It has been an honor and a privilege to serve as your president this year. I was appointed to my first MLA committee thirteen years ago; I was elected to the Executive Council ten years ago; I have been an officer of the association for the past three years. And it is a most curious thing—the MLA is one of the few organizations I've known whose internal workings appear more impressive the closer you look. My thanks to Rosemary Feal and all the other members of the senior staff, who have been so wonderful to work with, and my thanks to all of you for being here tonight, postponing dinner for a while and joining me for my first and last Presidential Address.

Missing from the tradition of scholarship on the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are distinctly feminist forms of critical attention, an insufficiency only beginning to be redressed. This essay attempts, by way of a contribution, to tease out the poem's feminine text: another romance within this romance, one in which a feminine desire is recoverable at the limit of the masculine narrative, where the logic of the poem as the stage of its masculine characters slips and fails. The critical status of the pentangle and “luf-lace” is reimagined in the context of this other theater, where desire circulates among female figures in a relay of filiative and contestatory relations legible in traces, marks, and signatures at multiple textual levels. The argument restores, in part, a locus of strangeness to a 600-year-old text made familiar by settled conventions of reading and by the consolidation of criticism over time.

The thematic approach adopted by a number of feminist critics of Shakespearean tragedy raises serious problems. Some of these are inherent in thematism itself, such as the need to select the facts of the play to fit the theme and to manipulate the theme to fit the facts. But other problems are peculiar to their choice of “gender conflict” or “patriarchy” as the central theme that is the subject of these tragedies and the cause of their outcomes. This leads to the confusion of a necessary condition with a sufficient cause and to difficulties in their treatments of the protagonists, the emotional effects, the tragic genre, and the role of the author, who is supposed to be condemning “patriarchy” in these plays. Further problems arise because of the particular conception of masculinity that some of these critics bring to their readings.

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition. The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” relates details of the philosopher's life and diet that corroborate this critique. Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality. From the opium eater's perspective, the beautiful and the sublime occur as effects, not of representation, but of incorporation, giving rise to the possibility of material thought. A specialized diet also challenges the norms of public medicine, such as those expressed in Thomas Beddoes's Hygiea, which grounds public health in private reflection and responsibility. De Quincey's Confessions affirms a subjectivity that is the effect of daily dosing.

Two works by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, El Padre Mío (1989) and El infarto del alma (1994; produced in collaboration with Paz Errázuriz), contain an undeniable testimonial impulse that aligns them with testimonio, a genre of subaltern personal narrative that has emerged with new force in Latin America in recent decades. Yet these texts, which present subjects who are mentally ill, incoherent, or lacking identities, call into question some of the key assumptions about testimonial practice and its reception, disrupting the usual responses of identification with and empathy for the narrator. By reading and writing testimonial discourse through a postmodern aesthetic, Eltit advocates the recognition of testimonial subjects as producers and agents of culture rather than as victims in need of compassion. Her project, with its particular merging of the aesthetic and the ethical, constitutes a local yet politically urgent attempt at rethinking the predominant conceptualizations of marginal culture, refusing the notion that the aesthetic is the exclusive privilege of elite culture.

MSS CCCC 190 and 265, Bodley 718 (2632), Junius 121 (5232), Nero A 1, and Bibl. Paris MS Fonds Latin 3182, all from the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century, contain a great many common entries relating to the affairs of a bishop and have been studied with some care by several scholars. Miss Mary Bateson nearly fifty years ago made it clear that the theological and legal material in these MSS really constituted a sort of bishop's commonplace book, and she identified a number of the random excerpts found here in such bewildering confusion. It is my purpose to present some evidence that Archbishop Wulfstan early in his episcopacy at Worcester made extensive use of the material collected here and perhaps directed its assembling as a part of his attempt to regulate the practices of both bishops and lesser clergy under his supervision. To the list given above must be added two other MSS which contain the same excerpts in somewhat the same order—Copenhagen Royal Library Gl. Kgl. 1595, and Bodleian Barlow 37. It is extremely difficult, if not now impossible, to fix the relationship among these MSS, but it is generally agreed that they represent a collection made at Worcester early in the eleventh century, and in the following discussion I shall deal with what must have been the original collection rather than with the contents of any particular MS.

Latin American fiction has historically been characterized by its testimony on sociopolitical issues, and the contemporary novel offers important examples of the documentary narrative. Indeed, Latin American authors appear to have made richer—and earlier—use of documentary narrative than have more commonly cited American writers. Through an examination of five representative narratives, by Rodolfo Walsh (Argentina), Elena Poniatowska (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Hernán Valdés (Chile), and Miguel Barnet (Cuba), this study examines such major features of Latin American documentary narrative as complementary and contrapuntal juxtaposition, irony, authorial editing and commentary, foreshadowing and echoing of events, and disjunctive interplay between various levels of the text.

The fact that the term “criticism” has now come to designate all commentary on textual meaning reflects a general acceptance of the doctrine that description and evaluation are inseparable in literary study. In any serious confrontation of literature it would be futile, of course, to attempt a rigorous banishment of all evaluative judgment, but this fact does not give us the license to misunderstand or misinterpret our texts. It does not entitle us to use the text as the basis for an exercise in “creativity” or to submit as serious textual commentary a disguised argument for a particular ethical, cultural, or aesthetic viewpoint. Nor is criticism's chief concern—the present relevance of a text—a strictly necessary aspect of textual commentary. That same kind of theory which argues the inseparability of description and evaluation also argues that a text's meaning is simply its meaning “to us, today.” Both kinds of argument support the idea that interpretation is criticism and vice versa. But there is clearly a sense in which we can neither evaluate a text nor determine what it means “to us, today” until we have correctly apprehended what it means. Understanding (and therefore interpretation, in the strict sense of the word) is both logically and psychologically prior to what is generally called criticism. It is true that this distinction between understanding and evaluation cannot always show itself in the finished work of criticism—nor, perhaps, should it—but a general grasp and acceptance of the distinction might help correct some of the most serious faults of current criticism (its subjectivism and relativism) and might even make it plausible to think of literary study as a corporate enterprise and a progressive discipline.

This paper considers the significance of the memorized poem in Victorian schools across the English social spectrum. I use Felicia Hemans's culturally ubiquitous “Casabianca” as a lens to examine the processes by which compulsory recitation forged short-term and long-term bodily relations between individuals and measured language. I argue that the denigration of regular poetic form prominent in the twentieth century's rejection of works like Hemans's poem is an inevitable, if disavowed, response to their institutional histories in the lowest-status echelons of the educational system. The fragmented survival of “Casabianca” in English popular consciousness today is the last remaining trace of its pedagogical past, of a time when the iamb connected to the heartbeat in a manner that we no longer appreciate and cannot feel.

How do we know where languages begin and where they end? It is widely assumed that languages exist as discrete, distinct entities, an idea that forms the basis of mono- and multilingualism, as well as of source and target languages in translation theory. What created that clear-cut division between languages? I argue that our current conception of language was invented as part of the process of the creation of the nation-state. The idea of a language, and therefore of translation, was a product of nation-state formation that required the construction of boundaries to divide homogeneous territories, peoples, and their languages. The Stammbaum model of linguistic filiation emerged as part of the same politicized ideology of modernity. Against this, I consider the alternative model of language mixture, which conceptualizes language as a transformative process of interaction without boundaries and challenges ideas of a language and of translation.

While sociologists generally do not deign to assume such a rhetorical mantle, Michael Omi and Howard Winant Suffuse the first edition of Racial Formation with the language of prophecy that they at once fear to articulate and hope to imagine otherwise. “What does the immediate future hold?” they anxiously wonder.

Cognitive psychologists studying the reading process have developed a detailed conceptual vocabulary for describing the microprocesses of reading. Modified for the purposes of literary criticism, this vocabulary provides a framework that has been missing from most literary-critical investigations of the history of literate practice. Such concepts as the production of a coherent memory representation, the limitations of working memory span, the relation between online and offline reading processes, the landscape model of comprehension, and the presence of standards of coherence allow for close attention to general patterns in reading and to the ways that individual readers modify them. The interpretation of Victorian responses to the poetry of Robert Browning provides a case study in the adaptation of cognitive models to the history of reading. Such an adaptation can reveal not only reading strategies used by historical readers but also those fostered by the discipline of literary criticism. (AE)

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.

Aristotle's distinction between phronesis, or ethical knowledge, and techne, or productive knowledge, is relevant both to Romantic and to modern discussions of the relations between aesthetic and ethical experience. Wordsworth and Coleridge try in different ways to negotiate between the two kinds of knowledge, advocating the ethical force of poetry while acknowledging its status as techne; in contrast, modern criticism tends either to accept the ubiquity of techne or to revive phronesis while undervaluing the tension between the two. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas provide a way to link phronesis to aesthetic autonomy through the means-end unity of phronesis and the ethical claim of the other, although Gadamer overemphasizes the autonomy of the artwork and Levinas under-emphasizes the ethical possibilities of the aesthetic. Wordsworth and Coleridge present the ethical encounter with the other as in tension with techne, but they also show that tension itself to be ethically significant.

One of modern feminism's most crucial literary texts has incited a systematic backlash that would save its author from feminism, denying that mere gender can have a place in Ibsen's universal art or claiming that Nora Helmer is too inconsistent, frivolous, dishonest, abnormal, or unwomanly to be a feminist heroine. The argument that Nora represents not Woman but Everyman is a gender-based tautology in itself; applied to the play's thoroughgoing feminist text it becomes doubly nonsense. The confused notions that Nora's critics have about feminism and its relation to art lead them to uphold equally illogical positions, and their charges against Nora, which repeat those of her foil and husband, constitute both a serious misreading and, unintentionally, a kind of spurious deconstruction that denies the play's coherence and worth. Finally, research on Ibsen's life proves that, all claims to the contrary, his intentions in A Doll House were thoroughly feminist.

Oscar Wilde's Salome, composed in French in 1891, represents both an episode in the history of celebrity and a dramatization of celebrity's theatrical structure. The play first entered the orbit of stardom when Sarah Bernhardt, internationally hailed as the world's greatest actress, agreed to play the title role in 1892; its author had long been a celebrity, known as much for his artfully crafted persona as for his published writings. Bernhardt, Wilde, and Salome, a play in which almost every character is both fan and idol, were all defined by the volatile conjunctions shared by theatricality and celebrity: the asymmetrical interdependence of actors and audiences, stars and acolytes, exhibition and attention, distance and proximity, absolutism and democracy, exemplarity and impudence, worship and desecration, and presence and representation.

An examination, some time since, of scattered notes on allusions to Cain in our literature showed that there was still room for a somewhat more thorough investigation of the subject. The results of such leisure as could be given from time to time are here presented. They cover, it is hoped, the main features of the Cain story, though not unlikely some allusions have been missed. Many more references might also be given to notes on various phases of the subject, but I have preferred not to overload the footnotes with comparatively unimportant ones. In general I have intended to give the more important, preferring earlier to later, and original to derived sources when possible. Lack of time to pursue the matter further at present is the excuse for publishing the paper in this form.

Als ich im vergangenen Sommer Karl Vietor für die freundliche Zusendung des Sonderdrucks seiner gehaltvollen Arbeit über “Goethes Gedicht auf Schillers Schädel” im Märzheft von PMLA meinen Dank aussprach, verhehlte ich nicht, daß die Begründung seiner Hypothese von Zugehörigkeit und Sinn des dem Gedicht im Druck der “Wanderjahre” von 1829 hinzugefügten Vermerks “Ist fortzusetzen” mich nicht überzeugt hätte. Als er daraufhin mir vorschlug, mich an einem für das Juniheft 1945 der PMLA geplanten Symposium zu beteiligen, für das die Herren Feise und Mautner Beiträge zugesagt hätten und fùr das er selbst einen weitern Nachtrag zu seinem Aufsatz in Aussicht stelle, nahm ich diesen Vorschlag gern an. Damals wußte ich nicht, daß er u.a. vorhatte, die Hypothese, daß der Vermerk sich auf den Roman beziehen könne, als “erledigt” abzulehnen, noch wußte er, daß ich an dieser Interpretation festhielt und mich dafür einzusetzen gewillt war. Als ich mich dann im Oktober bei PMLA erkundigte, bis wann mein Manuskript würde müssen eingesandt werden, erfuhr ich, daß die betreffenden Arbeiten bereits im Dezemberheft erscheinen würden und schon im Druck wären. Dieses zur Erklärung, weshalb die folgenden Ausführungen erst jetzt als verspätete Nachzügler erscheinen.

The discursive ligature between the Jew and the sexually transgressive is crucially revised in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Kushner creates a powerful series of metonymies between the queer and the Jew that suggest their affinities but refuse to reify a unitary queer-Jewish identity. The center of this imaginative project is Kushner's Roy Cohn, who both illustrates and transforms the image of the queer Jewish power broker that circulated in American anti-Semitic discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Cohn's fate in the play suggests that the author's attitude toward Jewishness is conflicted, and the play's turn to Christian imagery confirms the suggestion. To fulfill laudatory political ends, Kushner deploys a typological vision common in American imaginative production and fulfills a pattern of assimilation equally common in American Jewish experience. I conclude by turning to Walter Benjamin, one of Kushner's sources, for a different model of identity formation that might avoid this fate.