Although instinctively formalistic, modern criticism has avoided the basic problem of interpretation: not what a universally valid method should be, but why there should have to be any interpretation in the first place. Whence the first principle of metacommentary: each interpretation must account for the necessity of its own existence. Russian Formalism is the model of a criticism which refuses to interpret: it is unable, however, to deal with diachrony, and in particular with the novel as a form. The second principle of metacommentary: the fact that a work needs no interpretation (as in the novel of plot) is itself something to be explained. Thus, the possibility of plot reveals a wholeness in the society that produces it. To the evolution of the plotless novel corresponds the structuralist hermeneutic, with its reading of the work as a single sentence or as a system of binary oppositions. Structuralism can be transcended by the realization that its abstract mental categories are in reality historical moments. The ultimate model of metacommentary is one which, distinguishing the manifest and latent contents of the work, then seeks to account for this distinction (or repression). Since the latent content is an experience, the elaboration of the work corresponds to a question about the possibilities of Experience itself, and the disguises of the content to an attempt to conceal the causes of the limitation of experience in the social situation.

Fanny Burney's diaries and the reading lists to be found in her unpublished notebooks and memorandum books yield many references to the courtesy writers and to the courtesy books and allied works widely read in her age. The date of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, often taken as the culminating point in studies of the courtesy literature for men, marks the beginning of an accelerated production of courtesy books for women. In 1759 Thomas Marriott, the author of Female Conduct, was rejoicing that “such an agreeable Theme” should have been so long reserved for him. As far as he could remember, “very few [had] touched this Subject in Prose, and None in Verse” to any appreciable length before him, so that he was able to appropriate, as he thought, an uncultivated “Spot of Ground in Parnassus.”1 In the following decades, however, the problem of the conduct of the young lady was investigated so thoroughly that the lifetime of Fanny Burney, or more accurately the years 1760–1820, which saw also the rise of the novel of manners, might be called the age of courtesy books for women.

I am interested in questions of reading and interpretation. I am also drawn to actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour. Can these attractions be brought into alignment? To what extent can a style of thought that describes itself as empiricist and rejects critique speak to the dominant concerns of literary studies? Can actor-network theory help us think more adequately about interpretation? Might it inspire us to become more generous readers? How do literary studies and Latourian thought engage, enlist, seduce, or speak past each other? What duels, rivalries, intrigues, appropriations, or love affairs will ensue?

The recent turn to aesthetics in literary studies has been embraced by some of its advocates as a polemical riposte to critique: a practice increasingly attacked from multiple directions but here specifically for doing artworks the disservice of reducing them to encryptions of history or ideology. But while the new or revived focus on pleasure (and, to a much lesser extent, displeasure)1 has been vaunted for the way in which it seems to circumvent the reduction of artworks to historical or ideological concepts, our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of aesthetic categories. Any literary or cultural criticism purportedly engaged with aesthetics needs to pay attention to these categories, which are by definition conceptual as well as affective and tied to historically specific forms of communication and collective life. But how does one read an aesthetic category? What kind of object is it, and what methodological difficulties and satisfactions does its analysis pose?

WHEN members of an institution debate, it may seem that they are arguing about fundamental principles, but it is more often the case that the truly fundamental principle is the one that makes possible the terms of the disagreement and is therefore not in dispute at all. I am thinking in particular of the arguments recently marshaled for and against blind submission to the journal of the Modern Language Association. Blind submission is the practice whereby an author's name is not revealed to the reviewer who evaluates his or her work. It is an attempt, as William Schaefer explained in the MLA Newsletter, “to ensure that in making their evaluations readers are not influenced by factors other than the intrinsic merits of the article” (4). In his report to the members, Schaefer, then executive director of the association, declared that he himself was opposed to blind submission because the impersonality of the practice would erode the humanistic values that are supposedly at the heart of our enterprise. Predictably, Schaefer's statement provoked a lively exchange in which the lines of battle were firmly, and, as I will argue, narrowly, drawn. On the one hand those who agreed with Schaefer feared that a policy of anonymous review would involve a surrender “to the spurious notions about objectivity and absolute value that … scientists and social scientists banter about”; on the other hand those whose primary concern was with the fairness of the procedure believed that “[j]ustice should be blind” (“Correspondence” 4). Each side concedes the force of the opposing argument—the proponents of anonymous review admit that impersonality brings its dangers, and the defenders of the status quo acknowledge that it is important to prevent “extraneous considerations” from interfering with the identification of true merit (5).

Why not compare? It's a janus-faced question, a double entendre, its dual meanings depending on emphasis. On the one hand, what are all the reasons why we should not compare? But, on the other hand, why shouldn't we compare, and what are the costs if we do not? Embedded in these questions are more fundamental ones ranging from the epistemological to the methodological. What do we mean by comparison, what effects do our comparisons have, and how do we actually do comparison? By “we” here, I address those involved in intellectual work who face choices on whether or not to engage in comparison; I do not, in this essay, address those who study how and why individuals or human societies compare and with what consequences.

Archipelagoes, cosmopolitanism, creolization: From antiquity to the present, from early Greek colonial settlements to twentieth-century postcolonial sites, these terms capture an idea of diversity linked to fluidity and mobility, exchange and transformation. Early modern European colonial expansions intensified processes that have continued to affect populations and landscapes, languages and worldviews. Today, postmodern global cities are the setting for new forms of creolized identities that are altering understandings of ethnic and national belonging across the world, even if established political and educational institutions do not always follow suit and adjust to this changing human landscape.

The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior exhibit parallel narrative strategies. The respectively black and Chinese American protagonists work their way from speechlessness to eloquence by breaking through the constraints of sex, race, and language. The heroines turn to masculine figures for guidance, to female models for inspiration, and to native idioms for stylistic innovation. Initially unable to speak, they develop distinctive voices by registering their own unspoken grief on paper and, more important, by recording and emulating the voices of women from their respective ethnic communities. Through these testimonies, each written in a bicultural language, Walker and Kingston reveal the obstacles and resources peculiar to minority women. Subverting patriarchal literary traditions by reclaiming a mother tongue that carries a rich oral tradition (of which women are guardians) the authors artfully coordinate the tasks of breaking silence, acknowledging female influence, and redefining while preserving ethnic characteristics.

For the student of acting and actors, the Eighteenth Century is a rich period. Within a century the careers of such players as Betterton, Quin, Macklin, Garrick, and Kemble ran their courses; these were actors of varying techniques, yet they had in common their century's earnest desire to imitate “nature” and they all subscribed to the same basic set of acting conventions. The century is rich too in theorists and critics: Gildon, John and Aaron Hill, Churchill, Lloyd, Hiffernan.

Guernsey, in shape a triangle and sloping toward the North, is divided into twenty parishes. The Lower or Northern Parishes are those most frequently visited by strangers; here the scenery is quiet, the bays are large, with beautiful white sand-beaches, varied, here and there, by some bold projection. The Southern coast, on the contrary, is beautiful in its very ruggedness; here, cliffs a hundred feet in height, wild and fierce, sea gulls and crows with their piercing shrieks, waves dashing against the rocks and into the caverns, all contribute to produce a peculiar fascination on the visitor.

ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH VESELOVSKY (1838-1906) IS WIDELY REGARDED AS RUSSIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED AND INFLUENTIAL Literary theorist before the formation of Opoyaz (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), whose members—Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, Roman Jakobson, and others—developed the approach generally known as Russian formalism. Readers of Shklovsky may note the prominence accorded to Veselovsky in Theory of Prose (1925). Some will also recall the use of the term historical poetics—in reference to the method put forward by Veselovsky—in the 1963 edition of Mikhail Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky and in his “The Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics” (1937-38, pub. in 1975). Another eloquent testimony to Veselovsky's spectral ubiquity in Russian literary theory is the concluding paragraph of Vladimir Propp's pathbreaking Morphology of the Folktale, where Propp humbly asserts that his “propositions, although they appear to be new, were intuitively foreseen by none other than Veselovsky” and ends his study with an extensive quotation from Veselovsky's Poetics of Plot (115-16). It is rarely recognized, however, that Veselovsky's method, in its rudimentary form, constitutes a common denominator of Shklovsky's, Bakhtin's, and Propp's widely divergent approaches.

In the merry England of Queen Elizabeth the life of the professional writer was seldom dull—witness the careers of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Kyd. Not less varied, though perhaps less appealing, is the career of Barnabe Rych, well known to students as a pamphleteer, romancer, and Shakespearean source. It is the lesser known but more humanly and historically interesting phase of his character which the writer ventures here to present: that of soldier and chronicler of the Irish wars, persecutor of Catholics, and informer to the Crown.

In the space between translators and translated, there are texts that straddle two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation. They participate in the construction of cultural identies from that in-between space and stage many of the concerns of contemporary translation theory. I call such texts translational literature. While all bilingual and multilingual discourse dramatizes the interaction of languages, translational texts lay special emphasis on translation as an essential component of cross-cultural contact. As such, translational literature treats translation in several registers–formal, thematic, linguistic, and discursive–raising questions not only about technical aspects of linguistic transfer but also about cultural (un)translatability, discourses of difference, and ideologies of domination. This essay elaborates the notion of translational literature and offers the exemplary case of Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love (1999). (WSH)

Globalization is such a large concept that it forces us all into the position of the blind men examining an elephant—able to articulate the part we touch but not able to grasp the whole. So it is with the provocative papers in this issue by Mark Poster, Bruce Robbins, and Thomas Keenan, along with Emily Apter's introduction. Each makes excellent points but also mounts a different argument. As a group they present a more comprehensive view of globalization than they do when read separately, and I want to explore the shape that emerges from their interactions. I see my task less as weaving them into a seamless tapestry than as highlighting the ways in which they challenge and complement one another. By pointing out the incompleteness as well as the accomplishment of each, I want to show that together they suggest new interactions between the local and the global and, through these interactions, new possibilities for political awareness and action.

A Funeral Elegy was written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies, A Funeral Elegy received scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”

The research that I reported in the darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) was driven by my desire and need to understand the opening up of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, its historical, theoretical, and political consequences. How was it that coexisting socioeconomic organizations like the Ottoman and Mughal sultanates as well as the incanate in the Andes and the tlahtoanate in the Valley of Mexico were either inferior or almost absent in the global historical picture of the time? I became aware, for example, that people in the Valley of Mexico living in the Aztec tlahtoanate, whether in conformity or dissenting, were compared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. The comparison was twofold: on the one hand, the Indians and the Jews were dirty and untrustworthy people; on the other hand, the Indians in the New World may have been part of the Jewish diaspora. So, the comparison got in trouble, because Indians and Jews may have been the same people. The Jesuit priest José de Acosta, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589), asked whether the Indians descended from the Jews, addressing a question that was on everybody's mind. He dismissed the possibility of the connection, because the Jews had had a sophisticated writing system for a long time while the Indians were illiterate (in the Western sense of the word). Jews liked money, Acosta pointed out, while Indians were not even aware of it; and while Jews took circumcision seriously, Indians had no idea of it. Last but not least, if Indians were indeed of Jewish origin, they would not have forgotten the Messiah and their religion.

Each new technology may be janus-faced, potentially improving and degrading the human condition. The steam engine made industrial products cheaper and more diverse but contributed to the exploitation of child labor and proliferation of squalid urban living conditions. The automobile makes transportation more convenient but pollutes and leads to countless highway deaths. Calculators let anyone perform feats of math but have weakened basic arithmetic skills.

A related conundrum holds true for technologies of the written word. The printing press helped spread literacy but shook the foundations of the Catholic Church. Word processing enabled the Japanese to generate text without producing each kanji stroke by stroke, but now many Japanese find themselves forgetting the stroke order. The spelling checkers in word-processing programs monitor typographical errors but dampen motivation to master spelling.

Information and communication technologies have generated new platforms on which to read. The list includes desktop and laptop computers, e-readers (such as the Kindle and Nook), tablet computers (e.g., the iPad), and handheld devices (e.g., the iPod Touch, mobile phones). But does reading on these devices differ from reading in hard copy? If so, does our growing dependence on reading onscreen contribute to a redefinition of what it means to read?

As Roger Sale has wryly observed, “everyone knows what children's literature is until asked to define it” (1). The Reasons WHY this unruly subject is so hard to delimit have been well canvassed. If we define it as literature read by young people, any text could potentially count as children's literature, including Dickens novels and pornography. That seems too broad, just as defining children's literature as anything that appears on a publisher-designated children's or “young adult” list seems too narrow, since it would exclude titles that appeared before eighteenth-century booksellers such as John Newbery set up shop, including the Aesopica, chapbooks, and conduct books. As numerous critics have noted, we cannot simply say that children's literature consists of literature written for children, since many famous examples—Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Little Prince—aimed to attract mixed audiences. And, in any case, “children's literature is always written for both children and adults; to be published it needs to please at least some adults” (Clark 96). We might say that children's literature comprises texts addressed to children (among others) by authors who conceptualize young people as a distinct audience, one that requires a form of literature different in kind from that aimed at adults. Yet basing a definition on authorial intention seems problematic. Many famous children's writers have explicitly rejected the idea that they were writing for a particular age group, and many books that were not written with young people in mind have nevertheless had their status as children's or young adult literature thrust upon them, either by publishers or by readers (or both).