During 1931–33 Michel Leiris took part in an ethnographic expedition across Africa, the highly publicized Dakar-Djibouti mission. This essay examines three documents related to the mission. The first, remarks that Leiris wrote before the trip, reveals his understanding, either conscious or unconscious, that theft would be an essential part of the mission's ethnographic strategy. In the second, a journal kept during the expedition, Leiris recorded specific incidents of theft. I argue that the ethnographers' thieving, portrayed as spontaneous acts, is in fact a political one that allows them to collect objects of great cultural significance while ensuring a European identity distinct from the identity of the colonized. The third document is the published version of the journal, which Leiris titled L'Afrique fantôme. Variants in this version and a photographic illustration prefigure Leiris's rethinking of ethnography's role in decolonization.

Focusing on several classic works of children's literature in English (such as The Wizard of Oz, the Alice books, and Peter Pan), this study examines the self-reflexive and metaliterary thrust of the genre's characteristic fantasy-framing device, the return-to-reality ending, and suggests a tripartite taxonomy of closural effects: therapeutic-socializing, fantasy-rejecting, and tragic. The familiarity of the return serves to screen conflicting adult agendas in literature for children. The traditional role of the adult as regulator of transitional states (i.e., of childhood itself) consorts oddly with the Romantic reversal of the adult-child hierarchy and with post-Romantic anxiety regarding both traditional and Romantic models of the relation between adult and child. While the return works to restore the conventional orders of significance temporarily neutralized by the fantasy plot, it also tends to ironize such conventions, including the convention of narrative closure.

Despite the fact that the stream of consciousness technique occupies an important position in twentieth-century fiction, there is no general agreement as to where the method originated or what it really is. As Frederick J. Hoffman observes, “Writers and critics are both confused by the idea of ‘interior monologue,’ or the ‘stream of consciousness,’ as it is more familiarly known.”1 Elizabeth Drew says that the stream of consciousness technique was “invented by Dorothy Richardson.”2 Katharine F. Gerould remarks that Henry James “introduced the method into English fiction.”3 In an editorial note appended to the English edition of Edouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés, James Laughlin holds that Dujardin invented interior monologue.4 In making this statement, he is following the position taken by Dujardin in Le Monologue intérieur, in which he attempts to describe and define the method first used by him, he says, in Les Lauriers.

There is much divergence of opinion among scholars as to the naming of the main periods of the English language, and hardly any two agree in regard to the limits of each period. But in treating of the absolute participle, an arbitrary division must be made according to the occurrence and development of this form in the language.

When seen through the lens of the African American freedom struggle, the seemingly minor spaces and places federated by Gérard Genette under the term paratext take on a major role. Entangled throughout the margins and fringes of books and other kinds of texts (especially visual ones), the paratext (e.g., citations, prefaces, typeface) has served as a field through which white supremacy has been transacted indirectly: white-written prefaces to fugitive slave narratives are vivid examples. At the same time, the paratext has also served as a vector through which white power has been resisted. Examining the paratextual issues surrounding Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Without Sanctuary, James Allen's exhibition of lynching photography, this essay explores what is gained and lost when the paratext is used as a means of resisting racialized domination. (BAMcC)

Leslie Stephen chose his daughter Virginia Woolf as his literary heir and trained her extensively in history and biography to prepare her for a writing career. Traces of Stephen's training can be found throughout Woolf's work but especially in her literary criticism. Woolf and Stephen share the same assumptions about the nature and aims of literary criticism, assumptions that place them in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve. Further, Stephen and Woolf focus on the same set of forces to describe the birth and evolution of literary genres: both father and daughter say that shifting class structures produce a dominant historical consciousness and that this historical consciousness in turn expresses itself in an appropriate technical form. In the light of this literary historical process, both writers insist, the critic of self-conscious historical vision must be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms.

Renaissance courtesy theory helped organize the pursuit and repression of social mobility in Elizabethan England; the letters of supplication written by courtiers seeking preferment record the practice of this aristocratic ideology. Such letters were governed by codified epistolary theory and by the oppressive exigencies of political connection and distance in a newly centralized nation-state. A sample set of these letters, from Toby Mathew to Sir Christopher Hatton, reveals an implicit rhetoric. Mathew presents conspicuously little “objective” argument in support of his technical qualifications for the post he seeks. Instead, the letters focus on depicting the suitor's personal and political graces and the patron's magnanimous power. Though these persuasions embody coherent arts of modest ostentation and flattery, they also reveal anxiety, and we cannot easily assess the reception their depictive products met. The congruent forms of erotic seduction, prayer, and self-enticement may offer important parallels.

The idiom of a language is the atmosphere of thought which pervades the signification of all its words and governs the architecture of all its sentences. Idiom appears in the structure of the language as an effect; as a cause, it resides in the experiences and predilections of the speakers of the language. Arising in the domain of ideas, belonging to the content communicated rather than to the communicating instrument, idiom is the attitude of mind common to all members of a linguistic community and inherent in all their thinking. This common attitude creates the master pattern, the cardinal orientation of cognition, to which all the phrases of the language must conform.

This essay explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Don DeLillo in his essay on 9/11. What distinguishes the essay is less what it says about 9/11 than how, in responding to the event, it puts the question of response at stake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what 9/11 means, he instead shows that response is always a question of response-ability, or the ethical “how.” To image 9/11, DeLillo rhetorically activates a neorealist mode of seeing that differs ethically from other accounts of perception, such as those of (neo)phenomenology. Whereas the latter locate the perceiving subject's perspective outside an event, DeLillo insists that point of view—the act of seeing—is immanent in the event. Responding to this immanence, DeLillo's rhetoric of seeing suspends and questions any representational judgment of 9/11.

Jean-François Lyotard has argued that the master narratives sustaining Western civilization in the past have been delegitimated and can no longer be presented. Although a sense of loss for these “missing contents” marks modernist and postmodernist literature, this sense seems more evident in texts written by men than in texts written by women. Women's texts that convey these missing contents do not look backward toward past master narratives. Rather, what is missing is the “not yet presented,” that which has not yet come into range. This pattern of bifurcation in modernism and postmodernism suggests that male texts are more readily adopted into the canon than female texts are because their nostalgic stance toward the past binds them, as female texts generally are not bound, to the long reach of the male Western narrative tradition. (EGF)

Any analysis of reading today must consider contemporary writing practices. The epochal shift from print to digital texts has been under way for some time. Indeed, print books are now so interpenetrated with digital media at every stage of their production that they may more appropriately be considered an output form of digital texts than a separate medium. Much has been written about the end of books, but, as Alan Liu observes, they have been deconstructed almost from the beginning, from the remixing of Bible excerpts according to the liturgical calendar to the experimental fiction of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (“End” 509-11). This tradition notwithstanding, Jessica Pressman correctly detects in some contemporary novels anxiety about the continued life of books and a desire to reassert the book's authority in the face of the exponential expansion of the Web and the ongoing conversion of books into digitized texts, including the several million now available at Google Books and other online venues.

The field of neurodiversity offers new ways to think about the history of the book and the history of reading. Because autistic individuals—especially those marked by “classical” symptoms—often report a strong reliance on physical objects and a pronounced tendency toward sensory engagement, their interests coincide with those of book historians and reception critics who investigate the embodied reading experience and the material aspects of the book. Indeed, the textual practices of autistic individuals can resemble those of bibliophiles, who often enjoy touching and smelling books. But autistic textual engagement occasionally takes singular forms, thereby pushing historians of the book into surprising new territory. For example, many classical autists attest to an intense intimacy and intercorporeity with the material book. In so doing they create opportunities for reflecting on the interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds.

The failure to distinguish between Iser's “implied” reader (analogous to Booth's implied author and referring to the reading behavior a text demands of us) and the “characterized” reader (referred to directly or indirectly in the text) has promoted a good deal of critical confusion. Although the work of Wolff, Iser, Ong, Link, and Prince, among others, is crucial to our understanding of how fictional readers function in texts, it generates certain misleading conceptual categories. In part this confusion is due to a gap between continental and American reader-response theory. The “implied reader” is not a philosopher's stone that will objectify criticism, but it can be a useful concept to the newer communicationoriented theories of criticism.

Critics of sex and gender in Tudor-Stuart theater generally subordinate the polymorphic eroticism of Jonson' plays to the rigor of his finales. But his meantimes and endings are dialectically intervolved. Delay, embodied in boy actors, is vital to his dramaturgy. For example, wooing Celia, Volpone imagines that he is playing young Antinous, retarding phallic threat with feminized display. In Volpone's deferrals and sartorial excitements, early modern spectators beheld a pattern of their own pleasures, in which sexual and social lusts commingled. Proposing that Jonson was more flexible than many have supposed, I analyze the convergence of homo- and heteroerotic desire on the figure of the pretty youth. Arguing that Epicoene's versatile appeal illuminates the charms of boy actors, I suggest that female spectators may have enjoyed boys, and the female roles the boys performed, without disturbing men's territorial enjoyments. In this way boy actors were crucial to the construction of an erotic community in the playhouse.

Faultfinding is the fault that Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique attributes to literary criticism. Faultfinding is also, of course, what Felski's book spends most of its time doing. Had it not abandoned itself so completely to faultfinding, its central insight might have led it to do more interesting things. (The fact that these more interesting things are already being done by much socially engaged criticism is one obvious weakness of her argument, which puffs itself up by expanding its range of targets so as to take in nearly the whole profession and then, sensing a challenge, steps back in mock horror so as to suggest, “No, of course, I didn't mean that!”) As an example of these alternative, nonfaultfinding versions of critique, the book might have tried to explore the reasons the humanities are as susceptible as they are to the holier-than-thou self-righteousness that Felski both accuses and, however reluctantly, also personifies.

A collaboration between poetry and nationalism, exemplified by the tutelary border guard or “genius of the shore,” accounts for the interest of many Renaissance poems; redrawing the map, poets express the myths and grievances that hold their nations together. In “Lycidas,” Milton tries to redeem the fatal voyage of Edward King, his Anglo-Irish friend, by renewing the ideal of a missionary spirit, joining poet, saint, and soldier in a protectorate to bridge Ireland and England. In The Lusiads, Camões personifies the Cape of Storms as the titan Adamastor (“Unconquerable”), who curses the audacity of da Gama's voyagers and predicts their future calamities; hence the figure represents both the glory and the self-pity of Portugal and of its national poet. Though Milton and Camões hope for a bright colonial future, they turn their faces, like Benjamin's Angel of History, toward memories of shipwreck in the past.

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.