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.

Carl Zuckmayer and Heinz Hilpert adapted Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) for the Berlin stage in 1931. The unpublished manuscript of the play “Kat” reveals that the German adaptors, while making several original contributions, relied heavily upon Annemarie Horschitz' translation of A Farewell to Arms (In einem andern Land, 1930). By participating in the dramatization, playwright Zuckmayer sought to win a wider audience for Hemingway; at the same time, he was responding to current trends in the Berlin theater and to the political situation facing the Weimar Republic. Zuckmayer's political consciousness, manifest in the earliest of his successful plays, reached a new level of seriousness in “Kat.” Stepping out from behind his own humorous satire, he permitted Hemingway's endorsement of individual freedom to come to life in the Deutsches Theater at a time when the cause of freedom was being threatened as never before in Germany's history.

Wallace Stevens noted in his journal that while aphorisms are never believed for very long they help us make brief, intensely felt discoveries about ourselves; there he made a connection between his love of aphoristic expression and his theory of human perception of reality as a perception of fragments, never the whole. Exploring the nature and variety of his aphorisms as a manifestation of this concept is important to the understanding of his poems. The tendency to experience life as fragments is, on the one hand, a centripetal tendency akin to aphoristic expression, since in each case one momentarily pulls experience into a self-contained unit. But such moments invariably give rise to a centrifugal tendency, an encompassing of the plenitude of experience in all its contradictory fullness. The juxtaposition of these opposing tendencies lies at the heart of Stevens' aphoristic technique and of the tension in much of his poetry.

In Wordsworth's early poetry, a description of natural tranquillity often follows a narration of human suffering. The most notable instance of this is the Pedlar's spear grass vision at the conclusion of The Ruined Cottage. This pattern of calm following suffering is not an attempt to evade the metaphysical questions provoked by evil and human misery; rather it represents a bona fide response which Wordsworth's imagination makes to the fictional representation of suffering. The poet contemplates the pathetic, as he does images of nature and memory, in order to provide himself with the excitement necessary to achieve the transcendental state he calls “calm.” This natural calm is Wordsworth's version of a significant and familiar response to fictive suffering, the psychological mechanism of catharsis.

Recent criticism of the eighteenth-century English novel points to a providential world view as the “proper conceptual context” for these fictions, but it would be an error to see the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett as uniformly or unhesitatingly committed to the providential order. These authors constructed fictions, characters, and structures in response to the historical actuality of the age, in transition from the Christian to the secular world view. It is this transition and its effect on the providential world view that provide the conceptual context for the fiction of this period. Critics, having recognized the novel as the fictional form of a secular age, must also recognize the significance of the romance as that fictional form best depicting the providential order. In eighteenth-century English fiction the romance is gingerly displaced from the theoretical center of narrative by elements of form now identified with the novel.

Doris Lessing's major novels dealing with madness show a striking similarity to the ideas of R. D. Laing. Novelist and psychiatrist share the belief that the primary ill of our society is self-division; both see the mad person as victim and revealer of what is wrong with normal society. Lessing shares Laing's conviction that the therapist can help his patient best by transposing himself into the patient's world view. The Golden Notebook portrays the progressive disintegration of Anna's normally fragmented life to its culmination in madness with Saul, her fellow patient and unwitting therapist. In The Four-Gated City Martha helps the mad Lynda and eventually herself and the world by entering into Lynda's view of reality. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell Charles goes on a Laingian cosmic journey; however, the hero's vision of a fatally structured universe undercuts the force of Lessing's final portrayal of madness as potential salvation for the world.

The theme of education pervades nineteenth-century novels, often particularized in the theme of learning to read and write. Great Expectations reveals the complex metaphorical nature of the terms “reading” and “reader,” deepening our sense of how Pip's moral perceptions are related to his literal education. The novel begins with several scenes in which Pip learns to read and then goes on to show a wide range of characters reading rightly or wrongly, dramatically or narrowly, with self-deception or with charity. Dickens' own reader comes to see that the stages of Pip's expectations correspond to the growth in his powers of interpretation.

Billy Budd concentrates Melville's philosophy of war and lifts it to its highest point of development. The themes of the work extend ideas he had developed since his youth, and its poetic conceptions are the offspring of earlier ones expressive of his thought on “the greatest of evils.” In Billy Budd the philosophy is conveyed entirely by poetic means—conceptual imagery and form; symbolic characters, actions, questions, contrasts, and contradictions; interplay of sight and sound; and pictorial representations of social realities. The work conveys both the abhorrence of war underestimated by those who, in the classical argument about Billy Budd, interpret it as Melville's “testament of acceptance” and the nonironic, even luminous, affirmation of man's latent humanity overlooked by those who read the book as irony, rejection, or darkness alone. In the course of his last artistic exploration Melville discovered that within the most cruel contradictions of the world of war lies the potential for its metamorphosis.

The opposition of fictive to nonfictive (i.e., scientific) discourse current during the last 350 years is linked here to the relations between metaphorical and literal discourse. The problem is this: if metaphorical usage is somehow a “misuse” of the literal relation of words to things, what are we to make of the fact that all language is metaphorical? (A) Metaphorical usage retroactively affirms the “dictionary” meanings of its words as if they were literal. (B) Fictive and nonfictive discourses encompass a (literal) heterocosm and a (metaphorical) second world, between which there is a dialectical liaison. (C) Langue stands metaphorically for extra-linguistic reality, but parole may become metaphorical by retroactively affirming its words' meanings within its langue as if they were literal. (D) Fiction is discourse that makes metaphorical statements by defining these as if they were literal, and nonfiction makes literal statements by defining these as functions of metaphorical statements.