In his recent paper, “The Authorship of the Secunda Pastorum” Mr. Oscar Cargill brings forward an entirely new suggestion. Observing that the same bob-wheel stanza is used in the burlesque poem known as the Turnament of Totenham, he makes a detailed comparison with the Towneley Play which discloses a series of striking similarities in humor and in characterization as well as in metre and language. The reader's surprise when these resemblances are called to his attention is quickly succeeded by astonishment that they had not been observed previously. On the basis of these similarities Mr. Cargill very plausibly concludes that the Turnament is also the work of the Wakefield playwright. And whatever difficulties one may find in following the further steps in Mr. Cargill's argument, he deserves the thanks of all students of the early drama for throwing this new light on the activities of the author of the Secunda Pastorum.

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.

That there are figures in all things is a notion which in the Renaissance, certainly no less than in any other period, demonstrated both its potential sublimity and its potential absurdity. Like many other sublime commonplaces, we find it in Shakespeare; and in Shakespeare, too, we find the quintessence of at least one kind of allegorical interpreter, for “there is figures in all things” is spoken by that redoubtable combination of learning and bravery, the valorous Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. To Fluellen's mind, as he pursues the universal figurative correspondences, Macedon and Monmouth are as “alike as my fingers is to my fingers.” He not only perceives such allegorical richness, he is eager to communicate it. Ancient Pistol cannot complete his tirade against “that goddess blind / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” before Fluellen must break in with an explication in which iconographic and thematic elements are finely balanced: “By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls; in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.” But Shakespeare does not allow us to dismiss Fluellen, in his comical character, as a mere bundle of clichés and correspondences, the theorist of a river in Macedon (though it is out of his brains what is the name of it) and also moreover a river at Monmouth, and salmons in both.

It is generally agreed that had either Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion: A Vision been completed, the result would have been a lofty utterance of Keats' best wisdom in fundamental matters. As to what these matters and this wisdom comprised there has been wide difference of opinion, particularly in respect to Hyperion.* In The Fall the poet, speaking in his own person, gives us some pretty clear hints; in Hyperion we must guess the meaning from the nature of the story and the characters. Hyperion, the longer of the two, is usually held to be the better poem; it is certainly the more cryptic. It has been variously explained as signifying: “the unity of all existence”; “a self-destructive progress toward good … that beauty and not force is the law of this change … light and song passing into union and perfection out of elemental crudeness”; as “the old dynasty of formless powers, driven into oblivion by new creators of form and order”; as “the epic of the Revolutionary Idea”; and as the apotheosis of “disciplined imagination” and “a state in mental stature where all facts, pleasant or otherwise, will appear in their proper perspective.”

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

MOST CRITICS agree that The Years (1937) was an attempt by Virginia Woolf to modify the form of the traditional family chronicle by combining the externality of chronological events with the internality of poetic vision. We know, however, from A Writer's Diary (1953) that Virginia Woolf originally intended something quite different: she intended to write an “Essay-Novel” which would combine both forms. The facts revealed in the essay part of the novel would be explicit comment on the implicit social, economic, and sexual forces controlling the lives of the fictional characters in any given period of history, and the fiction would illustrate dramatically through characters and situations these general facts of history. Thus, Virginia Woolf's original intention was mainly one of externality, and indeed in A Writer's Diary she cautions herself against the pull toward “vision.”1 Ultimately, she combined fact and fiction by “compacting” the essay into the novel and combined externality and internality by seeking to reveal through internal vision the pattern of continuity in external events.

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

In the early 1960s two editions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart were published with competing sets of illustrations. The first, by Dennis Carabine, illustrates a realist novel, the second, by Uche Okeke, a modernist one. Reading Achebe's iconic novel through its early publication history and for its visual images shows how the famous ending of Things Fall Apart turns, stylistically, to the impenetrable flatness of the modernist surface. At mid-century, modernist style could be made to serve realist imperatives, and Achebe's flat style challenges colonial modes of literary representation and the myth of modernist primitivism in the visual arts. This essay stresses the importance of the visual image to mid-century anglophone literature and the importance of modernist style to the poetics of decolonization.

I congratulate the Modern Language Association on the establishment of a section which is as indispensable to language as the character of the Prince of Denmark is to the play of Hamlet. Language lives in sound; and the study of modern languages is the study of the spoken tongues.

Shakespeare's sonnets are designed to seem written by a poet and spoken by a lover. This conspicuous ambidexterity, compounded by our declining tolerance for such deftness, has made them infamously problematic. They simultaneously flaunt and flout the correspondence between the lover's pen and his heart, between the artifice of his “rhetoric,” characteristic of much Tudor literature, and the rhetoric of his sincerity, characteristic of the Romantic poetics that has proven their sternest judge. The sonnets thus pose internally the very problem that informs their extensive interpretive history. But they also propose its solution: their sustained balance of verba and res, of verbally erotic and hermeneutically chaste designs, exalts the conflict of these designs, displaying its poetic power. And this paradoxical resolution of the poet's dilemma solves the critic's as well: it suggests a way of making a richly correspondent and yet reasoned sense of the sonnets and, indeed, of any literary text.

Coleridge maintains a lifelong ambivalence toward nature. As early as the 1795 version of “The Eolian Harp,” he toys with incompatible speculations upon nature and, for the moment, retreats from the pantheistic implications of a bold metaphor. After long worrying about the problem of nature, he arrives at a more stable resolution of his dilemma : in The Stateman's Manual (1816) and in his “Essays on Method” (1817), he employs a traditional distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans. Regarded in this latter aspect, nature becomes a source of sacramental symbols: Coleridge holds that the imagination is peculiarly fitted to create symbols and, hence, to apprehend natura naturans. In 1817, twenty-one years after its original publication, he adds to “The Eolian Harp” a key phrase, “the one Life within us and abroad.” This addition, Coleridge's poetic equivalent of natura naturans, reconciles the poem to his Christian Platonism. Despite a growing dualistic aversion to nature in later life, Coleridge, as witnessed by dated footnotes added to his works in the 1820's, continues sporadically to reassert his sacramental faith in nature. Coleridge's adaptation of natura naturans, though it does not resolve all ambiguities, binds through common assumption a considerable body of his mature writings.

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.

The wheel as an attribute of Fortune is of Roman origin, and, together with the globe which often takes its place, signifies the inconstancy of the goddess. In Roman art the wheel or globe is. represented as being held in the hand of the goddess, or lying at her feet; she is sometimes represented as standing on the globe. Motion of the wheel is not implied in its postures.

In Latin literature previous to the middle ages the references to the globe or wheel as attributes of Fortune are few in number, the earliest of them being seemingly that of Pacuvius (second century B. C.): “Fortunam insanam esse et cæcam et brutam perhibent philosophi saxoque instare in globoso prædicant volubili.” Cicero (first century B. C.) writes in Piso, 10, 22: “cumque ipse nudus in convivio saltaret in quo cum illum saltatorium versaret orbem ne turn quidem fortunæ rotam pertimescebat.”

Wie die anderen großen Klassiker seiner und früherer Zeiten, hat auch Goethe nie Deutschunterricht im heutigen Sinne genossen. Es mag dahingestellt bleiben, ob er trotzdem oder deswegen ein—Goethe geworden ist. Tatsache ist jedoch, daß er seit etwa einem Jahrhundert im Deutschunterricht gelesen wird und daß es trotzdem noch keine größere, das Thema auch nur annähernd erschöpfende Arbeit gibt über die Behandlung, die sein Werk und seine Persönlichkeit auf der deutschen Schule erfahren haben. Eine seltsame Unterlassung in Anbetracht der sonst schon längst ins Unermeßliche angewachsenen Goetheliteratur ! War und ist die Schule denn nicht der Ort auf dem Goethes großen Nachfolgern, seinen Widersachern, und auch uns, seinem Publikum im allgemeinen, eine erste Kenntnis seiner Art und Eigenart vermittelt wurde? Mogen die Umstânde dieser ersten Bekanntschaft nicht oft genug fürs ganze Leben ausschlaggebend gewesen sein? Und hat Goethe selber die Wichtigkeit gerade des dichterischen Schulerlebnisses nicht hoch genug angesetzt als er in den Wahlverwandtschaften schrieb, daß “ein Lehrer, der das Gefühl… an einem einzigen guten Gedicht erwecken kann,” mehr leistet als einer, “der uns ganze Reihen untergeordneter Naturbildungen der Gestalt und dem Namen nach überliefert?”—Diesen Worten können freilich andere entgegengesetzt werden, etwa diejenigen, mit denen der um den Deutschunterricht besonders verdiente Rudolf Hildebrand in seinem Buche Vom deutschen Sprachunterricht (1867) den damaligen Schulbetrieb charakterisierte: “Der Unterricht im Deutschen gilt den Lehrern… nicht als der leichteste und angenehmste, ja vielen wohl als der schwerste und lästigste, und lästig, nicht selten geradezu langweilig, selbst sterbenslangweilig, nicht den Lehrern bloß, auch den Schülern, und nicht an Volks- und Bürgerschulen bloß, ebensogut, ja besonders an Gymnasien.”

In an age when symbols are being discovered in literary works where critics of an earlier period would never have dreamed of looking for them there is probably little need to defend a study of symbolism in Grillparzer's work. Indeed Grillparzer himself recognized that there is a symbolic element in all art and reproached his own time for its refusal to acknowledge the symbolic aspect of poetic truth. Das goldene Vließ, moreover, is not the only drama in which Grillparzer uses symbols. In Sappho, for instance, the lyre, the laurel wreath, the rose, the statue of Aphrodite, and the dagger all have symbolic significance. Even the title of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen reflects symbolic motifs. In that drama subtle variations on the water imagery predominate but are reinforced by symbols such as the dove, the tower, the Leda song, and the lamp. In Libussa, to cite one more example, there is a highly developed circle symbolism as well as symbolism involving flowers, vegetation, and metals.

For the last ten years, the elementary courses (first two semesters) in foreign languages at the University of Texas have comprised five contact hours per week. They carry four semester hours credit in accordance with the well-known formula, 1 hour/week: 1 semester hour credit; 2 laboratory hours/week: 1 semester hour credit. Coincidentally, beginning in 1946, drill sessions were provided, in French and Spanish, for oral-aural practice outside of class. The oral-aural emphasis became then the established procedure. When, in 1952, the three departments of foreign languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic) moved into their new building, Batts Hall, the new facilities made possible further development.

Henry Playford in his note to the reader in Orpheus Britannicus felt free to say: