Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

Toni Morrison's Sula develops out of and centers on images of violence and violation, proffering itself as a catalog of traumatic experiences, of literal and figurative deaths. Such traumas almost invariably register as watched, the novel thus functioning, by means of its characters, as an act of bearing witness. Inasmuch as the story Sula tells is framed by passages mourning the loss of the world the novel imagines, the narrative structurally articulates an absence. Together these elements—Sula's thematic preoccupation with witnessed dying and its insistence that the narrative mark loss—locate the novel's center of interest in grieving. Folding the history of loss it narrates within a recursive structure, Sula pitches itself against the conventional notion that mourning must be worked through: indeed, the novel implicitly argues for—and persistently works to effect—a sustaining of grief. To move beyond mourning in the context of continuing cultural fragility, the novel suggests, may well constitute a surrender to the processes of cultural absorption and dispersal Sula describes toward its conclusion.

Innovation in cultural practice is both an act and an event whereby the other is brought into and comes into being. I call the private aspect of this process creation and the public aspect, by which innovation gives rise to further innovation, invention. A related phenomenon is the responsible encounter with the human other; in both, the subject's modes of understanding undergo change as the subject registers and affirms the singularity of the other. A further domain to which this account applies is reading, another act-event in which a responsible response entails an innovative affirmation of innovation. Responding to the literary work involves performing its verbal forms. The responsibility invoked in all these instances is responsibility for rather than to, since the other is brought into existence (and transformed from other to same) by the subject's response. The ethical obligation implied here is, as Levinas argues, prior to any philosophical account we could give of it.

The multiethnic and multilingual character of Nigeria compelled the country's writers to use some form of English, but standard imperial English was not long acceptable to patriotic Nigerians. So Nigeria must develop for its literature an English whose norms were created by Nigerians in response to the special circumstances in their country. Such an English (Nigerian Pidgin) existed at the time of independence, but because it was maligned, the first generation of Nigerian writers sought a more respectable English literary medium. Hence they devised the strategy of “transliteration”—introducing ethnic-language tropes and idioms into the English text. But transliteration was a flawed approach, and its literary output, in a language only marginally different from imperial English, remained inappropriate in Nigeria. Even so, the strategy served the desired goal by demystifying standard English. As a result, Nigerian Pidgin is coming into its own as a literary medium, and Nigerian writers are taking greater liberties in their reconstitution of English.

With “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,” of 1897 (“Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”)—a meditation on how to set up a mental dice game that would visually inscribe the fatal play of human thought shipwrecked against unbeatable chance—Stéphane Mallarmé announced modernism. As his celebrated white sonnet about a swan stuck in the glacier of the blank page (“The new, lively, and lovely today”) had established the image of writing as a near-to-death experience, his equally celebrated understatement about how the ultimate presence of the rose depends on its absence “from any bouquet” had set up symbolism as the art of suggestion. Had any French poet ever had such influence on writers to come? such resonance for readers and artists? With Mallarmé modern poetry begins.

Djuna Barnes's experimental text Nightwood offers a difficult narrative shaped around a sense of loss. Barnes outlines a loss of access to history, to language, and to representation in general for those consigned to the margins of culture. By using a torrential and Byzantine language—a language of indirection—Barnes creates a lexicon of loss that acts as a strategy for recuperating what has been unspeakable, particularly the culturally disempowered: in this text, Jews, women, and homosexuals. Her psychic and textual strategies work through analogy to recover unrecorded history and to show the unrepresented. Barnes reconfigures the culturally privileged discourse of melancholia and in doing so articulates a structure of loss for those whose histories have been effaced.

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition. The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” relates details of the philosopher's life and diet that corroborate this critique. Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality. From the opium eater's perspective, the beautiful and the sublime occur as effects, not of representation, but of incorporation, giving rise to the possibility of material thought. A specialized diet also challenges the norms of public medicine, such as those expressed in Thomas Beddoes's Hygiea, which grounds public health in private reflection and responsibility. De Quincey's Confessions affirms a subjectivity that is the effect of daily dosing.

Aristotle's distinction between phronesis, or ethical knowledge, and techne, or productive knowledge, is relevant both to Romantic and to modern discussions of the relations between aesthetic and ethical experience. Wordsworth and Coleridge try in different ways to negotiate between the two kinds of knowledge, advocating the ethical force of poetry while acknowledging its status as techne; in contrast, modern criticism tends either to accept the ubiquity of techne or to revive phronesis while undervaluing the tension between the two. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas provide a way to link phronesis to aesthetic autonomy through the means-end unity of phronesis and the ethical claim of the other, although Gadamer overemphasizes the autonomy of the artwork and Levinas under-emphasizes the ethical possibilities of the aesthetic. Wordsworth and Coleridge present the ethical encounter with the other as in tension with techne, but they also show that tension itself to be ethically significant.

Across a range of disciplines and discourses, translation has become a central concern for many scholars working in the humanities. Indeed, the notion of translation has begun to inflect the most compelling and consequential debates on meaning and representation. My essay gives attention to Walter Benjamin's redemptive and generative notion of translation as survival and to postmodern currents in translation studies alongside a contemporary Nigerian diasporic novel written in English, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. Framed by a passing on of the story of the Women's War (the Igbo women's tax revolt against the British in 1929), Echewa's narrative critiques the complicitous practices of translation, colonialism, and anthropology. In this exemplary instance of a type of hybrid postcolonial textuality, processes of intergenerational and intercultural transmission, conceived as both acts of translation and instruments of historical consciousness, perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory.

Abstract of “McKinley at Home” This paper examined early American cinema's role as a “visual newspaper” to assess the emerging medium's influence on the formation of a national public sphere. Focusing on early moving images of William McKinley, particularly a brief 1896 “front porch” campaign film showing the presidential candidate on his front lawn reading a telegram, I demonstrated how this recently introduced visual technology could be deployed to dislocate time and space for pointed political effect. This effect depended on how McKinley was depicted on-screen “at home” (simultaneously in Canton, Ohio, and in front of vaudeville houses across the country) and on how these images were initially exhibited and received (by cheering audiences packed with high-ranking Republican dignitaries). In both formal composition and reception, early cinema was instrumental in helping to blur traditional distinctions between personal presence and mass media representation, as well as between domestic life and public spectacle.

At the conclusion of “Benito Cereno” Herman Melville “elucidate[s]” a curious “item or two,” including Cereno's ultragentlemanly apparel. This return to the issue of Cereno's clothes reiterates the Yankee Delano's preoccupation with Cereno as a dandy, restaging Delano's tendency to focus unswervingly on the apparently complex markers of class superiority signaled by such genteel refinement—and, within the logic of that preoccupation, to ignore the seemingly transparent truth presented by the naked black body. Melville mobilizes the figure of the dandy. I suggest, to interrogate the Yankee's veneration of social form, a veneration at odds with the North's smug self-figuration in 1855 as homogeneously democratic and classless, as morally superior to a South reviled for its social inequalities and slaveholding. By orchestrating the encounter between Yankee and dandy, Melville maps a peculiarly northern political field, pointing to an obfuscatory rhetoric of “apparent symbol[s]” that articulates the slave only polemically and ignores him otherwise.

The allusions to Emerson in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are usually read as a scathing indictment of Emersonian individualism. Yet even as Ellison satirizes the Emerson canonized in Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day, the career of Ellison's narrator extends a pragmatic tradition of individualism leading from Emerson through Kenneth Burke. Though often accused of ignoring tragic limits, Emerson describes the self as existing only within the material limitations of culture—and thus as always socially implicated and indebted. While Emerson claims that the pursuit of one's own most vital work is a moral end that fulfills one's social duties, Burke and Ellison demand more complex scrutiny of one's ethical connections to others. Burke insists that the social context of our individual acts requires a comic ethics of identification: we must identify with others across social conflicts and recognize how our individual acts may be identified with those conflicts. Ellison's narrator progresses toward this Burkean ethic: in his final confrontation with Mr. Norton (who has recommended Emerson to him), the narrator adopts a mode of communication that asserts the democratic connection of all Americans at the same time that it confronts the systemic discrimination that separates them.