying certain syllables while weakening others, and by producing diphthongs and affricates out of strongly situated sounds while others tended to disappear or remained as they were. During the ninth century, physiological characteristics of precisely opposite nature started to appear, and French gradually gained in tenseness until it became about what it is today: the tensest of known languages. We reject here the theory proposed by W. von Wartburg concerning the effects of Germanic invasions on early Old French changes. “Le provençal s’étendait autrefois jusqu’à une ligne qui allait depuis l'embouchure de la Loire jusqu'aux Vosges méridionales. Cette ligne coïncide assez exactement avec une limite ethnique et politique qui s’était formée vers 500, grâce aux invasions germaniques.” And we accept the opposite views which attribute the early Old French laxness to the Celtic substratum and only the tenseness of a later period to the Germanic superstratum. They are well exposed by Dauzat:

The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.

Seventeenth-century French patronage of the theater was an ideal means of political legitimation. While Louis xm sporadically exercised patronage through royal decrees and attendance at comedies, the Cardinal de Richelieu, who better understood the theater's political benefits, actively influenced its technical aspects: the acting companies, the scripts, and the dramatic conventions and mechanics. The goal of Richelieu's patronage was the beholders' symbolic identification of the elements of refined theater with the genius of the cardinal underwriting them. The lansenists' tracts against the theater scorned this sort of symbolic transference as a commonplace of dramatic “portraiture.” Pierre Nicole's theory of spectatorship criticized the beholder's tendency to accept theatrical images as models of imitation, which gave life to a world of simulacra advantageous to political representation. The phantasmic force of the illusion of legitimacy fueled the system of art and politics in seventeenth-century France.

Paul Celan Breaks Into “Tears, His Body Shaken by Sobbing, the Whole Affair Again Present, Accusings, Denouncings, as Stunned and distressed as on day 1.” It's June 1966 in Paris, and he has gone with Yves Bonnefoy to visit a “most generous, most welcoming” friend who has “deep instincts for a poet's quality and for how infamous these attacks on Celan were.” But “[t]hat trustful welcome had only deepened the open wound.”

Nothing in the life of Paul Celan (1920-70), short of his parents' murder in the Holocaust, racked him more than the vicious, specious plagiarism charges a German French writer, Claire Goll, launched against him on behalf of her deceased husband. As Bonnefoy saw all too well, Celan never recovered from them.

The writing of La Porte étroite occupied André Gide from May 1905 to October 1908. During at least part of that period, the novelist was certainly reading the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, for he notes in his Journal on 24 November 1905 that he has carried a Montaigne with him on a visit to the Louvre, and, although in early March of the following year he declares that Pascal has replaced the essayist in his readings (JAG, p. 200), on 21 March we find him “patiently advancing” in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” (JAG, p. 203), very probably a deliberate choice on his part, since that essay has long been considered the most complete statement of Montaigne's religious philosophy, and La Porte étroite was to have distinctly religious overtones. If we consider, as we must, the element of mysticism and Jansenism in the novel and the actual place the great seventeenth-century French classicist has in it (OC, v, 193—194, 230, 235–236), it is understandable that Gide should at this moment have turned to Pascal, but it is significant that this self-confessed “creature of dialogue” whose works demonstrate a constant search for balance recognized that there are and always will be in France “division et partis; c'est-à-dire dialogue. Grâce à quoi, le bel équilibre de notre culture: équilibre dans la diversité. Toujours, en regard d'un Pascal, un Montaigne; et de nos jours, en face d'un Claudel, un Valéry” (JAG-S, 13 Feb. 1943, p. 191). On 8 April Gide takes a copy of Montaigne with him on a stroll to the bois (JAG, 1906, p. 206), and home in Cuverville in May 1906, he again records that he has read some Montaigne (JAG, p. 220).

Critics are now agreed that Rabelais' Gargantua, which takes its place as the First Book in the author's complete works, was composed and published approximately two years after the first book of Pantagruel. The latter must have appeared first at the autumn fairs at Frankfort in 1532, and it is highly improbable that the former was launched before August of 1534. During the two intervening years the author had suffered the censorship of his first work in October, 1533, and had profited from his first trip to Rome in the entourage of DuBellay early in 1534. Quite some time, eight years to be exact, elapsed after the publication of the Gargantua before the appearance of his promised continuation of the Pantagruel in 1542.

Goldsmith's extensive borrowings from other writers, especially from French writers, have long been known. It has been established that he was heavily indebted to Buffon, Voltaire, Marivaux, Montesquieu, D'Argens, and the Encyclopédie. To these French sources of Goldsmith should be added La Spectacle de la Nature of the Abbé Pluche, published in eight volumes in Paris between 1732 and 1751. La Spectacle de la Nature is a medley of popularized scientific knowledge, presented in dialogue form. It includes material on zoology, botany, physics, and astronomy, with a strong teleological motivation. Its popularity in England may be seen in the fact that the English translation appeared in 1733, almost immediately after the first Paris edition, and went into an eighth edition between 1754 and 1763. To the English sources of Goldsmith, moreover, should be added William Derham's Physico-Theology, first published in London in 1713, which includes astronomy, physics, and natural history, and which, like La Spectacle de la Nature, promulgates the argument from design.

On 19–20 May 1956 the Foreign Language Program sponsored a Conference on Criteria for a College Textbook in Beginning Spanish, held at MLA headquarters. Nearly all of the seventeen participants had considerable experience in teaching the Spanish language to beginners at the college level, and most were authors of beginning texts. They represented in their theory and practice of language teaching a wide variety of views in both the academic field and the field of linguistic science.

The Alexandrian followers of Aristarchus, buzzing in corners and busy with monosyllables, have left the world that they worried with their wranglings over and and , the swords that were drawn over inchoate verbs have been rust for centuries. But the bookworms of Aristarchus, the troops of Callimachus, the pack of Zenodotus return at times to earth. In order to hear this pack in full cry, we have only to recall the various emendations in Greek texts necessitated fifty years ago by the fallacious Dawes Canon that is never used with the first aorist subjunctive in the active or middle voice.