WHEN PAUL CELAN ACCEPTED THE BREMEN LITERATURE PRIZE in 1958, he used the occasion to reflect on the region of his birth: “The landscape from which I—by what detours! But are there such things: detours?—the landscape from which I come to you might be unfamiliar to most of you.” On the syntactic level, Celan's speech performs the detours (Umwege), repetitions, and redoublings of his journey to Germany, a country in which he never lived or spent more than a few weeks but whose language he persisted in calling his own:

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

Genres travel in multiple directions. This article maps the evolution and movement of two lyric genres in Georgia, a small nation situated south of the Caucasus mountains, between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The mukhambazi arose from a polyglot urban culture rooted in Near Eastern traditions of bardic performance and festivity, while the sonnet was imported around the time of the Russian Revolution as a marker of European modernization. The brief coexistence of these two genres allows for a reexamination of the foundational opposition between East and West. Moving beyond the familiar dichotomy of tradition and modernity, this essay explores the texts and debates of more than a century, reconstructing the discrepant cosmopolitanisms and multiple modernities that typified the Caucasus region. In doing so, it seeks both to make available a literary archive unknown to American readers and to contribute to ongoing debates on the relations between the local, the national, and the imperial as cultural formations.

In 1995 I Taught a Course in New Zealand Literature at Tokyo University. The Students Were Attentive, and Curious About New Zealand, but they found my Kiwi English hard to follow, being accustomed to American or British varieties. I wondered about their seeming tolerance recently while teaching a similar course to undergraduates back home, at Victoria University, in Wellington, when one of the Maori students complimented a Pākehā (New Zealand European) colleague for her Maori pronunciation. Like most Pākehā, I have a rudimentary grasp of Māori, enough to be familiar with the words and phrases that have entered everyday speech and those in the poetry and fiction I teach. But I cannot conduct a conversation in Māori or read a Māori text, and I am as embarrassed by the irritation that my pronunciation of te reo (the Māori language) causes Māori speakers as I was by the difficulty my rising terminals and strange accent posed for competent English speakers in Japan.

The emergence of Spain as a world power in the early sixteenth century compelled a radical change in its language and literature. reflecting the country's global expansion, Spanish culture moved beyond its medieval belatedness to compete with Renaissance Italian culture, whose superiority was based on the humanist rebirth of ancient values. The cultural rivalry between Spain and Italy is documented in the prefaces that follow, written by the Catalan poet Juan Boscán (1490?–1542) and the Toledan noble Garcilaso de la Vega (1499?–1536). Through these poets' efforts, Spain became the first European nation-state not only to appropriate Italian versification and prose style but also to displace Italy from the political and literary spheres of power (King 240–41). The political and cultural significance of Boscán's and Garcilaso's revisionary poetics makes their prefaces the first literary manifestos of early modern Spain.

In the wake of Foucault's influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of censorship theory emerged that was devoted to exposing and unpacking the paradoxically productive effects of censorious practices. This essay traces a particular strand of that paradox, labeled here the logic of scandal: the logic wherein discourse is authorized and amplified by feelings like shock and moral condemnation rather than stymied by them. To explore the ramifications of this logic for and within narrative art, I take as my subjects a novel written during the famously prudish Victorian era and a film produced under the famously stringent Production Code—W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve. In each the “scandalous” discursive acrobatics performed by the text's morally ambiguous heroine reflect the strategies of censorship evasion employed by the morally ambiguous artist who created her.

The conclusions of Jane Austen's novels are invariably ironic devices for the final summary of themes and characters. This role is illuminated by three main elements of all the conclusions. First, the novelist parodies the predictability of sentimental “happy endings” in much popular fiction. This accounts for the exaggerated self-consciousness with which she approaches the mechanics of concluding her own narratives, a self-consciousness that seems on the surface to contradict Jane Austen's well-known dislike of unrealistic plots. Second, she subverts the canons of poetic justice that are integral to most happy endings: instead of allocating “rewards” and punishment in accordance with ideal conventions, Jane Austen exposes the prevailing social norms that frequently undermine and replace traditional ideals. Finally, she replaces the arbitrary endings of poetic justice with the logical evolution of character and theme. Each character “punishes” or “rewards” himself, in keeping with his frequently unreliable sense of right and wrong. These features are particularly useful in a much-needed revaluation of Mansfield Park, for they demonstrate that it is not the didactic work described in traditional criticism. Thus Jane Austen's comic conclusion is a consistent device for the realistic, rather than didactic, analysis of character and society.

Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam” (29). What quickly becomes evident is that the plot (and perhaps the point) is the narration. In an extraordinary formalist feat (or coincidence), the narrative illustrates the materialist dialectic as proposed by Marx and Engels (122-38). The narrator's confession, which frames the novel, becomes linked to his material reality in an extreme and vivid form when the narrator is imprisoned and consequently generates the narrative from the knowledge that his bruised body allows his mind to piece together. He incarnates, in his slippery and changeable identity, the essence of social reality: dynamism. This dynamism, as the subject (and hope) of Marx and Engels's theorization, illustrates through Nguyen's vertiginous plot the Marxian dialectic. The dialectic holds that opposites—as Hegel pointed out—inhere in one another and that the process of change occurs through transformation of quantity to quality. It also shows, dramatically, how the law of the negation of negation operates. These aspects of the dialectic are cleverly developed through a process that implicates the reader and is nothing short of brilliant, recalling the poem that opens Charles Baudelaire's collection Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), at the end of which the poet addresses his reader as an “[h]ypocrite” (“hypocrite”) while also resembling him and being his “frère” (“brother”). Although Nguyen's narrator does not reach out to the reader in this type of direct address, he does establish complicity with the reader through the use of metaphor and revelations in the plot.

Though few today, even in academic circles, can say with certainty when, where, or over what issues the seven years' war was fought, this mid-eighteenth-century conflict can fairly be characterized as the first global war. It was fought on three continents—Europe, North America, and Asia—and there were significant encounters in West Africa and the Caribbean. It engaged all the European powers, and it is estimated to have cost over a million lives. The historian Linda Colley has characterized the Seven Years' War as “[t]he most dramatically successful war the British ever fought” (101). From the standpoint of empire, this assessment is accurate. The war established the contours of the vast British Empire and brought the rival French presence in North America and India to a sudden end. It also had transformative outcomes for the populations caught in the crossfire. Terms such as global, diaspora, refugee, and cultural minority are more widely applied in discussions of contemporary transnational warfare, but they helpfully illuminate the upheavals associated with this eighteenth-century conflict. The global warfare of the 1750s–60s relegated the indigenous population of North America to the status of an embattled cultural minority, and it turned thousands of francophone Canadians into refugees. Yet despite its scale and the social and political fallout it occasioned, the Seven Years' War has never occupied a central place in the national narratives of its major contestants or in the historiography of the Enlightenment. The main reason for this low profile, I think, is that the war was a many-sided conflict, fought on both metropolitan and colonial fronts. Because of this multilateralism, the war has had a fragmented historical reception, a fracture reflected in the various names by which it has come to be known. The label Seven Years' War is generally used to refer to the fighting that took place in Europe. The war in North America, on the other hand, goes under the name French and Indian War, though in Quebec it is remembered more acrimoniously as the War of Conquest. Histories of India often inventory the warfare of the 1750s–60s under the academic-sounding title Third Carnatic War; a more meaningful characterization would be that it marked the starting point of British rule in India.

I am not only honored but instructed by these essays. Let me begin with Jean Franco's essay and acknowledge her moving expression of solidarity: “coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire[.] Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.”

Reviews of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) regularly cite the vietnamese-french-american protagonist's self-characterization: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). A less-cited version of the same characterization appears later in the novel: “I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—” (325). Nguyen's unnamed narrator, a Northern Vietnamese spy with Southern sympathies, has exploited, betrayed, and even murdered his own. If the above statements are any indication, this Cold War history of slippery allegiances takes an existential toll. But the second statement adds a layer of intrigue. With rhyme, anaphora, and considerable theatrical aplomb, it transmutes ethnic duplicity into literary figuration and casts the narrator as another murderer with a fancy prose style. Murder and style, though, are not Nguyen's only connection to Vladimir Nabokov, whom Mark McGurl takes as iconic of the “codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of … ‘metafiction’” (9). Like Lolita and much of Nabokov's other fiction, The Sympathizer and many of Nguyen's writings hold up that special mirror of “modernist reflexivity.” For Nguyen, however, the chance to wield this mirror comes with the added responsibility of being a Vietnamese American author writing about Vietnamese America. Hence, if Nabokov's iction delivered “an elaborately performative ‘I am’” that enabled his “programmatic self-establishment” (10), Nguyen's equally performative “I am” instantiates not only an authorial program but also a political program of ethnic representation.

This essay explores things in translation, examining what translation does to things and what happens to things in their trajectory in translation. Although translation scholars have posed useful questions about how to translate realia, I take a different approach here. When objects circulate among different groups of people, they are transformed in defiance of their material stability. The linguistic analysis of translations may allow us to observe from a unique perspective not only what kind of force things have at different times in different societies but also how the materially stable objects can actually be different things in different translation scenes. Translations of material objects offer, then, a charged locus of study, generating special, valuable knowledge about cultural contact and transfer, as well as about cross-cultural and transethnic misunderstandings. The essay focuses on three case studies from English retranslations of the landmark nineteenth-century Brazilian novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by J. M. Machado de Assis, as well as retranslations of biblical Hebrew narratives. By contextualizing particular linguistic references to clothing and artifacts, I demonstrate that translation imbues these ostensibly stable material objects with new cultural significances and valuations: language effectively remakes them.

Caroline Levine's Forms has been received as a prototype and a manifesto, a sign of the new formalist times in American literary studies. In the cover endorsements for the hardbound edition, Amanda Claybaugh calls Forms a “book of a generation,” Bruce Robbins “a big, brilliant, necessary book”—large claims for a text of 150 pages. Levine's treatise promises no less than “a way to understand the relations among forms—forms aesthetic and social, spatial and temporal, ancient and modern, major and minor, like and unlike, punitive and narrative, material and metrical” (23). Levine claims to provide “a reading practice that does not fit any familiar formalism,” a practice that instead “draws from all” formalisms (21).