It has taken a relatively short time for critics to become convinced of the basic continuity of James Joyce's entire body of work, despite Joyce's own protestations while in the process of creation that he had forgotten each previous effort in favor of the one in progress. While concerned with Leopold Bloom, Joyce impatiently asserted that “Stephen no longer interests me. He has a shape that can't be changed,” and when writing Finnegans Wake, he contemptuously shrugged off Ulysses: “Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.” It was imperative for him as an artist to concentrate on his new effort, and since he acted as his own publicity agent, it was necessary for him to call attention to it; but a retrospective appraisal should take note of the manner in which each work overlaps with one another: the child in the first three stories of Dubliners is very much the child Stephen in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Richard Rowan in Exiles is a projected image of the mature Stephen, and Shem the Penman is a caricature of both. Finnegans Wake in fact is a summation of all that Joyce had previously written: it recapitulates themes and motifs, reworks many of the same characters, and puns every previous Joyce title into its fabric. The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H. C. Earwicker.

The subject of this paper as announced some time ago in the programme of this convention, is not exactly the one which it should bear. In a former paper, published in the Modern Language Notes, I tried to trace back a number of our peculiar words and speech usages to an earlier period of the language, using Shakespeare as a basis. In the present paper this method of procedure has been attempted only incidentally. In other words, I invite your attention to a study of a few of the peculiarities of the language as found in Tennessee, regardless of their origin and history. It is not to be supposed, however, that the forms pointed out are limited to one particular state or to a small territory. On the other hand, most of them are found throughout the larger portion of the South, and many of them are common over the whole country. Nothing like a complete survey of the field, or a strict classification of the material gathered, has been attempted, and many of the words treated have been discussed by others. A few cases of bad pronunciation have been noticed, rather as an index of characteristic custom than as showing anything new.

When the subject is the relation between capitalism and American literature, few novels come more readily to mind than William Dean Howells's 1885 The Rise of Silas Lapham. “Published at the height of America's industrial expansion,” writes Wayne Westbrook in a typical assessment, it “pictures an era and personifies a type. The Era is the Gilded Age. The type is the American businessman” (59). But for a novel self-consciously focused on business, The Rise of Silas Lapham is surprisingly interested in the gift. Counter to Howells's famous later assertion that “[a]t present business is the only human solidarity,” the gift turns out to be the sole “chain” uniting Howells's characters against whatever interests, tastes, and principles separate them. Hidden in plain sight, the main plot of the novel delineates the awkward yet ultimately binding relations between the Brahmin Coreys and the rising Lapham family, which come about not because the Laphams “buy their way into society” (Michaels 40) but because they give the Coreys a gift so true and so large that it must be recognized and reciprocated. When the women of both families happen to be staying at a Canadian resort, Mrs. Lapham spontaneously comes to Mrs. Corey's rescue and, as a French doctor later makes uncomfortably explicit, saves Mrs. Corey's life. “A certain intimacy inevitably followed,” Howells writes, as the Coreys are “gratefully recognizant” of the gift and their “singular obligation” to the Laphams (24–25). This gift has received no critical attention even though it engenders the main plot of the novel as the initial “helplessly contracted” (172) obligation leads to further contact between the families, from dinner to business dealings to marriage. None of these consequences are comfortable; indeed, each of them is excruciating and poses one of the text's central questions: how does one reciprocate such an impossibly large gift when one shares no interests or tastes with the people to whom one is now bound by gratitude and debt? Mrs. Lapham's gift to Mrs. Corey not only transforms the Coreys' life forever (in a way, they pay with their son for the mother's life), but it also transforms Howells's novel from a novel about business to a narrative about gifts. This is far from incidental. Howells doubles the Corey-Lapham plot as Silas Lapham, in turn, believes that he owes his life to Jim Millon, who, during the Civil War, took a bullet for Lapham and died. The Laphams equally struggle with their own uncomfortable obligation to the working-class Deweys. While neither the Coreys nor the Laphams can figure out how to respond to impossibly large gifts given to them by people with whom they share nothing else, they do know instinctively that they must do so and reciprocate in one way or another. Howells's novel tells the story of these gifts and their confusing, maddening, and binding obligations. Indeed, Howells's supposed business novel can only spin itself out on these gifts, given and recognized as such.

Investigation has revealed that a number of the minor writers, the decadent writers of neoclassic French tragedies, contributed a comparatively large number of dramas which were accorded wide and enthusiastic acceptance in Spain during the second half of the eighteenth century. The chief reasons for this wide acceptance are that they came at a time when the greatest efforts were being made to introduce the neo-classic tragedy into Spain, and that these same tragedies had been first accepted with applause in Paris. If Crébillon's Rhadamiste et Zénobie seemed so good to Paris audiences that they applauded it thirty-three times during the first year of its appearance, why should Spaniards not feel safe in adapting it to their stage? Paris had been forming a taste for neo-classic tragedy during a period of two hundred years; it was the home of modern tragedy, and what Paris applauded, certainly Madrid could accept with assurance.

In the opinion of the late Thomas R. Lounsbury, Chaucer was virtually “free from these verbal quibbles which characterize to so marked a degree the language of the Elizabethan dramatists.” “The single instance,” he went on to say, “in which he furnishes any noticeable example of this sort is the play upon the word ‘style’ in the Squire's tale; though there is possibly one of the same character in a line in ‘Troilus and Cressida,‘ where it is said that

‘This Calkas knew by calkulynge,‘ i., 71

that Troy was to be taken. Still, from conceits of all kinds and of all grades Chaucer's language, at every period of his literary career, was in general wholly free.“

In the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction, there has been a turn to the redemptive power of biological life in various new materialisms, neoanimisms, neovitalisms, and affirmative biopolitics. In this essay I outline a series of historical and conceptual cautions against staking our lives or others' on such reconsiderations of life. Exploring the fascination with hylozoism (the theory that all matter is alive) in turn-of-the-twentieth-century biology, philosophy, and fiction, I demonstrate a recurring link between theories of universal life and eugenic racism that troubles any attempts to base political and ethical norms on supposedly biological ones. An examination of Mark Twain's “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes” reveals an alternative philosophy of life that uncouples hylozoism and imperialism but does so at the cost of a deadening nihilism. Such examples suggest that we look elsewhere than to life for our animating principles.

The advocates of the philosophy of engagement assert that learning and scholarship are not value-free, that there is a ubiquitous, even if implicit, commitment to a moral, and therefore basically political, standpoint in the vocation of the scholar and in the mission of the university. The first thing to note about this philosophy is its high-mindedness, its exalted conception of the role of the scholar and scholarship. However, if the commitment of the scholar is moral and not only intellectual, to virtue and not only to truth, how can this supply guidance or a principle of decision where the scholar encounters conflict among moral values? Decisions as to which values are to be given priority flow from the judgments, inescapable moral and political judgments, with which the citizen must concern himself. But the traditional view is that the primary goal of the citizen in his role as scholar is not the quest for virtue or power but the quest for significant truths. The pursuit of truth does not entail withdrawal or isolation from but service to society. Scholars cannot and should not escape the world of politics. But in a rational and humane society there must be some activities and institutions that are beyond politics.

The intricate architectural structure of Valle-Inclán's Ruedo ibérico is one of the trilogy's most original features. Not only does the work portray what is going on throughout that ruedo during the last months of Isabel II's reign, but the individual novels and their constituent parts have been constructed in the form of circles as well. Books i and ix, ii and viii, iii and vii, and iv and vi in both La corte de los milagros and Viva mi dueño bear many and close relationships with each other, leaving Book v in each case as the axis upon which the others revolve. Therefore, every book of Corte and Viva, with the exception of the two central books, has a sister book within the given novel with which it shares setting, characters, and subject matter. However, this broad general circularity is the merest beginning of the total revolution of the Ruedo. In addition to the relationships between certain books within a novel, each book is itself constructed in the form of a circle, as are some of its chapters. Finally, given books in one novel are parallel to their counterparts in the other. Valle-Inclán's use of the circle as an organizational device was not an arbitrary choice. On the contrary, the Ruedo ibérico is a synthesis of form and content whose origin will be found to lie in certain concepts expressed in such earlier works as La lámpara maravillosa and La media noche.

I am prompted to enter again upon this subject by two considerations, which hang together. One is that opinions I had previously expressed upon it have, in a respectable quarter, been treated with greater condescension than a man not wholly in error can well be expected to ignore; the other is that similar opinions, as I have lately noticed, have (independently) appeared in recent reputable criticism, particularly the foreign. I had said that it is not justifiable to treat literary or other art as a document, a record of the time, on the one hand, or of the author's life, on the other; that, rather, art reflects the taste of the time, and the taste of the author; and that while much of the life of the period may be reflected, and of the author, too, it is only with the greatest difficulty and uncertainty that this can be isolated and recognized. Imaginative literature is not only not history or unconscious autobiography but not even raw material for it; big allowances must be made both for the limitations and conventions of the art and also for the character of the artists. Some of these, to be sure, are realists, intent on the external object; some also are egoists, concerned, directly or indirectly, with their own nature and experience: but good art, and the greatest, is not limited or determined either by the artist's person or his day. And rather similar are the opinions of the critics Mm. Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, and Henri Bremond; and of recent notable novelists such as Proust and Gide. Like writers of their nation and of England whom I have cited in discussing the subject before, they are all of one accord against the biographical or historical attitude as unfruitful and irrelevant; and nearly all of them have much to say of Racine as one who did not recognizably reflect his time or his own life within it, and is, because of that, all the more significant as a poet.

Bertha's warning to Walther that her narrative not be taken for a Mdrchen provides a clue to an “intrinsic” Freudian psychological reading of “Eckbert,” a work which, like a dream or a fairy tale, has a “latent” as well as a “manifest” level. Bertha's narration is interspersed with compulsive confessions that point to her own repressed awareness of the symbolic meaning of her acts. On its latent level, her story is that of a narcissistic child's failure to attain the norm of productive social adaptation explicitly prescribed for her in the world of the work. Only in the fantastic “Waldeinsamkeit” does she approximate, briefly, “normal” socialization. Her theft of the jewels and killing of the two animals, in the context of her psychosocial and sexual development, is her definitive rejection of what they represent–the possibility of a productive life as wife and mother. The incestuous marriage symbolizes the fruitless union of two narcissistic characters who in the other love only themselves. Approached on a level other than that of logical causality, the story appears to have an inner coherence not previously appreciated.

Goethe's Tasso is approached from a fresh angle by an examination of certain recurrent epithets, notably “klug,” “schön,” and “edel.” By comparing in detail passages in which these adjectives occur, and by adducing evidence as to Goethe's usage outside Tasso, new light is shed upon the kernel of the drama, which may be seen as a contest between sets of relative values with the author ambiguously refraining from committing himself to an overriding judgment. The observation that the play is centrally concerned with the act of judging character, illustrated by Goethe's stress upon “kennen” and “erkennen,” makes it possible to penetrate beyond the conventional view of Tasso as an artist drama to the insight that it presents the complex confrontation between two modes of self-consciousness or ways of being. Through the technique of vocabulary analysis within a context of dramatic argument certain recalcitrant problems of Tasso criticism, such as the vexed question of the denouement and the exact nature of Antonio's reversal, are freshly illuminated and the ambivalence and relativity of the various moral and social ideals is conclusively demonstrated. At the same time Goethe extracts from this contest of epithets a tentative positive vision of “Seelenadel.”

Dr. Johnson's twenty-five-year friendship with the historian, antiquary, and clubman, Thomas Birch (1705-66), is significant for several reasons. First, it covers Johnson's earliest and most obscure years in London; second, it shows him in a curious association with a man of nearly the same age whose contemporary eminence and excellent social and intellectual connections contrasted remarkably with his own during the years before the Dictionary; and third, it gave rise to a large number of little-known Johnsonian passages in Birch's various correspondences. The Birch papers in the British Museum reveal their compiler as, among many other things, a voluminous if unsystematic and usually noncommittal chronicler of Johnson's career between 1738 and 1765. As a Whig with predominant Whig connections, Birch sometimes dealt harshly with Johnson. As a weathervane of taste, he was as often content to report current gossip or the progress of Johnson's projects as he learned of them through the newspapers, or in conversation with other friends or with Johnson himself. Once, by request, he wrote a short but extremely laudatory letter concerning Johnson's Dictionary. But the few well-known documents on the Birch-Johnson friendship suggest that relations were somehow disordered. Johnson's ten known letters to Birch are peremptory, cold, and without friendly expressions; his review of Birch's History of the Royal Society, published in 1756, was distinctly unfavorable; and his rumored final verdict on Birch (“a dull writer” [Boswell, i, 159]) is perhaps more widely known than Birch's services to English historiography. Johnson was content to remember Birch for a single talent: “he had more anecdotes than any man”—they flowed “like the river Thames” (Boswell, v, 255). Sir John Hawkins quoted Johnson on Birch, and the characterization, adapted by Boswell, has been endlessly repeated at Birch's expense: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”

Viewed from any angle Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is an unattractive play. The heroine is a wanton. Ulysses reads her at a glance and finds

language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.

He sets her down at once as “a daughter of the game,” and at every opportunity the foul-mouthed Thersites corroborates this description. “They say Diomedes keeps a Trojan drab,” he monologizes, “and uses the traitor Calchas his tent. I'll after; ”2 and in the rather awkward scene in which Cressida's perfidy is revealed to Troilus, he gleefully whispers: “Any man may sing her, if he can take her cliff. She's noted.”

Although suggestions have been made in regard to the possible means by which the Tannhäuser legend may have reached Swinburne's receptive mind, no one has offered a satisfactory explanation. It is my purpose to offer such an explanation, for the sake of the light it throws upon Laus Veneris as well as upon the development of the legend in English.

A preliminary consideration of possibilities is essential. First, there is Ludwig Tieck's Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser, which Carlyle translated as “The Trusty Eckart” in German Romance, published in 1827. Since Swinburne in his youth was an admirer of Carlyle, he may have known this translation. With some of its melodramatic absurdities omitted, the relevant portion of Tieck's story, part II, is briefly as follows: After a mysterious disappearance the noble Tannenhäuser returns to tell his friend Friedrich of his experiences. He believes that he has fallen in love with Emma and murdered a rival, causing both Emma and his own parents to die of grief. In darkest night he goes to a lofty hill, where he calls upon the Enemy of God; the latter teaches him a song, which in some strange way leads him to the Mountain of Venus. Passing the trusty Eckart, a superhuman figure who guards the entrance, he resigns himself to sensual pleasures in the company of Lady Venus and her train. From this “pomp of sin” he has now returned. Friedrich, who has been listening patiently to this recital of an apparent madman, assures him that Emma, recently married to Friedrich, is still alive. The Tannenhäuser does not believe this statement, supposing it a deception of Satan, and sets out to Rome to perform penance. Some months later he comes back, tattered and barefoot. Entering Friedrich's chamber, he kisses him, announces thatthe Holy Father cannot forgive, and departs. Friedrich discovers that Emma is murdered, apparently by the Tannenhäuser, and that the kiss draws him towards the mysterious mountain. The absence of any reference to the pope's staff and to the sending of messengers may be noted.