Oue Chaucer, pour sa traduction de Boèce, se soit servi de celle de J. de Meun est un fait établi. Toutefois notre curiosité va plus loin. Nous aimerions savoir si Chaucer a suivi un certain manuscrit et quel est ce manuscrit. On a suggéré ici même, il y a une vingtaine d'années, que Chaucer qui vérifie sans cesse son texte latin par la traduction de J. de Meun et qui puise indépendamment dans le commentaire de Trivet, a pu s'aider d'un manuscrit combiné de la traduction française, du texte latin et du commentaire de Trivet, tel qu'est p.ex.le ms.latin 18424 de la Bibl. Nat.

Recognizing the existential necessity for self-creation, but unable to unify mind and body, or to bear the burden of consciousness, the Beckett hero retreats from himself. His life becomes one long attempt to reverse the process of birth and speed his return to the pre-conscious state from which he emerged. And it is always the same hero, always the same story. In Murphy, Beckett defines the three zones of consciousness, the mental regions to which his later heroes retreat. What his prose fiction offers is a steady regression from the first zone to the third, beginning with Murphy, then Three Novels, Stories and Texts for Nothing, and How It Is. Eventually, the Beckett hero finds himself trapped in an inner corner which he can escape only through insanity or death. Unable to accept either, he passes the time inventing stories, hiding behind his characters, waiting for release from his unbearable, “unmakeable” self.

In 1926, coming upon Spengler's Decline of the West, Yeats was amazed and delighted. “Here is a very strange thing,” he wrote to Sturge Moore, “which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual man not being shut up in a bottle.” While he had been drawing his diagrams for the historical sketch in A Vision, Spengler's first edition had been going through the press. Had there been some occult communication? “I can almost say… that there is no difference in our interpretation of history (an interpretation that had never occurred to anybody before) that is not accounted for by his great and my slight erudition.” Though Yeats exaggerated, the similarities are substantial; but the means of communication are more various than he wished to allow. Many of Spengler's views were far from novel; and Yeats's early acquaintance with philosophies of history was much broader than his disclaimers of erudition imply. In fact, by 1895 his own historical symbolism was taking clear form; and like Spengler's system, it was amply nourished by the common thought of nineteenth-century Europe.

Tyrwhitt (about 1790) dated the A-Text of Piers Plowman upon the evidence of a reference (Passus v, 10–20) to a southwest wind storm which occurred in 1362. Scholars have generally accepted this as the date of composition. But Professor Cargill has shown the reference to have no value in deciding the terminus ad quem in view of the specific and lively records of this storm to be found in later sources: John Richesdale, for example, born after the time of the storm, as he tells us, speaks of it familiarly just as we might of the great blizzard of '88, still a memorable event.

Political controversy and partisan feeling were intimately blended with the literature of England during what we call loosely the Romantic Period. The views of individual authors have been treated here and there by their biographers; but little attempt has been made to generalize or draw conclusions from the several political attitudes of the poets, who, tho forming no school in the strict sense of the term, were nevertheless outstanding figures in the same liberal movement in literature. Some simple conclusions, drawn from a study of these men, are presented here; and in the presentation of this material opportunity has been taken to correct a few misunderstandings which exist regarding their political relations. For convenience, the poets may be divided into three groups : the conservative yet individual men, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge; the Old Tory, Scott; and the more or less radical trio, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. For obvious reasons little need be said of the last-named poet.

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.

Die “Französischen Zustände” gehören zu den weniger gelesenen Werken Heines. Sie sind hauptsächlich bekannt durch die “Vorrede,” die freilich nichts mit dem, worauf der Titel des Buches hinweist, zu tun hat, sondern sich ausschlieβlich mit Deutschland beschäftigt. Die “Vorrede” wurde zuletzt geschrieben und erst im Oktober 1832 an den Verleger gesandt. Da fast die ganze Korrespondenz Heines mit Campe aus dieser Zeit fehlte, bestanden über die sehr verworrenen Umstände der Entstehung und Veröffentlichung der “Vorrede” bisher groβe Miβverständnisse. Erst durch die Verwertung der noch unveröffentlichten Briefe Campes an Heine, welche mir durch die Güte des Bankiers Albert Strauβ zur Verfügung stehen und welche diese Angelegenheit eingehend behandeln, ist es möglich, im Folgenden eine abschlieβende Aufklärung zu geben.

The best remembered aphorists have contrived to state new truths in brief and telling ways. Less fascinated than most authors with leaf, twig, and branch, they strike immediately for the pith. Almost every reader of their work first pays tribute to this concentration of effort with the repeated shock of joy and enlightenment that marks his response. It seems likely that such writers try to achieve a compression of statement that corresponds to the instantaneous character of their insights. Like Dante, they are stirred by the hope of economizing glimpses of eternity into single-worded statements; unlike him, they never quite despair of doing so. Anyone who has responded to the success of their efforts can appreciate the temptation to discover something about the means by which these paradoxical compositions achieve their effects, particularly those that time and again tumble their reader's complacency. It is with the ways in which those effects derive from the structural patterns of the aphorism that this essay is concerned. The method will be first to classify aphorisms according to structure and then to examine the ways in which each class affects the reader.

The dreams of Charlemagne in Rol. 717–36 and 2525–60 have several times been the subject of critical investigations. Professor Rajna sees in them a direct influence of the Old Teutonic epic; Wilhelm Tavernier, on the other hand, is inclined to consider at least one of them as the literary imitation of a dream occurring in the Waltharius. The fact that some of those dreams are animal dreams appeared also to him as a proof of Teutonic influences due perhaps to the Norman descent of the author. It will, therefore, be the purpose of this paper to examine those dreams and to test the arguments put forward to prove their Teutonic character.

Two minor characters in Beowulf are Hreðric and Hroðmund, the young sons of the aged Danish king Hroðgar. The English poet represents the two princes as mere boys, too young to do anything. Yet they are not introduced simply to complete the picture of the royal household. On the contrary, they are the central and unifying figures in an episode so fraught with pity and terror that even now, after twelve centuries, we read and are deeply moved. Let us examine this episode, and see, if we can, what the poet was about.

The night before, Beowulf had put Grendel to flight, and all day the Danes have been celebrating his victory. The celebration ends with a feast in Heorot. The poet exclaims over the feasters: “I never heard of a people with a greater band of men, a finer array around their lord” (1011 f.). But the picture of such peace and happiness has for the poet and his hearers a tragic irony, for they know it will be short-lived.

It was late in life that Sainte-Beuve wrote to a correspondent:

This declaration is often cited as a sort of summary and synthesis of his critical theory and experience, witnessing his fixed and final preference for the Classical manner, a preference which he promptly and constantly declared after his conclusive break with the Romantics in 1838. The interest of the scholar is immediately aroused by two things in the passage: the fact that he calls the group or roll of writers whom he indicates a “school”; and more especially by the names he singles out as representing the “school” to which he declares his allegiance— Horace and Pope.

Jeanette Winterson's beautiful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is a biography of a reader, a book about reading—reading for your life. In addition to the Bible, there are six books in the Plymouth Brethren Winterson household, and they are all nonfiction. Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Winterson, bans the reading of fiction, so young Jeanette reads in secret, in the outside lavatory or under covers at night, carefully depositing each read book under her mattress until it floats so dangerously high that it threatens to reveal the habit considered so vicious by her mother but that is sustaining Jeanette. Mrs. Winterson reads the Bible; young Jeanette has a memory of Jane Eyre read aloud in her mother's good reading voice, but Mrs. Winterson doctors it (with the skill of a clever reader, an astute stylist) so that Jane marries St. John Rivers and goes off to the mission with him. T. S. Eliot makes her cry in Accrington Public Library because his lines “This is one moment / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy” (from Murder in the Cathedral; qtd. in Winterson 39) give her hope that she will survive the moment she is in, and so does Gertrude Stein saying to Alice B. Toklas: “Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it” (from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; qtd. in Winterson 130). Jeanette Winterson claims that she “puts herself inside books for safe-keeping” and that “a tough life needs a tough language” (36, 40). The people around her have that tough language. She hears lines that she later locates in Shakespeare, a writer she regards as “not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour” (115). When she is homeless and living in her Mini, supporting herself at the local sixth-form college by working at the weekend market and the local library, she reads “English Literature A-Z,” in the order in which it is shelved at the Accrington Public Library (115–30). Books are home when she is homeless (61); they are doses of medicine (42), saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of human.

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)

Much contemporary criticism presents the final speech of Pleberio in Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina as authorial philosophical pessimism. This view, based upon residual nineteenth-century critical habits, assumes what it claims to demonstrate. Pleberio and his dramatic world appear differently if we begin with the beginning, where other characters create roles for him in their private dramas, in contrast to his ineffective personal role. All the principal characters, Pleberio included, create their world and are created by it. They are united also by their common substitution of metaphors of commerce and exchange for the language of feelings and values. Pleberio the merchant and Celestina the bawd necessarily coexist in the system of La Celestina, as analysis of language and events makes clear. His final protest is an entrepreneur’s confused desperation on facing the world he has made. The last words allude to a context (“Salve Regina”) that reverses this world’s reversals.

An important and currently relevant statement about the role of methodological discourse in literary criticism is contained in the writings of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's relationship to the mainstream of western methodology is examined with particular reference to one of his main sources, Sir Isaac Newton's account of the method of analysis and synthesis. Central concepts of the tradition Johnson received are illustrated from various other writers who shaped the discourse he adapted to the purposes of his literary investigations. It was Johnson's achievement to bring the fruits of this discourse about method in science and philosophy into the arena of literary criticism and to show as no other English critic before him had the importance of rigorous attention to the complicated relationship between phenomena and received opinion in literary inquiry and what the requirements were for knowing something in critical discourse.

The questions raised by an early daguerreotype of a Parisian boulevard serve as the point of departure for a discussion of Balzac's Le cousin Pons and the famous definition of ideology in Marx and Engels's German Ideology. Taking issue with Walter Benjamin's essays on mechanical reproduction, I argue here that both works represent responses to the new technology that emphasize its critical potential.

Something more than the obvious psychological interpretation must be made of Rosebud, the. object from the protagonist's childhood that is the focus of the plot activity in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). This essay applies traditional methods of literary criticism—interpretation of symbolic imagery, close reading of dramatic language and gesture, and source and influence study—toward a solution of this major critical problem in one of the most important films. To assume that Rosebud will provide a definitive explanation of Charles Foster Kane is to disregard the function of the film's complex narrative organization. The position that Rosebud will explain everything is maintained by a character who is an object of comedy; the film's symbolic imagery and dramatic organization pose the issue quite differently: not Rosebud will explain everything! but Will Rosebud explain anything? Far from being a sign of the film's intellectual shallowness, Rosebud is the surest guide into its undetected complexities.

The poems which Juan Francisco Andres de Uztarroz wrote during the last two years of his life have long been considered lost. Don Ricardo del Arco, in reconstructing the intellectual and cultural life of seventeenth-century Aragon which centered around this famous historiographer, archaeologist, bibliographer, and poet, states that the autograph manuscript containing these poems was seen by the eighteenth century bibliographer, Felix de Latassa, but that it disappeared sometime later and its contents have remained unknown: “Desconocemos gran parte de sus poesfas, sobre todo las breves que vio Latassa en manuscrito.”