Structural linguistics is commonly held to be preoccupied with static language systems at the expense of language history. Yet in the 1920s the Prague Linguistic Circle resolved the structuralist dilemma of a system that ceases to act systemically the moment it undergoes a change. Language changes must be studied not in isolation but with regard to the whole system. No language system, however, is perfectly self-contained, nor can language changes be perfectly predictable, for language must adapt to concrete situations. Similarly, literary history appears largely systemic, but only a semiotic conception can explain its immanent development while simultaneously taking into account extraliterary influences. Prague structuralism thus studies both the internal, systemic changes of literary forms and the sociological aspects involved in their reception by the reading public. Finally, structural literary theory explains the role of individual artists, whose originality is seen as the dialectical antithesis to the systematic literary structure.

The relationship between speaker and hearer, between auctour (author and authority) and reader, is central to Chaucer's work. In the Canterbury Tales, speaking and hearing are conceived as equally creative functions whose practitioners jointly constitute meaning. Troilus and Criseyde, too, is constituted and sustained through a union of speakers and hearers whose verbal intercourse generates sexual intimacy. Pandarus' activity is paradigmatic for each partner; each manipulates language to gain control over events and over others while seeking absolution from responsibility by pleading subservience to external authority. In recognizing the complex interdependency of authoring and reading, Chaucer denies autonomous control to the one and insular passivity to the other and suggests that complicity is the essence of linguistic exchange and of worldly experience. Consideration of the evasions, insinuations, signals, and strategies comprised in communication in Troilus and Criseyde supports this position and generates a substantially new reading of the poem.

In Heart of Darkness Conrad explicitly selected two criteria—efficiency and the “idea” of the civilizing mission—to judge imperialism. Although he himself did not ultimately espouse these values (which social Darwinists used to justify European expansion), he chose them because they were popular and well-suited to condemning the peculiar exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold ii. Unlike capital rich imperialism, which could seek long-term development, Leopold’s capital-poor imperialism resulted in hasty exploitation of surface resources through forced labor. Conrad’s story powerfully illustrated the special inefficiency and cruelty of such exploitation. As in his other colonial novels, Conrad went on to imply a further judgment against all types of imperialism, even England’s, because of their complicity, belligerence, and arrogant disruption of indigenous cultures.

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.

Questions concerning textual referentiality figure among the most controversial in literary theory. The complementarity of semiotic and marxist notions of the literary referent suggests a new understanding of the referent based on the concept of “cultural unit.” The similarity in the relations that marxist epistemology (as defined by Althusser) posits between thought and the real and that semiotics (as defined by Eco) posits between language and the real warrants this reformulation. A discussion of the semiotic and marxist concepts necessary for a theory of the literary referent leads to its definition as a cultural ideological unit that, by virtue of its necessary but unrepresented relation to other, nonidentical cultural units, furnishes in the mode of a dialectical absence the materials requisite for an understanding both of certain textual properties and of the structure of the historical reality to which the text alludes.

In discussions of fiction, the implications of the term “voice” are seldom explored beyond its figurative uses. In As I Lay Dying, however, “voice” is central to our experience of narrative. The novel has two kinds of voice, mimetic and textual. Mimetic voice derives from represented speech, from the features of discourse by which readers identify speakers; but Faulkner’s novel dissimulates the origins of voices. The voices we hear turn out to belong to narrators and seem to originate in an author’s discourse. Textual voice arises from the printed text itself. Such features as italics, drawings, lists, and section headings generate signification independent of verbal meaning and establish an expressive context analogous to the paralinguistic context created by the voice in speech. As a result of the disruption of mimetic voices and of the presence of textual voice, language in As I Lay Dying transcends the conventional limitations of mimesis.

Despite his disillusionment with the moral condition of his friend, the beloved young man of the sonnets, Shakespeare's vocabulary of praise remains unabated. The key to this paradox lies in a shift of focus from the friend's “truth” to his power to inform the poet's style, that is, from moral fidelity to metaphysical and aesthetic constancy. This shift is attended by a heightened awareness of language as a way to grasp reality through participation in it. The sonnets portray the beloved as the incarnation of an unchanging truth, and poetry as a vehicle for evoking or re-creating that truth. These developments lead Shakespeare to a sacramental or “figural” conception of his poetry of praise that replaces the Petrarchan convention with which he begins.

The first part of this guide describes the various kinds of meetings at the MLA Convention and the procedures for organizing them. The second part describes the policies of MLA Divisions and Discussion Groups—their purpose and function, their structure and formation, and their governance.

The calendar of deadlines, referred to in this guide, is available from the Department of Special Programs at MLA headquarters. All correspondence concerning the procedures and policies should be sent to the Department of Special Programs.

In Peregrine Pickle, the extreme hostility of the hero's mother toward him from his earliest days, although an important catalyst in the plot, is never reasonably explained. Her attitude, as well as a number of otherwise ambiguous plot elements, become clear when we deduce that she was pregnant before her marriage. Several clues suggest that Smollett intended until late in the novel to present Peregrine as a bastard but changed his mind as he neared the end. It can be theorized that Smollett feared an accusation of plagiarism in borrowing this detail from Tom Jones, especially after he himself had accused Fielding with reference to Roderick Random. In addition, the life of Richard Savage, particularly as told in Samuel Johnson's elegaic and then-popular biography of his friend, offers many parallels in its story of the unnatural mother and the rejected bastard.

Muted allusions to second sight and revenants are crucial to the method and meaning of A Farewell to Arms. Like Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, Hemingway draws on European sources—particularly ballads—for his folkloristic motifs; like them, he uses these motifs to invest chaotic contemporary scenes with order and universal significance. For him to adapt the “mythical method” of these writers, however, is a formidable problem, since his vernacular rhetoric cannot accommodate their open, bookish allusions. Consequently, his references to prophetic gifts and returns from the dead, while undeniably present, are not prominent enough to have attracted the critical attention they deserve. For they point and contribute to an unresolved dialectic, between skeptical male and “croyante” female, that is characteristic not only of the Catherine-Frederic relationship but, Hemingway implies, of all love relationships between men and women.