Recent statistics on african american readers outline distinct trends that are difficult to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, standardized tests of high school reading proficiency show that African Americans are falling further behind students in every other racial and ethnic group. The National Assessment of Educational Progress “report card” on reading claims that “Black twelfth-graders scored lower in 2013 than in 1992,” when the assessment began, while “the White-Black score gap widened” over that period (“Top Stories”). On the other hand, the Pew Research Center, in a survey published in 2014, reveals that a notably high percentage of African American adults are book readers. Pew's statistics show that when it comes to having read at least one book in the past year, there are more black readers than white or Hispanic readers (81% versus 76% and 67%, respectively) and that African Americans have read more e-books, audiobooks, and books in print than any other group (“E-Reading”).

This essay combines a history of publication with a discussion of the sonic dimensions of Roger Williams's seventeenth-century Narragansett-English vocabulary, A Key into the Language of America, modeling one way literary scholars might think beyond print-centric analyses. Drawing on historical reprintings as well as Native American linguistic reappropriations of A Key, I argue that cross-cultural encounter emerges most powerfully in relation to Williams's text not as a vestige of the past, accessible through the dialogues or the language, but as a function of the text's reproduction, the audiences' imagination of its reproducibility, and the points at which it fails to be a mimetic record.

Had shahrazad lived today she might have been on the first boat of middle eastern refugees to europe, posits the theater director Mahmoud al-Hurani in his new play 1001 Titanics. First performed in September 2015 by the Arab Puppet Theatre at the Metro al Madina Theater in Beirut, the play toured in Lebanese refugee camps throughout the fall. In al-Hurani's play Shahrazad tells the tale of a skinny boy named Ahmad, a refugee driven by the fall of rockets from his quaint village to an unnamed Arab metropolis symbolized by the paper cutout of a skyline of high rises. The production relies on silhouette, puppetry, and mime to tell its story. In one climactic scene, two characters play cards over an upturned fan, and when a cutout of a missile drops to the stage their cards are blown into oblivion.

Almost all critics of Vanity Fair have assumed that Thackeray's novel had no very carefully worked out structure and have been content to make rather general comments on the form of the novel: it was loosely improvised along the line of a contrast between Becky and Amelia. J. Y. T. Greig, for example, believes that Thackeray not only lacked Fielding's ability to work out a highly detailed plot but also suffered from the additional handicap of being forced to compose hurriedly for monthly serialization. To Greig, “Vanity Fair is unified and shapely up to and including the episodes of Brussels and the Battle of Waterloo: for although it contains two heroines, the adventures and sufferings of the one are causally related to the adventures and sufferings of the other. It becomes unified and shapely again after Chapter xliii (Pumpernickel), and for the same reason. But in between—roughly 300 pages—the plot of the first and last sections of the book is suspended, and the unity of the novel disappears.”

I wrote my dissertation in the late 1990s. it compared harriet beecher stowe and other antebellum sentimental women writers with professional male orators and rhetoricians. I argued that these women authors hadn't been writing in a rhetorical room of their own. Instead, they were solving problems that the professionals could not. While writing the dissertation, I asked a friend who was in my program to read my chapter on the most popular book in the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Predicting any future—or futures—for literary criticism is a risky business, perhaps all the more so now that the relation of literature to its others is arguably subject to greater and faster changes than ever before. The changes to come in literary criticism will be determined by transformations in literature proper as well as by any number of forces outside literature. By changes “within” literature we cannot mean simply those to contemporary or recent literature, whose canons—to say nothing of what exceeds these canons—are far from settled. The literary past continues to change even if every given text endlessly repeats itself like a broken record. For an authoritative formulation of this position, one need not turn to some outré poststructuralist or to Walter Benjamin's contention that even the dead are not “safe” from the reaches of the present (“On the Concept” 391). One can appeal to the sober, usually conservative thinking of T. S. Eliot:

“Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest preserved efforts at musical composition are contained in two manuscript books owned by the Huntington Library in California and date from his thirty-first year, the year Treasure Island was completed. But almost a decade earlier he confessed that music had already become his ”consuming passion.“ From Frankfort in 1872 he had written home telling of his ”terrible excitement“ at a performance of Halévy's La Juive, and adding: “An opera is far more real than real life to me… It seems as if… opera would never stale upon me.” The next winter back in Edinburgh he heard his first Beethoven quartet, and with typical impetuosity forsook his love of opera for other loves. Later he was to write from Saranac Lake: “Wealth is only useful for two things—a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.”

After her death, susan sontag was portrayed in many obituaries (including one i wrote for the french daily Le Monde) as an intellectual who had moved from the formalism and aestheticism of her early work to the ethically engaged stance of her later essays, right up to the last one she published in her lifetime, the stinging indictment of American torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Sontag was eloquent, as well as somewhat despairing, in her diagnosis of an “increasing acceptance of brutality” and a “culture of shamelessness” in American life (“Regarding the Torture” 28–29); similarly, after September 11, 2001, she did not hesitate to denounce (in a brief essay that earned her the label of “un-American” in some quarters) the “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators” in the days following the attack (“Comment”).

Readers of assia djebar's oeuvre are well aware of her commitment to restoring algerian women to their proper place in the history of their nation's anticolonial struggle. Beginning with her third novel, Les enfants du nouveau monde (1965; Children of the New World), a text offering a panoramic view of women's participation in the Algerian War, Djebar signaled her intent to chart women's political and psychological awakening during the anticolonial struggle. In contrast to this early text, Djebar's penultimate work, La femme sans sépulture (2002; “Woman without a Tomb”), focuses on one revolutionary figure: Yamina Echaïb Oudaï, known as Zoulikha, the martyr of Cherchell.

Hopkins has recently been treated as a representational poet who aimed to praise God by imitating His creation, but his unconventional uses of language, which are related to his temperamental originality, introduce an autonomous quality into his poetry. His deviations, by their very nature, set reference aside to exhibit the inherent signifying capacity of language, a capacity that Hopkins' journals show he fully appreciated. His original methods, including his phonetic structures, his conception of inscape as it applies to poetry, and his unconventional syntax and imagery, give language dominance over experience and use it to reshape reality according to linguistic principles.

Before the history of Italian bestiary literature can be satisfactorily written, considerable preliminary work remains to be done. When Lauchert published his Geschichte des Physiologus (Strassburg, 1889), although he devoted a certain amount of space to the poets from the Sicilian school to Ariosto, he was not aware that any bestiaries earlier than that of Leonardo da Vinci existed in Italian prose. Three years later, Goldstaub and Wendriner, Ein Tosco-Venezianischer Bestiarius (Halle, 1892), published the text of a manuscript belonging to the Biblioteca Comunale at Padua, and also an account of seven other manuscripts, all of which are in Florentine libraries. This book (cited hereafter as G-W) is the most comprehensive study of the Italian bestiaries now available, and may safely be taken as the basis for further investigation. The present paper, based in large part on work done in the libraries of Florence, Naples and Paris, is offered as a contribution to the study of the subject, and will, it is hoped, be of value in indicating a large amount of material, including several important manuscripts, which was entirely unknown to Goldstaub and Wendriner. An important phase of the subject, namely, the use of bestiary material by the Italian poets of the thirteenth century, has been investigated by Dr. M. S. Garver, of Yale University, in a dissertation which he hopes to publish soon.

To people interested in the history of English pronunciation, the names of John Walker and Thomas Sheridan are not unfamiliar. Of these two men, the more important from the point of view of modern pronunciation, in particular American pronunciation, is unquestionably Walker; for almost invariably, where these two men disagreed, it has been Walker's decisions which have prevailed—especially in America, until today many of our pronunciations of individual words, as well as our ideas about proper pronunciation are traceable to Walker, not Sheridan. Walker's influence was made possible by the constant republication of his works in the nineteenth century and—more indirectly, but perhaps more pervasively—by his tremendous effect on succeeding dictionary writers.

In the treatment of classical authors and works used or borrowed upon by Rabelais, Cicero's share has not been fully studied, or, if studied, not properly emphasized. Plattard in his study of Rabelais maintains that “Bien que Gargantua recommande à Pantagruel, étudiant à Paris de former son style latin ‘à l'imitation de celui de Cicéron,’ Rabelais ne semble pas avoir beaucoup pratiqué lui-même les œuvres de Cicéron.” In the Lefranc edition of Rabelais' works, the same unawareness is evident although there are, besides quite a few direct mentions of Cicero in the text, many notations indicating possible references to him. These, however, are presumed to have been taken mostly from Erasmus. But on this point there is no complete accord. That Rabelais borrowed generously and frequently there can be no question. It is the purpose of this paper to show the borrowings made by him from Cicero's De Oratore and the Orator.

Hmm! A State-of-the-Art Essay About the Vvhereabouts of Theory Today? Should Such an Essay Be About Anything at all, considering the antirepresentational stance of radical theory? How does one write about theory, except self-reflexively (a question that Butler, Guillory, and Thomas raise)? If I did that, would I be guilty of professional narcissism, or would my rigorous self-reflexivity have a referent, whether the referent is called reality, the world, history, or experience? Would I be successful in combining the nuances and rigors of self-reflexive thinking with the mandate of having to say something about something?

The clarification of Goethe's concept of mathematics is important not only for an exact delineation of the extent and limits of his thought, but also in defining the relation between the humanities and the sciences. Again and again his spirit is invoked by humanists and scientists alike to define their relative positions. When the peculiar characteristics of the humanities and the sciences are brought into sharp focus, mathematics is usually the separating ingredient, and frequent reference is made to Goethe's supposedly negative attitude toward this science with a resulting unjust classification of his science as unscientific. Such arguments usually terminate upon application of two ancient remedies for deadlocked thought, the sets of supposedly logical alternatives-quality versus quantity, intuition (Anschauung) versus logic. Based on these criteria, Goethe's thought is securely if unilaterally embedded in the realms of quality and intuition, but at all costs immunized against the sinister demons of quantity and logic, which to some humanists are irritating symbols of aridity and vacuity, or even eternal foes of poetry, art, and life.

The student of Anglo-American literary relations in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is continually impressed by the number and kind of American books printed or reprinted in Great Britain. A full knowledge of the facts of such publication would almost certainly throw light on the whole matter of the reception of American writings in England. From what market did the publisher receive, or hope to receive, his return? What sorts of English readers bought the different classes of works? Or were the reprints sometimes sent back to compete with the American issues? Do periods in which there were many such reprints indicate waves of interest in things American, or merely that more American works offered themselves for republication at certain times?

As a member of the mla executive Council, I participated in the discussions that led to this conference and felt moved by my colleagues and their sense of urgency, particularly as expressed by Rosemarie Scullion and Sylvia Molloy. At the time of our council meetings, however, I was thinking mostly about staffing issues and the various reports and resolutions related to the use of graduate student and non-tenure-stream labor—some of them useful, some of them not very useful at all. And there I felt a real sense of urgency—and I remember thinking that there might be a way these issues converged.

In 1614 Lope de Vega, recently ordained, published the Rimas sacras, a confessional canzoniere replete with allusions to his past promiscuity and recent religious conversion. I argue that Lope addressed his collection not only to a public of anonymous readers but also to a specific, private reader: his patron, the duke of Sessa. For the previous eight years, Lope had served as Sessa's erotic amanuensis, writing love letters and poems for the duke's various mistresses. I propose that the collection as a whole and several sonnets in particular constitute an implicit reproach to Sessa. Through his religious poetry, Lope sought to repudiate his degraded masculine identity as the duke's epistolary pimp (and reputed lover) and affirm his status as a priest who served a more exalted and loving patron. In the Rimas sacras, the discourses of clientage and Petrarchan love are imbricated in the dominant religious discourse, rendering it more available for contestatory practices than is often recognized.