When “Six Cultures” appeared as part of the MLA Reports of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in 1961, we planned to make periodic revisions and we here publish revised and updated versions of the lists in four languages. Readers interested in French and Luso-Brazilian cultures may consult the original lists in the Appendix to the MLA Selective List of Materials (New York: MLA, 1962. $1.00) or they may obtain a reprint of the “Six Cultures” article by sending 50 cents to the MLA Materials Center. We reprint here the general introduction by Lawrence Wylie, Chairman of the original committee.

We now recognize that renaissance manuals of conduct, in which thinkers such as castiglione and erasmus sought to encode canons of polite behavior, are a major source of evidence about early modern emotions. But scholarly understanding of the relation between conduct literature and Renaissance society's management of emotions had to wait for the publication of the sociologist Norbert Elias's two-volume work Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process [1939]), which only began to reach anglophone critics in 1978.

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.

The Tenth and final “anchor standard for reading” in the common core state standards defines as “college and career ready” a student who can “[r]ead and comprehend literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (35). I want to remark on just one aspect of this worthy if blandly unremarkable goal. The distinction between “literary” and “informational” texts has the sanction of common sense, but, like many commonsense notions, it cloaks some knotty issues. For the authors of the standards, “literacy” requires mastering two different if closely related sets of reading skills. One lays the groundwork for “understanding and enjoying complex works of literature,” while the other is needed “to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally” (3). Pedagogically, one is the job of the “English language arts teacher,” the other the responsibility of “teachers of history/social studies, science, and technical subjects” (8).

The axiom that literature cannot be read in the same way as other forms of writing is by no means universally held, but it has long governed the teaching of reading in high school and college classrooms. In ways that humanists can find heartening, the Common Core standards valorize the traits that reading literature both requires and strengthens: habits of attention and intellectual rigor; the refinement of sensibility and emotional response; the ability to analyze, to synthesize, to discriminate, to evaluate. Such virtues travel well, too. The authors of the standards recognize that students who have mastered literary reading skills are better equipped to meet the challenges posed by texts in other disciplines.

In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection.

In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, the Symbolist movement started as a reaction against the positivism and utilitarianism of the preceding epoch. The eighties and the early nineties were periods of pervading rationalistic thought. Dostoevski and Turgenev were dead. Tolstoi had withdrawn from literature to expound his dogmatic, rationalistic Christianity. The poetry of the so-called civic poets had sunk to the lowest possible level. It was the “autumnal” period of Russian literature.

It is customary for the President of the Association to deliver an address as part of the annual program. For the most part my predecessors have used this occasion to discuss a subject of scholarly concern lying within the range of the speaker's competence, and the records of our annual meetings include a number of erudite papers of this character which were, or should have been, of interest to the audiences and which as published material have continuing significance for scholarship in widely diversified fields. By tradition, however, this occasion is for the President, who is in a few days to give place to a successor, a sort of moriturus saluto and he is therefore free to discuss any subject that he thinks of importance for the welfare of the organization. Several of my predecessors in office have departed from the erudite tradition and dealt with questions of contemporary import or of practical importance for the programs of the Association. The crisis in national affairs, which has its bearing on all forms of co-operative undertaking, leads me to follow this precedent and take up a matter, the significance of which for the future of higher learning in our country has not, I think, been realized or adequately discussed. It is the problem of the relation between nationalism and scholarship and, more specifically, the development of an American national scholarship in the humanities.

Ladies and Gentlemen:—I purpose to treat the subject of the study of modern languages in our higher institutions. By reason of my absence from the convention last year, I failed to hear two or three papers of great value treating the same general matter. It is, however, a subject of perennial interest, and though I shall not claim to contribute anything very new or original to the discussion, it seems worth while to go over again the different aims and methods of modern language study and to emphasize the importance of treating our classes with definite regard to these aims.

The most pretentious treatise on Castilian versification before the Golden Age is the “Libro segundo en que trata de la prosodia i sîlaba” of Antonio de Nebrija's Gramdtica castellana, first published in 1492. It is written by a scholar—not a poet, though Nebrija, Spain's first great humanist, did write some verses—a scholar whose classic learning determined his approach to the study of the vernacular in matters of versification. Nebrija's learning, however, did not blind him to the fundamental facts of Castilian practice in verse, though it may have slightly obscured his vision at times and warped his interpretation of certain phases of Spanish metrics. And it did cause him to discover in Castilian verse certain fundamental principles hidden from many theorists and prosodists even to the present day, yet for centuries instinctively practiced by poets. Nebrija studied and analyzed the nature of Castilian verse “en el buen uso” (Cap. viii) as it existed shortly before the introduction of Italianate meters in Spanish. The time is significant, as En-cina explains in the introduction to his Arte de poesia castellana (p. ii):

Sometimes a question has been answered in so many creative ways that we overlook the assumptions underlying such responses. When students ask, “What can I do with a degree in literature?” the answers suggest that instructors hear a second, unasked part of the question: “-besides a career in teaching.” That PMLA has reserved space to address a related question-“Why major in literature-what do we tell our students?”-suggests a professional interest not merely in the careers available to literature majors but more broadly in testing what MLA members say about our profession. One answer is that literature majors, like other majors in the liberal arts and humanities, have a wide selection of career choices. The knowledge students gain from modern and classical languages, history, social and political sciences, philosophy, and literature serves graduates by giving them a breadth of experiences and ideas, by developing creative thinking, and by providing skills in communication that make BAs and MAs attractive to employers in business, technology, industry, government, and research, to name a few. But these options omit the one career, sometimes considered a clichéd choice, often left unsaid: literature majors make-or ought to make-excellent teachers.

“The poem of Beowulf,” Klaeber tells un, “consists of two distinct parts joined in a very loose manner and held together only by the person of the hero.” Like W. P. Ker, Klaeber finds some reason to regard the second part as s late-conceived sequel to the first, rather than as integral with it in the poet's original plan.

Despite its brief history, Berlin Dada (1918–20) produced a glut of chronicles and memoirs, as if to immortalize its ephemeral insurgency. Its self-appointed chronicler, Richard Huelsenbeck, tried to harness this compulsion to memorialize in the service of Dadaist agitation he hoped would unleash a revolutionary time and redeem the failure of the communist uprisings at the end of World War I. his seditious temporality was based on two incompatible concepts of revolution: a properly political notion aimed at overthrowing an unjust regime and a vitalist discourse aimed at tapping into the circular low of life. he clash of the two modes of revolutionary time is enacted in Hannah Höch's photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (1919). he spectral temporality that sustains both is conjured by the Dada Almanac (1920), a literary compendium that doubles as a quirky inquiry into political normativity and an inluential paradigm of Dada's self-legitimation.

Reactions in France to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's phenomenally successful film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) tend to fall into two groups. According to one perspective, the film is a superficial and racially sanitized form of cine-tourism; according to another, it is a profound and sincere celebration of traditional French values. For both groups, the cultural work the film performs coalesces around close-ups of the face of Audrey Tautou, the film's star. This essay asks how Tautou's face and the close-up shot it exemplifies can say so much while showing so little. By drawing on the theoretical history of camera distance, it argues that the formal design of the close-up, which demands simultaneously an analytic and an affective response to the visual image, usefully informs the relations between political reactions to the film and French debates around the question of national identity at the start of the twenty-first century.

We have never been biological. Across disciplines, human beings are hybrids, to use Bruno Latour's formulation, inhabiting the realm of what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture.” Literature and biology, art history and physics, chemical engineering and philosophy approach the question of “human being” differently, but the tacit acceptance of a hybrid (natureculture) world is common to all these fields. So why does the question of the biological seem to be looming larger in the humanities in recent years?

In recent decades the Comic Spirit, after a century of sleeping-sickness, has been struggling with imperfect success to reassert herself in literature. And to her renewed vitality, it seems, is due something of the fresh interest in Byron—her recreant son. His poetry has not yet had its full and clear day. It was mistily worshipped by his contemporaries. The Victorians partly mispraised it and partly reacted from it. The poetic spirit of our own time, rejecting Victorianism and casting back for inspiration to the early writers of the century, has loved the Shelleyan dream and the “colorful” imagery of Keats. But Byron could offer neither. Moreover, though recent writers have re-created a cult and a cant of free individualism that is often reminiscent of Byron, they have patently desired not to be Byronic—so strongly has this poet inoculated his posterity against Byronism! Critics and interpreters of Byron have recently done him some good service. But they have allowed his poetry and his personality to remain too closely intertwined; and sometimes they have continued, in one guise or another, the legend of his Titanism. Matthew Arnold, while professing a balanced and disillusioned view of Byron, did much to strengthen the illusion that he was essentially, or potentially, a Titan. In 1881 Arnold still felt so strongly the pull of his boyhood's hero that, adopting for once a Swinburnian hyperbole, he insisted on Byron's “splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.” How ironic that word “imperishable” appears when Arnold goes on, in maturer vein, to state that Byron “has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future”; and that he “shattered himself to pieces” in attacking the bourgeois cant of the earlier nineteenth century! For sincerity and strength are “imperishable” in proportion as they cut through the passing forms to the perennial forces of human cant. Olympus itself is antagonist of the true Titan. He makes no compromise with its minions and, when he falls, falls deep. Byron made the compromise called “Byronism,” and fell—into the arms of fairly congenial Guiccioli, “with her sleek tresses” (as Leigh Hunt pictures her) and “none of her graces entirely free from art.”

The publication, in September 1522, of the first edition of Luther's New Testament was an event of European significance. This impressive-looking folio volume was not only the most important work of German literature in the sixteenth century, but also the first and most influential translation, from the Greek, of the New Testament in any of the Germanic countries: the sixteenth-century Dutch, English, Scandinavian, and Swiss versions are all more or less heavily indebted to it. Luther's Septembertestament is the editio princeps of the vernacular Bibles of the Protestant world. In Germany its influence was not restricted to Protestants but included Roman Catholics who read the Bible in the vernacular. Emser's edition of the New Testament of 1527, which was largely a “revision” of Luther's text, was used in Catholic Germany well into the eighteenth century. Other Catholic “translations,” such as those bearing the names of Dietenberger and Eck, also retained Luther's version to a surprising extent. Thus practically all of Germany, both Protestant and Catholic, and all of Protestant Europe were, in varying degree to be sure, under the spell of Luther's epoch-making translation.

The theory that in Book II of the Fairie Queene Spenser represents Mary Stuart allegorically in the character of Acrasia has never been presented with sufficient evidence to raise it above a level of general probability, and although the further cumulation of proof that I have gathered together here hardly seems enough to establish it as a fact of literary history, it may help to recapture some of the mental associations of his original readers and the figurative medium in which they were expressed. It is my purpose here to show that when the Faerie Queene was published Elizabethan courtiers had for a considerable time looked upon Mary Stuart as the epitome of intemperance and had characterized her as a Circean enchantress, a rather striking parallel to Book II with its political study of temperance and its major evil character—the Circean witch Acrasia.

Although Bulwer-Lytton, in the preface to Richelieu and in various footnotes, acknowledges certain sources for his drama, notably two French novels, he nowhere records any obligation to French dramas. At the same time he remarks that in handling historical data he has availed himself of that “license with dates and details which poetry permits and which the highest authorities in the Drama of France herself have sanctioned.” This statement in his preface raises a two-fold question: Who were the “highest authorities” whom Bulwer had in mind, and to what extent was he indebted to them? In such an inquiry no less than three French dramatists offer material for consideration.