Certain of Donne's sermons can be fully appreciated only if we know a great deal more about their background than we usually do. The editors of his sermons have supplied brief descriptions, in many cases, of the circumstances in which the sermons were given but, except for certain obvious examples such as the Sermon of Valediction, did not have time to show how closely Donne's sermons, even those which are less celebrated, could be involved in the time and place in which they were delivered.The purpose of this paper is to call for a more serious in-depth approach to the backgrounds of many sermons by showing that such an approach can be of real value. Donne was a world made cunningly of elements in the sermons as well as the poems, and a large part of that world was his interest in the people and events around him. Often he succeeded in bringing those people and events into his art of preaching, and until his manner of doing so is examined his art goes unrecognized and one side of his complex mind will be unappreciated.

Two indispensable prerequisites for successful research in Romance etymology are sustained attention and patience. The worker is at liberty to select problems that suit his personal taste, to assemble a wealth of pertinent data, to examine solutions proposed in earlier inquiries, to cherish the idea of having found the clue to issues previously deemed insoluble. Yet this preparatory work, no matter how meticulously planned and conscientiously carried out, may not yield immediate results: the easily accessible data not infrequently form a vicious circle, the explanations of pioneer workers more often than not serve to confuse rather than to enlighten the present day explorer. With his entire apparatus of research ready for action at a moment's notice, the etymologist, in a state of protracted suspense, must withstand the temptation of prematurely declaring his work concluded. Patiently, humbly, yet with unfailing alertness, he must await the moment of great satisfaction when a chance find (perhaps a passage in a not readily available book or a record in a new dialect glossary) may supply the one unexpected form, usually a precious relic, which helps him to break the vicious circle and step out into the open. This newly discovered form will prove a priceless aid in the reconstruction of the bridge between Latin and Romance; not one of those hazardous suspension bridges on which some nineteenth century etymologists were fond of performing their acrobatics, but a solid, pleasant bridge, allowing for comfortable walking and an enjoyable view of the surrounding landscape. The history of Spanish terco and its cognates is apt to show how radically such a casual find can advance our knowledge.

For in this processe Parrot nothing hath surmysed, No matter pretendyd, nor nothyng enterprysed, But that metaphora, allegoria with all, Shall be his protectyon, his pauys, and his wall. (ll. 205–208) THE wall of metaphor and allegory that Skelton built around his Parrot perhaps served to keep off the pursuivants of his archenemy, Cardinal Wolsey; certainly it has proved a formidable obstacle to the comprehension of the reader of today. The Reverend Alexander Dyce, to whom we are indebted for what is still the only edition of Skelton's poems deriving directly from the sources, provides illuminating notes to scattered passages in Speak, Parrot, but admits his inability to make the whole intelligible. Friedrich Brie, whose learned Skelton Studien has contributed much to our knowledge of the poet, omits the troublesome Parrot altogether from his consideration except for a short note on the question of date. Koelbing essays merely to sketch its general structure with but occasional specific reference. The only reasoned attempt at clearing the confusion of the satire is that of Professor Berdan in Speke, Parrot, An Interpretation of Skelton's Satire.

Billy Budd concentrates Melville's philosophy of war and lifts it to its highest point of development. The themes of the work extend ideas he had developed since his youth, and its poetic conceptions are the offspring of earlier ones expressive of his thought on “the greatest of evils.” In Billy Budd the philosophy is conveyed entirely by poetic means—conceptual imagery and form; symbolic characters, actions, questions, contrasts, and contradictions; interplay of sight and sound; and pictorial representations of social realities. The work conveys both the abhorrence of war underestimated by those who, in the classical argument about Billy Budd, interpret it as Melville's “testament of acceptance” and the nonironic, even luminous, affirmation of man's latent humanity overlooked by those who read the book as irony, rejection, or darkness alone. In the course of his last artistic exploration Melville discovered that within the most cruel contradictions of the world of war lies the potential for its metamorphosis.

American literary studies has shown that the symbolic exclusion of Native Americans from the Puritan and early national imaginaries was an essential component of the making of an American identity. This argument builds on reading practices that stress literary-historical contextualization. Our essay considers how M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village (2004) addresses the continuing relevance of Native American exclusion from the national imaginary not by faithfully representing “history” but by layering its narrative with multiple historical registers. Realized through editing, cinematography, and set design, these registers—seventeenth-century Puritan, turn-of-the-twentieth-century utopian, and “the present”—are stage-managed by a group of idealistic elders who wish to protect their community from the evils of the world outside. While most critics have reduced The Village to an allegory of post-9/11 United States political culture, we propose a viewing of the film as parable that marks historical collapses and exclusions as the limits of utopia.

Shortly after 1800 S. T. Coleridge gradually developed a set of personal symbols which he used thereafter in poetry and prose, sometimes consciously, to symbolize great turnings in his life and great, steady longings. The number of symbols seems rather limited; the referents lead mainly toward his love for Sara Hutchinson. It is possible that symbols for other important elements of Coleridge's experience will yet come to light. So far as I have been able to discover, there is nothing “universal” in the symbols which I have identified: they are specifically, and of course connotatively, allusive to events in his past life.

It has long been known that the distinction between sl and tl, which existed in Old Norse, has been lost in the modern dialects of Norway. In his Norsk Grammatik of 1864 Ivar Aasen wrote:

Jorge Guillén's literary criticism makes a case for the “sufficiency” of poetic language, its capacity to measure up to the richness of its creator's inner experience. To define the attitudes toward language that underlie his poetics, this essay reconstructs his argument in Language and Poetry, a series of authoritative lectures on major Spanish poets in which Guillén attempts to refute linguistic skepticism. His advocacy of sufficient language meets its test in his own poetry in Cántico. Although critics have traditionally viewed his theory as mimetic, his poems also reveal an awareness of linguistic mediation that undercuts his seemingly naive faith in the power of the poetic word.

The world's great cities have long been a focal point for artists, writers, poets, and social commentators, who have sought to use them both as backdrop or canvas for their work and as the subject matter of commentary and critique about the condition of society. Some have cast cities as places of nightmares and dystopian visions and landscapes. The French writer Octave Mir-beau evokes this genre when he notes that the dirt and smog of nineteenth-century London are part of “a dream, of mystery … of chaos,” what he refers to as the “special nature of the prodigious city” (qtd. in Ackroyd 773). Others, such as the Romantic poets, described the city as antinaturalistic, a place of nature's expulsion. Here urban dirt and pollution were metaphors for the degradation of human spirit and character; the English novelist George Gissing, for instance, characterized the smells in the district of Southwark in London as rising like “a miasma that caught the breath.”

In Artist Descending a Staircase, Stoppard has constructed a play so well suited to radio that it cannot be translated to any other medium without a significant loss. The play thereby calls into question the popular notion that radio is inferior to the stage as a forum for drama. The play also questions our ability to know, with any certainty, those things we have not witnessed, not to mention those we have. Thus, the two mysteries at the heart of the play—Who killed Donner? Whom did Sophie love?—remain essentially unsolved, even though the play suggests convincing solutions. Similarly, although the play does not explicitly discuss Marcel Duchamp, a portrait of the artist nonetheless emerges, drawn in meticulous detail. Artist, then, is built upon paradox, teasing us at every turn with “Now you see it, now you don't.”

One is to infer from this characterization that Beowulf is exceedingly strong. Perhaps one can learn no more. For there may be no significance in the facts that the dragon is fifty feet long (l. 3042), that Beowulf rules the Geats fifty years (ll. 2209, 2733), that Hroþgar rules the Danes fifty years before the coming of Grendel (l. 1769), and that Grendel's dam holds the moors fifty years (l. 1498). And there may even be no connection between these facts except that Beowulf, Hroþgar, and Grendel's dam rule their domains for a very long time and that the dragon is a very long beast. Anything which approaches thirty or fifty in dimension, conventionally approaches the marvellous. Accordingly Deor says (ll. 18–19):

Đeodric ahte þritig wintra
Mæringa burg …

Cathy N. Davidson's the new education: how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux joins a rapidly growing genre that calls on society and its leaders to revolutionize education at all levels to prepare children and young adults for a fast-changing world. his genre includes the former Harvard University president Derek Bok's The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges (2017) and the Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun's Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017). But whereas Bok focuses on why so little has changed in education despite the pressing need for radical transformation and Aoun introduces the new discipline of “humanics” as a means for higher education to prepare students for an era when professions are rapidly disappearing, Davidson highlights the widening gap between a rapidly changing society and an educational system that has not kept pace. Davidson supports her theoretical arguments with case studies of programs from institutions that are paving the way for a new education.

In Tottel's Miscellany there are 310 poems, including the thirty-nine added in the second edition of 1557. Of these 310, ninety-six are noted as by Wyatt, forty by Surrey, forty by Grimald, and 134 by “Vncertain auctours.” There are fifty-four sonnets in Tottel. Wyatt contributed twenty-seven, or exactly half. Surrey contributed fifteen; Grimald, three; the uncertain authors, nine. Rather more than one out of every six poems in the book is a sonnet. It is interesting that, among these fifty-four sonnets, fourteen different rime patterns are to be found. These constitute eloquent evidence of the mood of experimentation in which the English sonnet was conceived. It is a mistake to assume that Tottel contains only two types of sonnets, the Italian (or Petrarchian) and the English (or Shakespearian). Even if we define the first type loosely (and we must, when dealing with its early manifestation), there remain fifteen sonnets in the Miscellany which more or less defy classification. It is instructive to consider the various rime patterns in some detail. From them we may get, not only a suggestion of how the English sonnet evolved, but also a clue to the authorship of at least two sonnets by uncertain authors. A study of rime patterns is a narrow approach to the whole problem of sonnet technique, but, when applied to the English sonnet in its infancy, it has an unusual usefulness.

El Periquillo Sarniento, the first Spanish American novel, by José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, was published in Nueva España in 1816. The book's reception at that moment, when Mexico was fighting for independence, cries out for a reader-response interpretation sensitive to the social realities of production and consumption. In the title of this essay the “colonial reader” emphasizes the political nature of the reading process for this particular work, but the quotation marks suggest general applicability. Lizardi's sense of his readers' varying orientations to a book—from a rigidly European literary taste to an American desire for plain expression—dictated the design of this indigenous work. Lizardi, like the writers of the “new Spanish American novel” later, understood the need for a radically different literary language, one that would urge readers to question inherited forms and to revalue existing speech.

Upon Appleton House is a poem in which superficial sprightliness and subterranean portentousness, a variety of rhetorical stances, and a loose, episodic structure apparently conspire to create disunity. But a unifying principle is supplied by the formulaic topos of the locus amoenus. As this convention developed from Homer through the Elizabethans, it took on potentially ambiguous connotations of refection, generation, and eroticism. Marvell systematically exploits these connotations, making of the Fairfax estate a double microcosm which reflects a disorderly world and his own uncertain relation to it. The confusion is further mirrored in Marvell's deployment of the topos. As rhetorical device, its impact should normally be synchronous, so that its elements strike the reader as a unit, not as a sequence of terms successively qualifying one another. But Marvell breaks the unit down, anatomizes it, taking its topographical elements (garden, grass, shade, water) serially and discontinuously. Gradually, however, the locus reasserts its mythic totality. As it does, Marvell also traces a historical movement back through the development of civilization to the first locus amoenus, Eden, and a rhetorical movement from critical objectivity to devotional subjectivity. These movements come to a focus in the figure of Maria Fairfax, whom Marvell, as poet-priest, adores as summarizing the virtues of Appleton House, now become the emblem of a reordered cosmos, a refuge from the corrupting processes of time and change. The vision cannot last, as Marvell implies by sustaining the mocking extravagance of his language right through to the last, ambiguous lines. The unity is only poetic, conceptual, rhetorical. But a unity it is, sung out of confusions, with the locus amoenus as its major chord.

Ce titre doit être expliqué. Notre intention, en premier lieu, n'est pas de parler d'influences possibles, mais de comparer les conceptions de Proust avec celles de certains philosophes. En second lieu, notre exposé sera centré sur la question du temps. Nous ne ferons intervenir d'autres questions (sur l'art, la connaissance, la morale) qu'en tant qu'elles surgissent dans cette perspective.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying
changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked?
—Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives”

The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear.

—Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”