Yael Farber's Molora blends themes from the Oresteia, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Xhosa folk singing to produce an aspirational vision for an equitable postapartheid South Africa. This blending draws on ubuntu ethics—the living philosophy that holds that subjects become properly human only through their interaction with others and a commitment to making the world better—by combining these cultural forms and signs without hierarchically privileging any. Farber's revision of the plotline of the Oresteia emphasizes human community because the chorus of Xhosa women collectively introduce order and justice, as opposed to the imposition of order and justice by Athena in Aeschylus's play. The chorus protects Elektra and Orestes from violence and offers them—as well as Klytemnestra—the chance to return to a human community through forgiveness and the renunciation of violence. This is precisely ubuntu's aspiration.

In the academic study of cinema, as in other kinds of academic discourses, one of the most commonly encountered questions these days tends to be some version of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be represented in this manner? What does it mean for me and my group to have been made invisible? These questions pertain, of course, to the urgency and prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. This is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nation, class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics thus to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality” (Andrew 348).' Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, currently faces its own “impending dissolution […] in […] transnational theorization” (Introduction 1). How did this state of affairs arise?

Although a good deal has been written about L'Etranger in the light of Camus's philosophic insights in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the verbal similarities between these two works have been used only sporadically in interpreting the novel. Carl Viggiani, whose essay on L'Etranger appears to have dealt most fully with the symbolic undercurrent of the novel and Meursault's relation to Sisyphus has concentrated almost solely on detached archetypal motifs while largely neglecting any sort of progressive or “novelistic” development of the protagonist as he moves from his mother's funeral to his final jail cell. I propose to demonstrate such a consistent development by viewing Meursault's adventure as a parable of mental awakening or coming to consciousness which corresponds in detailed thematic and imagistic ways to the adventure of the mind in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

As their schools reopen this year after the summer vacation, about 7,000,000 Japanese children from 12 to 18 years old are spending five hours a week studying English. They are taught by some 85,000 teachers, few of whom have ever heard the language spoken by a native—except, perhaps, over the radio. In the universities hundreds of thousands more are busy with their seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth year of English. In large cities tens of thousands of clerks and secretaries, waitresses and salesgirls, bankers and government employees of all ages go several evenings a week to commercial schools to learn English conversation and business correspondence. Many of these are among several hundred thousand listeners to radio English courses. At newsstands and bookstores, on streetcars and buses, electric trains and subways, thousands more are poring over magazines with English articles, movie scenarios and jokes; over grammar books whose chapter headings, such as “Elliptical Negation” and “Concessive Clause,” suggest their contents; over cram books, word lists and sample examinations. For high schools follow the lead of universities in making English grammar and translation a part of the rigorous ordeal called shiken jigoku, or “examination hell,” a stiffly competitive process of admission. And ever more business firms are requiring job applicants to take English tests.

Several bibliographies have been compiled, during the last fifty years, of those altered versions of Shakespeare's plays which form so illuminating a chapter in the history of the Restoration stage, and indeed of the English theatre in general. Unfortunately, the most scholarly of these lists have usually been minor appendices to works of wider scope, and are not unnaturally here and there inaccurate in detail. Perhaps the best is the most recent, Miss Bartlett's, in her handy bibliography, Mr. William Shakespeare; but there is no entirely trustworthy list, since all of them neglect to include at least one important item, the altered Hamlet, and most of them do include several plays which are either not adaptations of Shakespeare or not adaptations at all. I propose, therefore, to supply a more accurate bibliography, preceding it by a list of those now available, and supplementing it with a statement of the reasons for not counting as Shakespeare adaptations certain dramas which have long held their places in this inglorious roll of theatrical ineptitude.

In his admirable paper upon the sources of Browning's Childe Roland, Mr. Harold Golder shows from what a rich storehouse of nursery tale, poetry, and romance the poet drew for many of the incidents that go to make up that poem. Childe Roland is such a synthetic poem that the problem of finding satisfactory sources for it is not simple. Nor is it made easier by Browning's stubborn insistence that the only true source of the poem is the line from King Lear. But it has been impossible to be content with Browning's statement, and critic after critic has ransacked ballad, fairy tale and legend to find the origin of the simples which the poet has compounded in his poem. In the light of Browning's statement, the problem becomes one of “establishing a subconscious connection between Edgar's maudlin words and the material from which Browning obviously drew”; in other words, we must find for the sources of Childe Roland materials so familiar to Browning at the impressionable time of his life as to have become a part of his own mental character, and further, the materials must be such as would definitely suggest the images which appear in the poem.

In discussing the date of the Eddie poems one must carefully distinguish three factors: the date of their written compilation or recording, the date of their actual composition by the poet, and the age of the mythological, legendary and other material which they contain. In speaking of the age of the Eddie poems it is clear that we are referring to the second factor, the creative act of the poet, which, so far as we know, did not contemplate immediate written record either by himself or a scribe. It is by no means superfluous, however, to emphasize the distinction of the first two factors mentioned, as, in the case of the sagas, they have not yet been entirely disentangled. A consideration of the first and third factors is furthermore not without value, as it must be clear that the poems are not younger than the time of their written record and not older than their original content. The recording may be much later, the content much older, than the date of composition. These, however, if they can be established, furnish the most definite termini ad quern and a quo respectively. If the recording was actually centuries later than the time of composition we shall expect to find corruptions of various sorts, such as interpolations and transposition of stanzas and verses, with which we are abundantly familiar in the case of the popular ballads. This allows great leeway for textual criticism, in which, as experience has shown, critics are prone to disagree. Similarly, if the original content is centuries older than the time of composition of the poems, it is reasonable to suppose that the content will have been profoundly affected in its passage through the centuries. If we take as an example the Nibelungenlied, whose date of composition is approximately known, its original content of the time of the Germanic migrations has been in places so affected by the later medieval institutions and ideals of life, which have thereby become an important part of the content, that the terminus a quo would by this very fact be pushed far beyond the time of the migrations. Analogies of this sort may be of value in an effort to date the Eddie poems, but the question is here somewhat confused by the question of possible interpolations.

“Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murther!” Is there anything more in this phrase than meets the casual eye? Though the skull and jaw-bone of Hamlet's brooding comment are without doubt human, it has been suggested by no less an authority than the late Professor Skeat that here is an allusion to an old tradition according to which Cain killed Abel with the jaw-bone of an ass. The suggestion might seem almost fantastic were it not for several corroborative circumstances: namely, that the tradition was English; that it was wide-spread and familiar; that it found a place in the mystery plays; and that Shakspere was not unaccustomed to making allusions to the primitive and cruder art of the religious drama.

That Robert Browning, the poet, possessed wide and multifarious learning is evident to a casual reader of his poems. The careful reader is impressed by the range and extent of his learning which includes much of what is called hole-in-the-corner knowledge, a familiarity with out-of-the-way topics and incidents that few readers possess. The scholarship of the past two decades has begun to give us a good deal of knowledge upon the nature of Browning's learning, and we are in a fair position now to estimate how much of the poet's knowledge was systematic and well-ordered, and how much of it was haphazard and based upon a following-up of this or that temporary interest. The letter which is the heart of this paper and which is published for the first time below will shed light upon this problem in an area in which Browning's training was probably most systematic.

The Rev. Mr. N. J. Halpin in 1843, followed by Professor G. P. Baker in 1894 and Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1902, have sought to explain Endimion as the vehicle of a personal allegory setting forth a contemporary court intrigue. These commentators have been duly followed in turn, with slight variations, by the historians F. G. Fleay in 1891, A. W. Ward in 1899, and F. E. Schelling in 1908. The existence of this allegory may be regarded, therefore, as generally accepted by authorities on the Elizabethan drama. The exponents of this personal allegory agree in recognizing that Lyly intended to represent the Queen in Cynthia, a point which no one is likely to dispute. They agree further in arguing that Endimion, the lover of Cynthia, represents Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth. From this basis three varieties of the allegory have been developed, in attempts to identify a third character, Tellus, thè lady deserted by Endimion. Three ladies have been proposed, each of whom played a striking rôle in Leicester's career. Mr. Halpin suggested Lady Sheffield, Leicester's second wife; Professor Baker substituted for her Lady Essex, Leicester's third wife; and Mr. Bond set aside both in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Longfellow's Sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife's death and left among his papers, has survived to become one of his most admired productions. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother and biographer, first brought it to the world's attention, publishing it in the second volume of the biography. Along with the poem, he added some biographical details which to this day usually serve in paraphrased form as a preface to anthologized appearances of the poem. Writing of Longfellow's grief-stricken anguish during the months following Mrs. Longfellow's death, his brother observed:

In one of his early letters Mr. Longfellow had said: ‘With me all deep feelings are silent ones.’ It was so of the deepest. No word of his bitter sorrow and anguish found expression in verse. But he felt the need of some continuous and tranquil occupation for his thoughts; and after some months he summoned the resolution to take up again the task of translating Dante,—begun, it may be remembered, years before, and long laid aside. For a time he translated a canto each day. . . . Eighteen years afterward, looking over, one day, an illustrated book of Western scenery, his attention was arrested by a picture of that mysterious mountain upon whose lonely, lofty breast the snow lies in long furrows that make a rude but wonderfully clear image of a vast cross. At night as he looked upon the pictured countenance that hung upon his chamber wall, his thoughts framed themselves into the verses that follow. He put them away in his portfolio, where they were found after his death.

The problem of assessing Edward Taylor's literary reputation has been made difficult by the claims put forward on his behalf and by the criticisms of these claims because both share the assumption that Taylor's poetry may be compared with Herbert's. But a consideration of Taylor's Prologue (glossed with relevant poems and sermons) reveals the rudiments of Taylor's Puritan theory of the imperfect function of human art, rudiments which form a concept of decorum which is not “metaphysical.” Taylor's theory features the severely limited possibilities of fallen human art not only in dealing with man's condition but even in attempting the praise of God. Accordingly, at the practice of metaphor Taylor is committed to meiosis, and uses amplification for the praise of God with considerable hesitation. On the other hand, Herbert, with a different religious position and with consequently a different subject (the contrast between man's insignificance and his greatness as a child of God), has as a result a much wider metaphoric range. These differences in the range and use of metaphor reveal quite different concepts of decorum and suggest judgments about Taylor's literary reputation based not on “metaphysical” decorum, but rather on a Puritan decorum of imperfection.

In Milton's attempt to justify the ways of God to men, perhaps no passage in Paradise Lost is more important than Book III, 173–202, for in these lines Milton expounds his doctrine of predestination and its concordance with the mercy, grace, and wisdom of God. To the average reader, however, the passage offers considerable difficulty; and it is indeed surprising, in view of the importance and the obscurity of this portion of the epic, that editors and scholars have done so little to clarify the doctrine of these thirty lines. Newton contented himself with asserting that the views there expounded were Calvinistic, and Todd followed Newton. Sumner, without comment, showed a parallelism between portions of the passage and Milton's De doctrina, a document which is uncompromisingly Arminian. Brydges, however, repeated Newton's observation; and Barber argued at some length for a Calvinistic interpretation. Verity, on the other hand, seemed to agree with Sumner, but dismissed the matter with a single sentence: “The doctrine of predestination here alluded to is discussed at some length in the Christian Doctrine, I, 4.” Masson, Browne, and Moody, in turn, ignored the matter. Such disagreement, therefore, would seem to justify an attempt to throw more light on the passage by determining the precise doctrine that Milton there advances and the relation of that doctrine to the view on predestination advanced in the De doctrina.