In Ben Jonson's Epicoene, the misanthropic Morose pathologically seals his home against the “common noises” of London, “turning Turk” against his neighbors. What opens up the queer space of Morose's home, ironically, is his equally queer marriage to a cross-dressed boy, a travesty of marital domesticity that parallels the urban travesty of spatial isolation. While the eventual breaching of architectural and gender facades seems to reinscribe social norms, Jonson's play profoundly questions how we construct the space of home, the space of self. Indeed, by setting Epicoene near the Whitefriars theater, where the play was first performed, Jonson adopts chorographic techniques to represent “home” to viewers drawn from that social and spatial milieu. Through a reconsideration of Plato's chora, this essay explores how a vengeful community wrenches open Morose's closet-cum-home, forcing him to renounce his manhood and reducing him to a nonsubject.

In a famous essay, the agnostic bertrand russell hailed tragedy as the highest instantiation of human freedom. tragedy results from human beings' persistence in the conscious, imaginative representation of the plight of humanity in the inhumane universe. Tragedy “builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; … within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty” (53-54). Russell's “servile captains of tyrant Fate” are the instruments by which metaphysical compulsion tortures humans—Death and Pain and Despair. Man, instead of allowing himself to be terrorized as “the slave of Fate,” creates tragedy “to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life” (57). By transforming the human condition into tragic art, humans create their own world of resistance, in which they can be the truly free “burghers” of a dauntless new city-state of the mind.

The aesthetic of the sublime has long been associated with the language of elevation and height. Activities such as mountain climbing offer a physical correlative to this discourse. In these cases, the sublime is associated with a high point or summit, and the process of descent is minimized or erased. By contrast, what I call the Red Bull sublime—named for the energy drink company that claims to “give you wings”—uses technological innovation to draw attention to the aesthetic pleasures of falling. Taking Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump as its paradigmatic example, this essay elaborates the central features of the Red Bull sublime, connecting it with a Romantic tradition, represented here by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, of peering over the edge of the abyss.

Oscar wilde's only novel, the picture of dorian gray, first appeared in the july 1890 issue of the american periodical lippin- cott's Monthly Magazine? While the sometimes acrimonious reception of the novel in Britain has been routinely noted, less scholarly attention has been paid to the reception of Dorian Gray in the United States. Even when scholars allude to the reaction of the press there, they do so almost always as an afterthought—as a way of juxtaposing the novel's censorious reception in Britain with its supposedly more positive reception across the Atlantic. Thus, in the introduction to his definitive edition of Dorian Gray for Oxford University Press, Joseph Bristow comments in a footnote that he has “found no evidence of outright hostility towards The Picture of Dorian Gray in the American press,” before outlining “the trouncing that Wilde … experienced” in Britain“ (ln101). Similarly, in his general introduction to the ”uncensored“ Dorian Gray for Harvard University Press, Nicholas Frankel notes of the novel, ”To be sure, appreciative and sensitive reviews appeared in Britain and America, but a significant segment of the British press reacted with outright hostility, condemning the novel as ‘vulgar,’ ‘unclean,’ ‘poisonous,’ ‘discreditable,’ and ‘a sham’“ (5). In her contribution on Wilde in the series Bloom's How to Write about Literature, Amy Watkin is even more Manichaean: ”Americans loved it,“ she declares. ”English reviewers did not“ (129).

The two versions of “The Hall of Fantasy” reveal that the intellectual exchange between Hawthorne and Thoreau at the beginning of the Old Manse period was far more extensive and formative than has hitherto been supposed. The narrator's companion-guide is a strikingly full, thinly disguised fictional portrait of Thoreau as he appeared to Hawthorne in August and September 1842, when their friendship first developed. This portrait provides a new set of insights into their relationship and a more accurate notion of their attitudes toward Emerson, Alcott, and the whole intellectual ferment around Concord. The narrator and his guide assume the precise moral stances of Hawthorne and Thoreau concerning Transcendentalism, technical progress, reform movements, vegetarianism, “Adamism,” and other prominent philosophical and social issues. These discussions largely determined the subjects each would write about for the next year, especially in Hawthorne's “The Old Manse,” “The New Adam and Eve,” and “Earth's Holocaust,” and in Thoreau's two contributions to The Democratic Review. “The Landlord” and “Paradise (to be) Regained.” Their influence can still be seen in the major works of the late 1840's and early 1850's: “The Custom House,” The Bouse of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and the different versions of Walden.

We're short on charter members, this year, who can speak of the debates waged and principles established when the original forty men gathered in Hamilton Hall at Columbia College to set this learned and professional society afoot. But twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of our diamond jubilee, I wrote up a history of the MLA for the special anniversary issue of PMLA, relying heavily on a work by my predecessor, William Riley Parker. No need to repeat here the contents of that sixteen-page, double-column essay. No need to remind a present reader (as Chaucer used to say in almost any of his delightful exercises in occupatio) of the long record the MLA has in stimulating and helping other humanistic societies along the way or of its long-standing umbrellalike policy of providing hospitality at annual meetings for any number of special groups and interests, from the Milton and Melville societies to the National Council of Teachers of English, the College English Association, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. Now, I believe, it provides local habitation to some eighty-four such. To witness at any annual meeting these days six thousand humanistic scholars and teachers busying themselves for three days with their scholarly concerns is to sense the pulse beats (a little frantic to be sure) of a healthy and civilized activity in a troublesome world.

The national book award for nonfiction was given in 2010 to Patti Smith for her book just kids. Since Patti Smith is a rock star as well as a poet and “punk icon,” her heartfelt remarks at the awards ceremony did more for the book business than any other tribute could have done. Smith told the assembled guests that as a young woman working at the Scribner Book Store, shelving books emblazoned with the National Book Award logo, she had dreamed of writing such a book herself. She concluded her acceptance speech with an impassioned defense of the printed book: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book” (“National Book Awards—2010”).

A modern reader of the Poema del Cid cannot fail to be struck by the general oddity of its verbal system, especially in the tenses of the past, where one finds perfects, preterites, imperfects, pluperfects seemingly interchanged in no meaningful pattern; consequently he leaves the work with an impression of confused tense relationships, an indication (he is convinced) of the lack of skill of the poet (or poets) and the impossible primitiveness of the language. There have been recent stylistic attempts to interpret the uses of the tenses, in particular those of the past, as functions of aspect rather than of time, or as poetic devices in the delineation of heroic character, or as specifically epic techniques of narration. Simpler explanations given earlier, which saw in the unusual frequency of the imperfect, for instance, nothing more than the need to meet the rhyme, have found little favor and have been supported only by intuitive arguments. But those who have rejected the earlier views have not provided conclusive proof of their assertions. In fact, despite the great scholarly interest in the language, metrics, and style of the Cid, there seems to be no study of the possible relationship between rhyme and verbal structure. As a contribution to the study of the Spanish epic as well as to the larger field of historical style and syntax, the present paper seeks to clarify the issues and to provide an objective basis for a conclusive determination of the problem.

This essay examines parentheses on the level of individual narrative sequences in A la recherche du temps perdu. A narrative sequence is a limited, linear series of events that can be subsumed under a single label. “Sequence-level parenthesis” may be defined as an independent textual segment inserted between two contiguous moments in the sequence, interrupting its forward movement. The unique feature of Proust's sequence-level parentheses is the multiplicity of functions they fulfill: narrative, interpretive, associative. (1) Parentheses fill in gaps in the story, announce, prepare, or generate events to come, remind us of past events, etc. (2) They qualify or explain specific facts or situations; they also formulate generalizations or laws. (3) Parenthetical associations play a role analogous to that of the metaphor and the phenomenon of involuntary memory: they establish connections (rapprochements) between widely separated textual fragments. To borrow a term used by Proust, Spitzer, and more recently Deleuze, parentheses are the transversales of textual multiplicity.

The attitude of Honoré de Balzac toward poets and poetry has received casual comment from several of his critics and biographers, and they are agreed that it was unfavorable. A consideration of the two poets who figure prominently in the Comédie humaine, Lucien de Rubempré of Les Illusions perdues and Canalis in Modeste Mignon, as well as a study of Balzac's correspondence and of documents about him by contemporaries, bring little to contradict that judgment. Théophile Gautier, in his chapter on Balzac in Portraits contemporains, devotes several pages to a discussion of Honoré's harsh criticisms of verse and verse-makers, evidently the cause of some resentment from the author of Emaux et Camées. As another example of such opinion, note a statement from the diary of Charles Weiss, apropos of a visit to his home in Besançon by Balzac in 1833. He tells of a first interview with Balzac, in which the conversation happened to fall upon contemporary French poets, eliciting very frank criticisms from his visitor, and then, on the following day, indicates this summing up of attitude toward poetry in general by Balzac, in the course of a second discussion: “Il est sensible à l'harmonie du style et cependant il n'aime pas les vers. Il prétend qu'il n'en faut plus faire.”

The romance of Partonopeus de Blois, though widely read and much admired in the Middle Ages, has not aroused a comparable interest among modern scholars. No edition of the French text has been published since 1834, and no exhaustive investigation of its literary sources has yet appeared. The story is usually explained as a medievalized version of the legend of Cupid and Psyche, with the roles of hero and heroine reversed under the influence of Breton lais of the fairy mistress type. Since critical discussions have tended to emphasize—perhaps overemphasize—the indebtedness of Partonopeus to the classical legend and its folk tale analogues, the connections with the Breton lais and the matière de Bretagne have been explored only in a general and rather tentative way. A more specific study of these connections based on the available French edition may help us to reach a clearer understanding of the materials which compose this charming romance, although a comprehensive analysis must await a critical edition of the text.

In surveying the contributions of the Modern Language Association of America to the teaching and study of foreign languages in our country, especially during the last three decades, I hope to recapture the mood and spirit of past events and to pay tribute to those colleagues who took leading parts in them. This is not an easy task, but it is a welcome and a challenging one. Many of these colleagues are deceased, others are retired, and few if any of us during those intensely active years, I suspect, gave much thought to the task of gathering materials and memories for a chronicle of the MLA's role in the development of foreign language study. But it was an inspired and inspiring time—one happier than the present for education in our country—and I am grateful for the opportunity to set down a brief, personal, and inevitably incomplete memoir.

Si La renommée de Ramuz a dépassé les frontières de sa petite terre, le Pays de Vaud (Suisse), dont il nous donne une description si typique dans sa Lettre à Grasset; si tant d'articles de journaux, en France, en Belgique, en Suisse, ont été publiés sur l‘œuvre de cet auteur; si, sous la direction de Marcel Péguy, les Cahiers de la Quinzaine lui ont consacré un cahier tout entier; si plusieurs de ses romans ont été traduits en allemand, en anglais, en tchèque, en suédois; si la critique littéraire parle d'un style ramuzien; si enfin il y a un cas Ramuz, c'est que le poète dont nous traitons a réussi à intéresser un public d‘élite par l'originalité de sa conception esthéthique, par la vigueur et le pittoresque de son style et surtout par l'intensité de la vie qui anime les personnages et les choses de ses romans.

Confronted with his fabulously ugly wife after an unwelcome marriage ceremony, Chaucer's hero in the Wife of Bath's Tale receives from her a bit of consolation as ineffective as it is irrefutable. True it is, she says, that I am foul and old, but consider that for this very reason you need never fear that I shall cuckold you:

D 1215 “For filthe and eelde, also moot I thee
Been gret wardeyns upon chastitee.“

Traditional allegorical readings of Joyce's Dubliners story “Clay” have tended to collude with the story's rhetorical aim of aggrandizing the figure of Maria. The estimation of the “old maid” is indeed the story's crux, and the exigencies of desire compel the manipulative textual strategies that render the story ambiguous and produce conflicting interpretations. The story thereby achieves a fine dramatization of the precarious ontology of the old maid, a dramatization in which the fragmented reader (whose ear and eye are in conflict) participates as a principal actor.

The mystery in Hamlet is a ghost that has haunted the minds of many a generation of scholars and critics. Perhaps the full secret of this mystery was to be known only by Shakespeare himself, even as that other secret was told only to Hamlet by the ghost on the platform at Elsinore