In 1963 J. N. Hook, the first Coordinator for Project English in the United States Office of Education, reviewed briefly the growth and current status of Project English for the profession (“Project English: The First Year,” PMLA, lxxviii, September 1963, Part 2, 33–36). In 1964 Erwin R. Steinberg, the second Coordinator, reported at length to the profession on the history and prospects for research in English funded by the Office of Education (“Research on the Teaching of English Under Project English,” PMLA, lxxix, September 1964, Part 2, 50–76). He incorporated into his account summaries of the current status of each Curriculum Study Center, prepared by the Directors of the Centers themselves.

While other New York writers despaired of finding home in America's wasteland after World War i as War I, African American writers like Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher created a powerful urban image of home in Harlem. Their Harlem home was at once place, community, and aspiration. As collectively articulated in their various writings, its vitality was most palpable, least constricted, in Harlem's well-peopled streets. It was evoked wherever—albeit only where—African Americans could come together. It was expressed by their art's profound yet deceptive masquerades. The Harlem Renaissance thus challenged America's established association of home with rural permanency. We ignore a fitting image of home for mobile, urban America when we fail to recognize these civic dimensions of Harlem Renaissance art—as Greater New York also failed to accept a public statue of James Weldon Johnson, memorialized by a literary archive at Yale instead.

Our first reference to the acting of Macbeth on the Restoration stage is to be found in a list of plays drawn up by Sir Henry Herbert, the master of the revels, and dated November 3, 1663. The list includes the following item: “Revived Play. Mackbethe …. [£]1.” This reference agrees with Downes's assertion that before its presentation at Dorset Garden with “new Cloath's, new Scenes, Machines, as flyings for the Witches; with all the Singing and Dancing in it,” the play had been acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields. There, in the first house directed by D'Avenant, Samuel Pepys saw it on November 5, 1664, December 28, 1666, January 7, 1667, April 19, 1667, October 16, 1667, November 6, 1667, August 12, 1668, December 21, 1668, and January 15, 1669.

William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet has received less critical attention and, perhaps, less critical intelligence than any other of his major works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in 1940, Faulkner's only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 and Go Down, Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from the novels of the “major phase,” 1929–1936. It comes at a point in the development of the Yoknapatawpha Cycle when the early conflict between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compson had been largely resolved, and it is concerned with themes that had earlier been of peripheral interest. It presents as protagonists a class of Yoknapatawphans who are relative newcomers to the cycle. These things together—the lessening of tension and the utilization of new material—are reflected in the unique tone of The Hamlet, which led Malcolm Cowley to entitle his review of the novel “Faulkner By Daylight.” Further, since the novel is leisurely in its narrative method and relatively lucid in its style, it does not at first glance seem to demand or merit the sort of exhaustive readings which have been given, say, to The Sound and the Fury. Finally, with the major exception of Robert Penn Warren, almost none of the critics has been willing to recognize the book as a novel at all. Cowley speaks of its structure as that of “beads on a string.” John Arthos calls the book Faulkner's “most remarkable writing” but adds that it “falls into at least four separate stories… there is no real unity.” O'Connor, Howe, Campbell and Foster have all dealt with and appreciated various aspects of the novel but it remains the chief enigma of the cycle.

GEORG Trakl, Georg Heym, and Ernst Stadler are generally grouped together as the early German Expressionists. Each was born within a four-year period, 1883–87, and each died in the two-year period, 1912–14. The three poets produced a great deal of bad poetry before breaking through to both originality and modernity for a few short years before early deaths. Their poetry provided some of the models for the immense following wave of Expressionist lyric and at the same time represents the greatest and most lasting achievement of that movement. They shared many techniques, such as the new kinds of metaphor (described by Schneider)1 or the new kind of lyrical sentence-line (Zeilenstil described by Heselhaus).2

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.

The Drinking Academy, A Play by Thomas Randolph, edited by Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum and me and published by the Harvard University Press in June, 1930, was noticed at length in The Review of English Studies for October by Professor G. C. Moore Smith. He rejects Randolph's authorship and advances the claim of Robert Baron. “The present writer expressed the view,” he asserts, “that if the manuscript was, as alleged, in the handwriting of its author, the play could hardly be Randolph's.” As I was emboldened to accept Dr. Day's ascription of the play to Randolph partly by the fact that Professor Moore Smith, convinced by Dr. Day's evidence, had himself categorically assigned it to Randolph in the very note to which he thus vaguely refers, I subjoin extracts therefrom, since—as the testimony of an expert—they are an important element in the case.

In 1814 Mme de Staël published a curious second preface to her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (1788), her first important published work. In this new preface she shuns all discussion of Rousseau and simply restates her own ideas concerning woman. In her youthful work, despite occasional differences with Rousseau on other matters, Mme de Staël had espoused his idea of woman, abandoning all claims to feminine achievement for a Rousseauist enchantment with love. Her conception of woman, basically conservative, derived from a deep need not to diverge from the prejudices of her beloved father, whose notions paralleled Rousseau's. Mme de Staël's life departed radically from the conservative mold, however, and she experienced great difficulty in evolving a personal stand that could reconcile her confidence in her own gifts, emphasized in a passage from De la littérature, and her ideal of marital love, most explicitly stated in a chapter of De l'Allemagne. The second preface recapitulates these conflicts, but as an oblique reply to Rousseau's strictures on the woman of letters it is both an apologia for having lived the literary life and an understated espousal of the principle that the use of one's faculties is a positive good for all women.

If disability studies is often overlooked at universities today, cognitive disability is often overlooked by scholars in disability studies. How should we think and talk about mental difference? Our academic enterprise privileges intellect, as is appropriate. But how should we properly account for human beings who are intellectually disabled? How does mental disability relate to other disabilities or to more familiar identity categories like race and gender? Perhaps no one illustrates these questions better than an intriguing figure who captivated audiences in nineteenth-century America: Thomas Wiggins, also known as Thomas Bethune but most popularly known as Blind Tom.

Rereading Eugène Ionesco's postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. his new approach to a central text of the theater of the absurd invites us to reexamine the politics of language and language learning in wartime and postwar France.

In identifying cinematic qualities—including Eisensteinian montage—in Faulkner's major fiction, scholars have conceived of film as an exclusively visual medium. This essay provides evidence of Faulkner's familiarity with Eisenstein's cinematic praxis by examining the similarities between the novelist's 1934 film treatment of Blaise Cendrars's Sutter's Gold and one that Eisenstein produced in 1930. It then argues that there is a striking continuity between the two treatments in the realm of sound—in particular, the imagining and inscription of film sound. Most surprising is the manner in which Faulkner's sonic experimentalism, clearly influenced by Eisenstein, works its way into the novel on which he was working at the time, Absalom, Absalom!. Informed by screen writing and film-sound technology, Faulkner's high-modernist novel contributes to emerging scholarly interest in the auditory culture of modernism.

Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, the fictional autobiography of an incestuous SS officer, is one of the most controversial novels published in the last decade: it received two prestigious French literary awards but was denounced as kitschy, pornographic, and revisionist. This essay explores the intertext of the Oresteia, which makes the book more complex than most critics have acknowledged. The references to Aeschylus permit the narrator to style himself a tragic hero and thereby to trivialize the Nazi crimes. At the same time, the mythical emplotment, together with other intertexts, indicates that Aue's account is a concoction. Far from simply propagating a revisionist ideology, Les Bienveillantes combines much factual information with a high degree of reflexivity, provoking readers to ponder the Shoah and how to do justice to it.

When Sir Walter Scott, with his friend and publisher John Ballantyne at his shoulder, was adding his chapter-tags to the proofsheets of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816), he came to a halt at one chapter for which he wanted some lines from Beaumont and Fletcher. Ballantyne undertook the task of finding the passage. Awaiting for some time the discovery of the verses he wished, Scott at length exclaimed, “Hang it, Johnnie, I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one.” He did so, and thus began his habit of calling upon his invention when memory failed, producing throughout the remainder of the Waverley Novels numerous chapter-headings ascribed “Anonymous,” “Old Play,” etc., which Lockhart calls “some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen.” Of “Old Play” captions there are 94; “Old Ballad” 26—mostly Scott's free-hand alterations; “Old Song” 12; “Anonymous” 29; and unsigned mottoes 10. One of the best of the “Old Play” fabrications occurs at the head of chapter xxix of Anne of Geierstein, describing the good king René of Provence;—in reality, it may be called Scott's own epitaph:

A mirthful man he was—the snows of age
Fell, but they did not chill him. Gaiety
Even in life's closing touched his teeming brain
With such wild visions as the setting sun
Raises in front of some hoar glacier,
Painting the bleak ice with a thousand hues.
—Old Play

From a Middle-English poem narrating the events of the Trojan war, we learn that formerly in England, when folk gathered “at mangeres and at grete festes,” they listened gladly after meat to the “fair romance” of Horn, which “gestours” were then wont to recite; and, having this romance before us, we can readily understand the reason of its popularity: it interests us, as it did our forefathers, not only because it tells a tale of an ever-pleasing type, but also because it purports to record native English tradition.