The description of the marble reliefs which depict examples of humility, in the tenth canto of Purgatory,—the Annunciation, David and the Ark, Trajan and the widow—has been universally admired, and often studied and discussed. But it seems to me, for several reasons, that the specific matter of the order in which their details are presented may certainly be considered further with interest, and perhaps with profit—although the fact of their orderly sequence is, in at least a general way, obvious to every reader.

In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”

According to the report of the United Nations commission on Human Rights, rape is the least condemned war crime (coomaraswamy, Further Promotion 64n263). Although wartime rape was listed as a crime against humanity by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and by the Geneva Conventions, it was not until 2001 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia identified rapists as war criminals. In that year the tribunal sentenced three men for violations of the laws or customs of war (torture, rape) and crimes against humanity (torture, rape) committed during the war in Bosnia during the 1993 takeover of Foca, where women were systematically raped and killed, the purpose being “to destroy an ethnic group by killing it, to prevent its reproduction or to disorganize it, removing it from its home soil.”

The line between a contact zone and a comfort zone is a thin one. I can imagine that line drawn in many ways, but the color line of which W. E. B. DuBois spoke is the one that concerns Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In Racial Formation in the United States, when they declare that “race has no fixed meaning” (71), they mean that this color line is always being redrawn, by different hands and differing hearts. It is this possibility of racial transformation, not just racial formation, that makes Omi and Winant's theory powerful and compelling. With transformation in mind, we can conceive of racial formation as another version of Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone, where friction sparks unpredictable futures and where, by implication, our racial present may not look like our racial past. At the same time, racial formation is also reformation, affirming identities with which we feel at ease. In these comfort zones of inherited identities, we encourage others and are encouraged ourselves to toe the (color) line. These racial tendencies, toward change and constancy, innovation and cliché, are evident in both politics and culture. Although Omi and Winant's sociology of race is not concerned with literature, their insightful model of racial formation is manifest in literary culture, in aesthetic form and in literary institutions: the publishing industry, the literary marketplace, and the department of literature, where racial politics are always present.

If Shakespeare belonged to the United States by birth instead of by inheritance, the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth could not have been celebrated more widely or enthusiastically. It is not irrelevant to consider what his works have contributed to American culture, and what Americans have contributed to Shakespeare in the library and on the stage. To dispose first of some of the fringe benefits, it may be suggested that much innocent pleasure has accrued from the cultivation of Shakespeare gardens containing all the herbs, flowers, and trees named by the poet. An attempt to naturalize all the birds he mentions has had less happy results, though it must be acknowledged that the starlings imported by Eugene Schieffelin in 1880 have taken literally the injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.

A comparison of the mob in Zola's novel Germinal, 1885, and in Hauptmann's drama, The Weavers, 1892, reveals many points of resemblance. Some of these grow essentially out of the general similarity of theme, others represent more incidental details; yet the outward resemblance is greatly offset by the fact that the miners and weavers as such are fundamentally different. Nevertheless, both authors portray the abject poverty of a class of laborers—poverty due essentially to merciless exploitation on the part of unscrupulous employers who have degraded and virtually enslaved their employes. In both cases these miserable starvelings revolt against a tyranny which would suck the very blood from their veins and the marrow from their bones; under the momentary leadership of virtual outsiders they resort to violence in their protest against starvation wages. In varying degree, as determined by the greater epic breadth of the novel on the one hand and by the narrower scope of the drama on the other hand, details are given of individual and general misery, decrepitude, degeneracy, despair, long-continued suffering and of a subsequent flaring up into violent rebellion against the unendurable.

My contribution to this year's conference of the Modern Language Association is an inquiry which can hardly be reduced to concrete terms: Meaning and Destiny in Western Literature. And yet our attention is to be engaged by five concrete literary figures—symbolic not only of the spirit of the people in whose languages they originated, but of the spirit and soul of the European community as a whole. They have been familiar to you from your youth—as familiar as the skyline of your native mountains, or your cities, or as any landmark in the town of your childhood: Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust.

This familiar German proverb first made its appearance during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, soon found its way into the popular collections and spread throughout Germany and also to Holland and Scandinavia. By the end of the seventeenth century it had become popular in all these countries, particularly in the schools where it served as a maxim to encourage diligence. Later it appears in literally identical form even outside Teutonic territory.

This essay accounts for the recent prominence of women's writing in Greece by examining how women writers applied writing strategies developed under the dictatorship (1967–74) to their critique of fixed gender roles. Margarita Karapanou's novel Kassandra and the Wolf deconstructs the victor-victim opposition and poses the process of inversion itself as a position from which to write. Jenny Mastoraki's collection of poems Tales of the Deep works out a similar perspective formally, suggesting that such a position requires that the order of language also be disturbed. By analyzing these texts in the historical context of the dictatorship and in the theoretical contexts of feminist works such as Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, I show how Karapanou's and Mastoraki's responses to censorship are not individual exceptions but key components of recent Greek women's writing.

The marble faun frequently reads like a guide-book. Its characters and narrator describe many landscapes and ruins, comment interpretively on many works of art, and take every opportunity to make general pronouncements on aesthetics. Often at such points Hawthorne's Romance seems interrupted by bits of leftover essays, whose tenuous dramatic plausibility derives from the characters, three of whom are “artists, or connected with art,” and from the Italian setting, which is insistently presented as the home of the “antique, pictorial, and statuesque.”

The division of the stage into halves, one representing family conflicts in 1929 and the other representing the same family in 1932, is a device in the dramatic use of space which explains the originality of A Moratória, as shown by an Aristotelian analysis of its structure. The archetype which inspires the structure of this play is “the ant and the grasshopper,” whose division implies different dramatic climates within the play. On the one hand, we have the tragedy of negligence (level of the parents and their son), and on the other hand, the apprenticeship of consciousness (level of the daughter). The simultaneous use of the divided stage reflects the period of transition lived by the family and the Brazilian society in the early thirties: there is the shift from the country to the city; the shift from patriarchal to matriarchal tendencies; and the transfer of power from the great families to the emerging middle class. If the play fails in part, it is because the author cannot give an objective interpretation of reality. He is too compassionate.

“You only have to know one thing: You can learn anything. For free. For everyone. Forever” (Khan Academy). Utopias of learning abound in our contemporary media landscape. Take, for instance, the above motto of Khan Academy (#YouCanLearnAnything), one of the earliest providers of open online education. With lessons in over twenty-four languages on topics from algebra to art history, Khan Academy aspires to reach an unprecedented global audience—not only children from the United States who are stuck in “a corrupt or broken [school] system” but also the “young girl in an African village” and the “fisherman's son in New Guinea” (Khan 4). In this sense, Khan Academy enjoys a paradoxical kinship to the diverse geographies studied in this cluster of essays. By promising the global provision of education, it seeks to conquer geography itself.

We resort to many expedients in order to maintain the arbitrary character of English spelling. We ask that our children be drilled endlessly in school, we do homage to “the dictionary” as an arbiter of linguistic matters, and we cast a supercilious smile that cuts deep upon anyone who deviates from conventional orthography. Also among these mechanisms for maintaining our spelling is the spelling bee, and the tracing of its development—from its background in schools, through its flowering as a rural entertainment in New England and later as the principal literary exercise on the frontier, to its revival on the radio—forms a necessary chapter in American linguistic history.

The dissident priest Richard Wyche, Judged a recalcitrant heretic by the church and condemned to die at the hands of the state, was burned at the stake in London in 1440. Almost four decades earlier, he had been interrogated by ecclesiastical officials in Durham. A record of his ordeal survives, extraordinarily, in the autobiographical narrative translated below.

As though from a sudden awareness of the ethical void in which we have been living since the first World War, a growing number of scholars, several among them Americans, have lately been turning their attention eagerly and fruitfully to the doctrine of the gentleman. They have studied its varied aspects in different national environments and have examined painstakingly its effects upon human conduct as this is reflected in the various literatures of Western Europe. A large segment of that vast aggregation of dust-laden volumes bearing the forbidding name “didactic literature” has been taken from library shelves and scanned anew in this effort to lay bare the minutest details of the doctrine. The initiator of this contemporary revival of interest in the ideals which nourished the gentleman appears to have been Maurice Magendie, whose study of the doctrine in seventeenth-century France gave rise to a healthy polemic regarding the appropriate scope and methods of literary history. This work was followed by Ruth Kelso's Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, a model of erudite scholarship especially rich in bibliographical lore. Fittingly enough in a German work of the totalitarian period, August Hoyler's Gentleman Ideal and Gentleman Erziehung, dealing with the doctrine in England, sets up the Führerprinzip as the nucleus of the ideal. J. E. Mason's Gentlefolk in the Making continues Kelso's investigations down into the eighteenth century. The Italian contribution to the doctrine has been summarily discussed by F. R. Bryson. Written in semi-popular vein, In Praise of Gentlemen expresses the nostalgic longing of H. E. Sedgwick for a return to the social ideals of our forefathers. Perhaps the most complete analysis of the workings of the doctrine is found in E. Wingfield-Stratford's Making of a Gentleman. The number of these investigations is alone sufficient to show the interest which the subject holds for the literary and social historian, in spite of the doubt cast in some quarters on the present vitality of the ideal of the gentleman as an active social force. There is good reason to believe that we shall presently witness attempts, based upon these studies, to reinterpret the literature of the Renaissance as a reflection, in part, of the workings of the doctrine upon the minds of authors as disparate as Rabelais and Shakespeare or Spenser and Cervantes. Recalling the fruitful results obtained during the past half-century from the application of the investigations of Renaissance Platonism to literary interpretation, who can doubt that a similar success awaits the scholar who will launch forth upon a similar quest concerning the literary influence exerted by the concept of the “perfect gentleman,” of which concept Platonic love was but a part, however important?

En 1894, M. Binet, qui venait de fonder L'Année psychologique, eut l'idée de s'adresser à quelques-uns des auteurs dramatiques de son temps pour leur demander des renseignements sur la façon dont ils concevaient leurs pièces et les composaient, espérant ainsi “éclaircir la question si importante, si mal connue, si peu étudiée, de l'imagination créatrice.”

There are a number of passages in Hawthorne's “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” which seem to allude to Edgar Allan Poe or his writings. The passages are, in fact, so numerous as to indicate that one of Hawthorne's principal reasons for writing the tale when he did was to criticize through personal satire Poe's outlook on literature and life. In this connection it may be rewarding to take another look at this most repulsive of Hawthorne's tales.

It is not always easy to communicate with the larger community and the general public. In the field of literary studies our times betray a deep malaise. Belletristic exercises have been discredited as frivolous and elitist. The very underpinnings of any critical discourse are being scrutinized. What is criticism, and what for? To some, it is an analysis of functions, to others an elaboration and testing of theories, to still others a study of the modes of production and reception, while to not a few it has an ideological thrust of its own. There are those who nourish even more grandiose ambitions—who see criticism as a means of rethinking or undermining Western metaphysics and of shaking the foundations of a logocentric and anthropocentric cultural consciousness.