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.

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.

Contemporary liberal assertions equate illegal oppression and practices of expulsion from the juridical order with exclusion from humanity. It is often argued that violence ensuing from the abandonment of persons beyond the pale of the law not only violates their humanity but also, and perhaps more crucially dehumanizes them or constitutes them as less than human. While the objective of these critical assertions is to expose the radical evil that illegal violence can institute, they also establish an equation between the protection of the law and the constitution of humanity, effectively granting the former a magical power to endow the latter. Moreover, these critical assertions reproduce a particular conviction that humanity is a status to be recognized and conferred, or seized and taken away. Rather than leave this relation between humanity and the law intact, by pointing to its political instrumentality in contemporary human rights campaigns, this paper examines what this relation does to politics and to subjects of violence beyond its instrumental use directed at highlighting the suffering of subjects (by employing a dehumanization rhetoric) and at insisting on human-rights-based remedies to combat it. The paper asks the following questions. First, what conceptual and theoretical assumptions about humanity and the law, as well as about the relation between them, make possible the dehumanization argument? Second, to what degree has the law's conception of humanity as a status moved beyond the juridical field, leading many humanist practitioners to assert, albeit critically, that certain groups and individuals are dehumanized? And, finally, what other ways of being human are foreclosed by the conceptual assumptions grounding the law-based humanity argument?

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.

After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.

This essay reexamines the institutional rise and fall of deconstruction as a reading method in American literary criticism. Deconstruction was, to put it bluntly, commodified for an American market, simplified and watered down for use in how-to books that gave (and continue to give) a generation of literature students an overview of what was supposedly Derrida's work without paying corresponding attention to his texts. The deconstructive criticism of de Man and Hillis Miller is too often conflated with Derrida's thought—especially surrounding the question of undecidability—and this confusion misses essential questions that Derrida poses to any critical enterprise. For rhetorical deconstructive criticism, undecidability is the end revealed by reading, whereas for Derrida undecidability is only the first movement in a necessarily double economy. The essay concludes with a discussion of Derrida's own inscription within the institutional debate over deconstruction.

Recent linguistic studies, particularly the extension of structural analysis to the syntactic component of language and improved typological analysis, have made possible an increased understanding of Proto-Indo-European and the early Indo-European dialects. The new insights permit us to account for syntactic constructions such as the placement of relative clauses, adjectives, and genitives; the use of prepositions in VO, postpositions in OV languages; comparative constructions of the order STANDARD PIVOT ADJECTIVE in OV, ADJECTIVE PIVOT STANDARD in VO languages. As an illustration of a further pattern which can now be explained, the absolutes in the early dialects are examined, and accounted for as constructions that may arise in ambivalent languages. Besides contributing to an understanding of syntactic phenomena, current linguistic theory assists us in achieving further knowledge about Proto-Indo-European and further insights into the development of the Indo-European languages.

When did the Berlin Wall come down? However much this event took us by surprise in the autumn of 1989—indeed, no one foresaw either its rapidity or its consequences—I believe that the fissures in the wall began to be clearly felt in the early 1960s. A few unknown scholars—thinkers expressing disturbing ideas in hermetic idioms—were regrouping, like a colony of ants, to carry out subversive labors. Too complex for the already nascent media culture, their work was, of course, invisible from Paris or New York; but the masters of the Kremlin were not unaware of its undermining effects.

The attempts to define and to arrive at a standard of taste lie at the heart of the aesthetic inquiries that were being carried on in eighteenth-century England. That such inquiries, by examining certain fundamental assumptions of traditional æsthetics, exerted an influence on the theory and practice of literary criticism, is a commonplace. But why and how this influence was felt has not been explained. Its importance can be gauged by the fact that within a period of twenty years several of the ablest minds in England and Scotland, including Burke, Hume, Hogarth, Reynolds, Kames, and Gerard—most of them interested in literary criticism—were focussed upon the problem of taste. It was not a coincidence that in the years from 1750 to 1770, when the search for a standard of taste was at its height, the old assumptions of literary criticism were crumbling and the new “romantic” principles were being set forth, sometimes timidly and sometimes boldly, by the Wartons, Young, Hurd, Kames, and many others. The relation between these two phenomena is the subject of this study.

Comparative literature is unlike any other discipline. elsewhere—for example, in politics or religion—the comparative operates as a subdiscipline within a larger general discipline. The problem for comparative literature is that there is no general discipline of literature: institutionally, the discipline consists of nothing but the fragments of different languages. As a result, through a curious metonymic inversion, comparative literature has come to figure as the totalizing general discipline of which it should form a part. This is why it also seems to offer a natural home for the idea of Weltliteratur. Comparative literature promises the Utopian recreation of the lost amphora of literature as it stood before its fall into the clutches of the nation.

This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett's birth, and the celebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa (where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until apartheid was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University, in Tallahassee, to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre, in London, to the Pompidou Center, in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich to Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from Saint Petersburg to Madrid to Tel Aviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett's year. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of the plays but also lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscript displays. Paris Beckett 2006, for example, cosponsored by the French government and New York University's Center for French Civilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett's entire dramatic oeuvre, mounted in theaters large and small all over Paris, and lectures by such major figures as the novelist-theorists Philippe Sollers and Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz, and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett's work.

Dickens's A Christmas Carol exemplifies the literary and cinematic use of visual representation to reinforce ideological values in Western culture. The story positions Scrooge and its readers as spectators of a series of culturally valorized scenes; access to the spectator's idealized self depends on the ability to perceive and desire (to identify and identify with) the values embedded in those scenes. Scrooge saves his life by recovering what the story posits as his natural ability to identify with representations, an ability that characterizes both his ideal, sympathetic self and the ideal subject of commodity culture.

The Latin poem De arte graphica by Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy was edited with a translation into French prose and with notes by Roger de Piles in 1668; and in 1695 John Dryden, “to satisfy the desires of so many gentlemen who were willing to give the world this useful work,” not only translated de Piles's book into English prose but also supplied his translation with an “original preface containing a parallel between painting and poetry.” Dryden's Parallel is one of the least original, but it is not the least interesting of his literary essays: Saintsbury calls it “the first writing at any length by a very distinguished Englishman of letters on the subject of pictorial art.” Together with his translation of du Fresnoy and de Piles, it forms for us English-speaking people the handiest introduction to that long-lived esthetic theory founded upon the proposition Ut pictura poesis. Lessing seems to have seen in Dryden's preface some suggestion of a deviation of the parallel lines from the common direction; or perhaps the point at which they ought to have parted company; for he wrote, “ Falsche Übertragung des mahlerischen Ideals in die Poesie. Dort ist es ein Ideal der Körper, hier muss es ein Ideal der Handlungen seyn. Dryden in s. Vorrede zum Fresnoy.”

As every schoolboy knows, Dante classified the sins punished in the Inferno in descending order, going from transgressions caused by the abuse of our normal instincts down to the graver violations involving perfidy and malice, which both deface the nobility of the human soul and sever us from our fellow men. So, even before crossing the passage from the first to the second circle, we know that there we shall find damned souls worthy still of tears of pity. The damned of the second circle, carnal sinners, are men and women who have subjected their nobler impulses to the animal urges of the flesh. Foremost in the ranks of these stand Paolo and Francesca, and their story is in a certain sense the first truly infernal episode.

Mikhail Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky is well known. Less familiar, perhaps, is Bakhtin's attitude toward the other great Russian nineteenth-century novelist, Leo Tolstoy. This essay explores that “Tolstoy connection,” both as a means for interrogating Bakhtin's analytic categories and as a focus for evaluating the larger tradition of “Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky.” Bakhtin is not a particularly good reader of Tolstoy. But he does make provocative use of the familiar binary model to pursue his most insistent concerns: monologism versus dialogism, the relationship of authors to their characters, the role of death in literature and life, and the concept of the self. Bakhtin's comments on these two novelists serve as a good starting point for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bakhtinian model in general and suggest ways one might recast the dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on somewhat different, more productive ground.

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages they who received slave or serf rents or in modern times rents from shares or bonds or similar sources—these are rentiers.

—Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

On a long plane ride home on 1 january 2012, i saw the movie I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), a romantic comedy in which Sarah Jessica Parker plays a harried financial executive with two small children. The central issue is a common one: the conflict between work and family. And as is commonly true when this conflict is put at the center, the movie manages to be ambivalent about work without being very critical of it. It's not quite as uncritical as Mike Nichols's film Working Girl (1988), where we root for Melanie Griffith to make her spectacular rise despite the fact that the ladder she climbs is located in “Mergers and Acquisitions,” an activity then imagined as a sort of innocent corporate matchmaking. Three decades later and in an era when Occupy Wall Street has changed any number of conversations, I would like to think that studio heads have been obliged to consider possible adverse reactions to a heroine working in a financial investment firm. At any rate, I Don't Know How She Does It throws in one brief and unconvincing scene in which the upwardly mobile female exec unveils a new financial instrument that, she claims, will protect Americans' retirement income. This is, of course, an allusion, though perhaps a misguided one, to the widespread belief that if Americans today cannot retire when they had planned, it's precisely because of highly profitable trafficking in new financial instruments by companies like Sarah Jessica Parker's. But this belief (which I share) is not alluded to more directly. The only social consequences of work that seem to register are consequences for the heroine's family life. This means the movie can offer a simple solution to the work-family dilemma (no spoiler alerts: this film is already spoiled): if you're really good at your job, an appreciative boss will stop demanding that you pretend you don't also have a family. You can fly off to meet the big investors on Monday instead of leaving right now.

Romance is one of the most abused generic terms of medieval literature. For a good many scholars it serves as a commodious bottom drawer which will hold almost anything that could not be stored elsewhere. Having been enlarged to mean nothing less than “imaginative fiction,” the term romance communicates very little, especially when it is applied to such a conglomerate body of works as “The Middle English Romances.” Apparently indifferent to the possibilities of greater clarity and meaning through a more circumspect application of the word, scholars have wasted little time on morphological problems in the Middle English romances, and yet they would not discountenance discussions of whether The Scarlet Letter is a novel or a romance. There, indeed, labelling the work with one or the other term becomes a matter of making a statement about the area of meaning of the work and about the techniques with which this meaning is conveyed. In medieval studies, the latitude in application of the term romance and its consequent diminishing usefulness for descriptive purposes might have been felt more keenly if it were not for the assumption that the tracing of the sources of a given work has contributed the most significant part to its understanding. However, the variety of forms that the same story material can demonstrably assume, e.g., the Arthurian tradition, should make us more sensitive to the opinion of some scholars that generic patterns have a more important influence than story material upon the shape of a literary product. Moreover, the concept of genre acts as a kind of perspective which one assumes towards the work one is examining, and depending upon its appropriateness, it can make the structure more or less meaningful. The few writers who have ventured to deal with the whole body of the so-called romances and to make judgments on their respective merits have ignored the possibility that, without finer and more specific terminological distinctions, they may be mistaken about some of the ugly ducklings. Such has been the lot of the Middle English version of the story of Amis and Amiloun, because the perspectives of romance and saint's legend are not identical.

I began my work upon this subject with a study of the Anglo-Saxon year; but this, I was soon convinced, meant nothing less than a study of medieval astronomical science, and required far more leisure and aptitude than I possessed. I have, therefore, chosen to limit myself to particular portions of this broad subject.

Material goods in William Thackeray's work constantly circulate and incessantly dispirit, eliciting and frustrating the desires of characters. While these commodities present themselves as metonyms of enduring fulfillment and utopian pleasure, the images of contentment they provide are repeatedly undermined. This pattern, derived from Thackeray's own economic experience of loss, represents not a private obsession but the effects of the Victorian economy working through Thackeray's biography and his literary products. Vanity Fair, which represents this pattern most fully, derives its narrative energy from its characters' desires, and it suffers, as a result, an analogous disenchantment: the narrative itself, this essay argues, takes the form of the commodities Thackeray describes, and writer and reader experience the text in the way that the characters experience commodities.

Popular American tales of women's escapes from Roman Catholic convents were important manifestations of the virulent anti-Catholicism of the 1830s and 1850s. These stories also reveal how questions of evidence were imbricated with the woman question in nineteenth-century American culture. “Fictional” and “nonfictional” versions of these narratives attempt to prove their veracity, using a common standard of evidence and shared methods of authentication, documentation, and corroboration—including a reliance on their Protestant audience's reading history. Yet the multiple voices and forms and the visual, as well as verbal, rhetoric that the telling of the escaped nun's story entails work to destabilize feminine spiritual, religious, and moral authority. The escaped nun's intertextual story expresses and contains a cultural anxiety about young Protestant women and their influence in the remaking of American Protestant religious practices.