The struldbrugg incident in Gulliver's Travels has been relatively neglected. Scholars either allude to the Struldbruggs only in passing or omit the incident entirely from their comments on Book iii. The last sustained treatment is that in the notes of Emil Pons's edition of twenty-seven years ago. Pons's comments, however, attempting as they do to connect the hideous Struldbruggs with Swift's possible fear of old age, reflect a manner of approaching Swift which has become rather out of date. The purpose of this article is to consider three aspects of the Struldbrugg episode: (1) old age and the fear of death as conventional subjects for moral reflection and satire; (2) a desire for immortality in the light of the homiletic tradition; (3) the significance of Gulliver's conversations with his host. Such a study will attempt to show that Swift's treatment of the Struldbruggs conforms to a traditional background as regards both his literary method and his intellectual milieu.

By September 1967 the opening phase of federal support for English had been largely completed. Fourteen of the Curriculum Study Centers and five of the Demonstration Centers funded under the Cooperative Research Program had submitted their final reports to the Office of Education. Curriculum materials from the Centers at Carnegie, Georgia, Indiana, Hunter (Gateway English), Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin are available for classroom use this fall. The Centers at Gallaudet College, Georgia, Illinois (ISCPET), Indiana, Ohio State, and Wisconsin, however, are continuing their work beyond September 1967. Moreover, nearly ten percent of the Secondary School English teachers in the United States have attended the NDEA Institutes in English authorized by the three-year extension of the NDEA (of 1958) in October 1964.

In recent years Baudelaire has come to be recognized as one of the greatest of French critics, a critic whose judgments have an almost uncanny sureness, and whose principles of art and of criticism have a lasting validity. He was from the beginning a most independent and original critic. But he was also an avid reader, and his mind was full of ideas which he had read or heard. It is from a tangled skein of other people's ideas that he slowly wove a harmonious and original pattern that is unlike any of its single threads. In much of his early critical work, however, some at least of the strands are easily distinguishable. Among these are the works of Baudelaire's two greatest predecessors in art criticism, Diderot and Stendhal.

The introduction of French neo-classical drama into Spain in the eighteenth century met the most determined opposition on the part of patriotic Spaniards. French lyric and epic poetry had little influence, for France had given comparatively little attention to them during the great period of Louis XIV. The fable, satire, letters, and other genres were accepted in Spain without causing much disturbance. It was not so with the drama.

The Saracens in Italian popular literature are exotic. They are of French origin and came with the French epic into Italy, where this epic material found a second fatherland. For the Franco-Italian versions which served as a connecting link between the French poems and the court epics of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Ciecco da Ferrara, Tasso and the rest, one may consult the magistral work of Pio Rajna Le fonti dell' Orlando Furioso (Firenze, 1876), the same author's Ricerche intorno ai Reali di Francia (Bologna, 1872), and the Introduction of Johannes Hübscher's edition of “Orlando” in Stengel's Ausgaben und Abhandlungen. No. lx, (Marburg, 1886). The following works may also be profitably consulted: F. Castets, Recherches sur les rapports des chansons de geste et de l‘épopée chevaleresque italienne. (Paris, 1887); Vincenzo Crescini, “Orlando nella chanson de Roland i nei poemi del Bojardo e dell’ Ariosto,” Il Propugnatore, xiii, Pt. 1, 2 (Bologna, 1880).

Mr. Chairman, President Fred, President Starck, ladies and gentlemen of the Modern Language Association: I suppose on this occasion, as a member of the American Philological Association, I should be tempted to reflect upon the event in the year of the great schism, 1883, when forty youthful modern linguists, smarting under the tyranny of classical philology, struck their historic blow for freedom, and formed the Modern Language Association. Suffice it to say that after years of rivalry, we have all come to the realization that we are allies in a common cause, not only within the conventional humanities but also with our colleagues in the other areas of learning. No doubt the sense of kinship between classicists and scholars in the modern foreign languages has been enhanced by the experience of adversity. Certainly a classicist has had to learn to live with, and ultimately profit from, a perpetual “bear” market. But, happily, in recent years, the whole strategy of fighting defensive rear-guard actions has been abandoned, and a new spirit of confidence has appeared. A case in point is William R. Parker's excellent piece entitled “Why a Foreign Language Requirement?” There are also the many classicists who have sworn a mighty oath never again to utter a word of apology for the classics, but rather to start from the assumption that any intelligent and sensible man knows how important they are.

Keats's second ode to Fanny Brawne, the important poem (biographically considered) beginning “What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes,” contains a striking passage which has never been correctly interpreted. The poem as a whole shows Keats in an agitated state of mind. He is so enslaved by his thoughts of Fanny Brawne, he says, that he can neither regain his “old liberty” nor “mount” in his verse “above The reach of fluttering Love.” At this point he writes:

More dismal cares
Seize on me unawares,—
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods;
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads
Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

Many twentieth-century commentators on Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables—probably the majority of them—have found it necessary to note serious failings in the work. The censures are in a sense as different as the men who registered them, but I think they can be fairly summarized as: (1) objection to the plot as lacking coherent action and to the narrative method as partial cause of this difficulty; (2) objection to the conclusion as being artificial or forced; and (3) objection to the short-sightedness of the author in saying in his Preface and as comment within the story something which the story itself confutes. Structure, conclusion, and theme have all proved problematical.

My purpose in this study of George Moore's revisions is (1) to venture a few generalizations with respect to the dates, the number, and extent of the revisions and his motives in rewriting and (2) to compare closely the first and final texts of The Lake, The Wild Goose, and Esther Waters.

In Absalom, Absalom!, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's concern is with the individual's subjective apprehension of the palpable world of experience. In the latter novels he distinguishes one character's point of view from another's by means of significant variations in language and style in those sections which present a different individual consciousness. The distinction among the four narrative perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!, however, is not stylistic, but formal. Faulkner differentiates the viewpoints in the novel by shaping each perspective after a different literary genre. It is a skillful adaptation of form to meaning, for the selection of these particular genres expresses, structurally, the imagination's subjective act of re-creating history, engaged in by four narrators emotionally involved in either Thomas Sutpen or the Southern myth: Rosa Coldfield, haunted by the moral “outrage” inflicted by the “demonic” Sutpen, shapes her narrative to the Gothic mystery; Mr. Compson, convinced of the epical proportions of the South, relates his narrative as a Greek tragedy; Quentin, obsessed by Henry's relationship with Judith because of his own involvement with Caddy, presented in The Sound and the Fury, expresses his narrative in the framework of the chivalric romance; and Shreve, the detached, intellectual Northerner, relieves the intensity of the preceding viewpoints by means of the ludicrous humor of the tall tale.

Large-scale industrial processes and networks of extraction, slow violences wrought across toxic landscapes, and rapidly shifting atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic cycles are altering the conditions of human and nonhuman existence in ways that challenge the limits of existing media technologies. The last of these transformations—the fluctuating distributions of water—is the focus of this essay. Hydrologists are struggling to model and predict the intensities of drought, the changing supply of watersheds, the dispersions of chemicals through streams and rivers, and the failures of aging infrastructure. Water transports contaminants too small to identify by sight, requiring technologies that can register tiny particles on a massive scale. Water complicates boundary-making projects—it moves easily across local and regional zones, human and nonhuman bodies, and atmospheric, terrestrial, and marine ecologies. Global weather patterns and distribution infrastructures shape its circulation, yet its material effects depend greatly on local conditions.

In this essay I address the remediation of the centuries-old East African practice of poetic dialogue in the twenty-first-century digital social network of Facebook. Focusing on an online duel between two young poets from Mombasa, I demonstrate how East Africa's new media are transforming traditional poetic conventions in Swahili. Even sites that endeavor to preserve authentic literary Swahili have become in practice controversial crossroads of language, culture, and identity. By bringing voices of Swahili cultural authority, which draw from the East, into sustained contact with voices of the contemporary urban youth culture, which draws from the West, these new media are ultimately opening new terrains for literary production and debate.

In 1923 the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky returned to the USSR after a year of exile. Tike his entire cohort of “fellow travelers,” he accommodated himself to the new Soviet regime. He did so in the language of travel and other kinds of movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, nomadism—a prominent motif in works by Shklovsky from A Sentimental Journey through Marco Polo—emerges as his central figure for accommodation to official culture. This association occurs through the submerged double meaning of his signature term ostranenie—at once defamiliarization and reterritorialization. This duality of ostranenie has implications for our broader understanding of the way mobility is active in cultural production and intertwined with structures of power. In the Soviet case, ostranenie underscores that nomadic movement is essential to the operation of cultural agents, whose relative freedom becomes a mechanism of state authority and control.

Detailed study attendant upon the preparation of a critical edition of the Woman Hater has led me to the conclusion that the play is not an unsuccessful juvenilium in the Jonsonian “humour” school, as it has often been described, but is rather indebted to the evil influence of the outlawed satirist, John Marston, and identifies its author as one of a group of daring young comedists who took for their common subject the crimes and follies of the Court of James I. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to discuss the evidence of this satirical cabal of which Marston was unquestionably the arch-conspirator, but to point out several topical allusions to the King and his court in Marston's Fawn and Beaumont's Woman Hater.

The treatment accorded by grammarians to the passive reflexive construction as applied to personal subjects in Old Spanish is either incomplete or inexplicit. Diez, for example, gives no indication as to the extent of its use in either early or modern Spanish. Cuervo asserts that the passive reflexive is “arraigado” in the language of the early period, but cites examples with only inanimate subjects. We infer from his remarks that with a personal subject this construction came into general use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Meyer-Lübke, its use with personal subjects was extensive only during these centuries. Hanssen is of the opinion that the passive reflexive was of little use in the early period and that with a personal subject its use was limited to the single verb uencerse. The present study will indicate the status of this construction in Old Spanish: the extent of its use as applied to persons insofar as may be demonstrated by an examination of a representative text of that period. As such a text the Primera crónica general has been chosen, because, with its plurality of authorship and great length, it represents an admirable cross-section of Old Spanish prose.

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

At the present time, the only known manuscript of Berceo's Martirio de San Lorenzo is the eighteenth-century copy that belonged to Padre Ibarreta, and Solalinde expresses the conviction that the Sánchez edition of the poem is based on the Ibarreta manuscript. On several occasions Sanchez mentions the fact that he had at hand the Ibarreta manuscript, and he likewise states that he had his own copy of several of Berceo's poems and that he used the Ibarreta version “para cotejar algunas que yo tenía, y copiar las que me faltaban.” That there is a close relationship between the Sánchez and Ibarreta versions of the Martirio de San Lorenzo is evident from the following facts; in both versions the poem is incomplete, containing only 105 stanzas; both versions have five verses in stanza 15; both versions use, consistently, the forms, ome, omes, sancto, sanctidat, lazdrar, judgar, nunqua; and they conform in the use of the exceptional forms cipdad 10d, cipdat 12d, Katolicos 2d, Karidad 10b, Karidat 47b. Furthermore, the three specific errors of construction or legibility mentioned by Sánchez are also found in the Ibarreta manuscript: the omission of Dios in 10b, omission of the rhyme word in 102d, and omission of seven letters in avrie despecho 105d.

The variety of moods and techniques and the astonishing erudition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have frustrated critical attempts to grasp the work as a unified whole and have fostered instead an emphasis on decoding and explicating. The generic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin discerns in the tradition of Menippean Satire, however, provide a fresh and integral interpretation. Bakhtin's description subsumes such formal and thematic aspects of the work as its suppressed comedy, variety of styles, topicality, wide adaptation of other genres, fantastic inventiveness, frequent sharp contrasts and abrupt transitions, scandalous eccentricity, intellectual seriousness, three-leveled world view, utopianism, and psychological abnormality. These apparently heterogeneous characteristics are organized and unified within both Bakhtin's theory and the book's world by the model of carnival festivity. As an annually recurring celebration of change, carnival allows us, furthermore, to understand Lowry's spatializing sense of the book as “trochal,” like the regularly turning wheel of a machine.

Many scholars have found in Hamlet's soliloquy beginning “To be, or not to be” the crux of the drama. Those who, like the Romantic critics, have interpreted the play as a struggle between Hamlet's determination to avenge his father and his inhibiting propensity to over-subtle philosophizing have felt that here, more clearly than anywhere else, he is exposing his malady: over-delicate sensibility and a love of intellectual hair-splitting which absorb energy that should have gone into decisive action. Such critics point for further confirmation to the soliloquy at the end of Act ii, in which Hamlet contrasts his own lethargy (in language far from lethargic) with the deep histrionic passion of the player who has just recited for him, and to the later soliloquy (iv. iv), in which he certainly does quite roundly chide himself for procrastination, while he confesses to have had “cause, and will, and strength, and means, / To do't.”