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.

I would like to draw on Wai Chee Dimock's notion of “deep time” as “denationalized space” to situate the present study in the context of postmodernism and globalization (“Time” 760). Dimock argues that “literary space and time are conditional and elastic; their distances can vary, can lengthen or contract, depending on who is reading and what is being read” (“Planet” 174) and that “the continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any spatial locale” or “to any temporal segment”: “periodization, in this sense, is no more than a fiction” (“Time” 757). Within this constellation of ideas, the “postmodern” space in the heart of Beijing stretches back to ancient China as much as it reaches forward to contemporary thought. In this sense, “postmodern” space, as a quotation (of other quoted spaces), is both postmodern and antipost-modern, postmodern in the sense that the past has collapsed into the present and antipostmodern in the sense that postmodernism is as postmodern as it is ancient, so that it loses its foothold in contemporaneity and its need for periodization. In the pages that follow, I will discuss the “postmodern” space manifested in the National Theater of China and the Palace Museum (also known as the Forbidden City) in terms of a blurred spatial dichotomy of inside and outside.

During my winter sabbatical of 2004, I found myself one day in Hayneville, Alabama, a small hamlet off highway 80, the lonely stretch of asphalt that connects Selma with Montgomery. This is the same road that hundreds walked in 1965, to be joined by thousands more as they neared the state's capitol building in the last hurrah of the modern civil rights movement.

Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

When Gloria Anzaldúa died in 2004, she gave birth to an enormous archive; indeed, she let far more unpublished writings than works published in her lifetime. What's more, Anzaldúa was a compulsive reviser, and her archive includes ten to twenty unique drats of some works, along with doodles, ticket stubs, and other ephemera. his collection of material decenters what we previously thought constituted her literary corpus, knocking the presumed author of Borderlands / La Frontera of her axis. he process of siting through these materials changed my thinking about authority, textuality, identity, and many other things. My obsession with this archive has led me to reexamine the ways in which we produce, reproduce, and coproduce knowledge in archival work. In this essay, I show how recognizing the multiple material actants at work in this archive transforms conventional thought about archives, in general, and Anzaldúan studies, in particular.

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 …

Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.

Andrew Marvell's “The Garden” foregrounds the role of subtraction in aesthetic creation and seeks to imagine sameness independent of metaphor, similarity, and relation. The poem employs a subtractive poetics that challenges modern presuppositions about the networked, connected essence of literature. It also points to the critical limitations of recent accounts of surface and formalist reading, both of which still present poetry as productive, especially insofar as it heightens attention. For Marvell, in contrast, the value of lyric resides in the ways in which it challenges the dialectical notion of creative destruction and, instead, conceives of an annihilation that does not transform into its more respectable opposite. “The Garden,” then, shows that we and our students are overburdened with connection—that there is too much relation, not too little—and that the function of poetry is to dismantle these links in the interest of creativity.

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

This essay examines the shadowy brokerage of literary and anthropological value during the era of decolonization and its connection to the institutionalizing of African literature. Drawing on original archival research, it recovers the conversation between the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek's major long poem Song of Lawino and the Oxford Library of African Literature, a series of oral-literature anthologies edited by Okot's and Talal Asad's advisers at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology. Instead of reciprocating the series's temporal and hierarchical assumptions, which appropriate late modernist literary criticism's nostalgic veneration of the British past, Song of Lawino reconfigures the protocols for the textual production of oral poetry by revising social anthropology's theories of time and matter. If accounts of the departmentalization of African literature portray it as a transfer of colonial paradigms to postcolonial contexts, this interfield account of the making of Song of Lawino calls for an alternative history.

Julia Kristeva's recent interest in the work of Simone De Beauvoir stems from a concern to identify transformative possibilities in the “society of the spectacle”—a term Kristeva appropriates from Guy Debord to diagnose contemporary society's reduction of personal identity, sociality, and meaning to the status of mere representation. Over the last fifteen years, the spectacle constitutes one of the central notions employed by Kristeva to measure the significance of twentieth-century figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes (discussed in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt), as well as the three women she addresses in her biographical trilogy on female genius—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. In 1996, in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva promised to return to the work of Beauvoir in the light of her analyses of Sartrean revolt. The past several years have begun to fulfill that promise. In 2002 Kristeva dedicated the conclusion to her trilogy on female genius to Beauvoir, and in 2003 she presented a lecture entitled “Beauvoir présente,” subsequently included in La haine et le pardon in 2005. The essay published here was presented in January 2008 as the keynote lecture at a conference in celebration of Beauvoir's centenary, which was initiated by a committee from the University of Paris 7 chaired by Kristeva.