The prevalence of dentists in recent novels by Grass, Bellow, Updike, Pynchon, and Vonnegut suggests a shift in cultural attitudes toward teeth. Teeth have conventionally represented potency, beauty, or pain. The first attribute is most common in myth, folklore, and psychoanalysis. The topos of beautiful teeth, familiar in literature from the Old Testament to Poe, was inverted parodistically by fin-de-siècle writers like Mann and Benn. The attribute of pain assumed particular significance for Dostoevsky, H. C. Andersen, and Mann—heirs of the romantic association of disease and art—as a clue to the psychic state of the individual. Following the revival of the organismic theory of society, decaying teeth were seen to provide a more general symbol: in the novels of Koestler and Greene dental health consistently reflects social health. Hence the dentist enters contemporary fiction as psychic healer and social analyst.

“Unimpersonated artistry,” the idea that narrators in the Canterbury Tales are intermittently replaced by the voice of the poet, is a notion common in Chaucer criticism. The idea arises from a confusion of voice with presence, and this confusion leads critics to posit preexisting characters and a preexisting poet whose combined traits constrain the meaning of the text. On the contrary, the poem is conspicuously textual, and the voices of the text create the characters and the narrator. Only by treating the pilgrims as the products, rather than the producers, of their tales can we construct their personalities. Similarly, we must construct the poet from his poem. The general narrator is not a naive “Chaucer the pilgrim” but a complex and sophisticated impersonator who withholds himself and directs us to the roles he plays in order to create himself as fully and complexly as possible in his poem.

The most striking change in children's culture, including children's literature, over the last few decades has been its commercialization and globalization (O'Sullivan, Comparative Children's Literature 149–52). The children's book industry in the United States, the leading market, is increasingly dominated by a handful of large media conglomerates whose publishing operations are small sections of their entertainment businesses. As a consequence, as Daniel Hade observes, “the mass marketplace selects which books will survive, and thus the children's book becomes less a cultural and intellectual object and more an entertainment looking for mass appeal” (511). The influence of these multimedia giants is immense: manufacturing mass-produced goods for children, they sell their products beyond the borders of individual countries, further changing and globalizing what were once regionally contained children's cultures. As a discipline that engages with phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic borders and also with specific social, literary, and linguistic contexts, comparative children's literature is a natural site in which to tease out the implications of these recent developments.

How should literary historians aiming to describe literary traditions that predated the modern nation use the methodological tool kit developed contemporaneously with the European nationalisms? Can philology be separated from the logic of the nation and from the teleological vanishing point—the languages and literatures of (for instance) modern France, Spain, or Italy—that has traditionally provided a rationale for readings of medieval literature (and jobs for philologists)? Medieval literary historians have known for some time that we must get out of the habit of thinking in terms of the national literatures that would emerge centuries after the texts we study were written. And we have absorbed the lesson that the nineteenth-century philologists on whose shoulders we stand worked (frequently, if not systematically) under the influence of the nationalizing movements emerging as they wrote, so that their pronouncements on medieval texts must be read with appropriate caution. We have not, however, yet produced new geographic and historical formulations to replace the narrative that traces the origin of the modern European nations to a medieval Latin Christian crucible.

Human Rights violations traumatize more than the immediate victims of “barbarous acts.” they wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights locates rights primarily in the individual (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”), it is clear that “the human family” invoked in the opening sentence both sustains claims to inalienable rights and suffers from their transgression. Nonetheless, most responses to violations focus on individual victims almost to the exclusion of family and the broader community. Several countries sponsor “torture clinics” to reintegrate victims into society or find them asylum elsewhere. Survivors are diagnosed, and therapists help them work through their trauma in different ways, usually involving individual, group, and family therapy. These important programs medicalize trauma as individual pathology and attempt to reduce symptoms and empower survivors. However, even when particular programs are successful, problems and contradictions abound. Not all communities have access to mental health care. Not all governments are willing to sponsor programs that recognize the traumatic effects of their political actions. The wider impact of criminal politics on society as a whole remains unexplored. The question of whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment is left unexamined. The individual becomes both the exclusive site of traumatic injury and the subject to be healed.

The aesthetic theory pervading Middlemarch provides a context for interpreting the novel and understanding its references to the arts; consequently a language of art is important to the novel's (1) imagery, (2) aesthetic theory, and (3) iconography. (1) Although Dorothea Brooke is characterized in images of music and poetry, her Puritanic sensibility has hampered her aesthetic development, and the classical and Catholic artifacts of Rome oppress her senses as marriage to Casaubon oppresses her spirit. (2) To help her, Will Ladislaw teaches Dorothea the language of art, with the aid of Ruskin, Lessing, and Goethe—all champions of realism. (3) Eliot further dramatizes the relations of Casaubon, Dorothea, and Ladislaw by invoking the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus —a myth surrounded and amplified by allusions to literature and art. Guiding Eliot's use of the language of art in Middlemarch is Ruskin's aesthetic of Naturalist Idealism.

The proponents of modernism, in their putative wish to be free of inherited patterns, release a compensatory reaction, an anxiety over the sense of a lost relationship with tradition. In this context, the critical dogma lamenting the “anxiety of influence” may be seen as one modernist's attempt to regain a relationship with the past at the expense of the equally recalcitrant doctrine of originality. But this most recent defensive reaction only represses an even deeper anxiety over the loss of the present moment in the inevitable formal quality of literature. As a way out of this impasse, the modernist poet Hart Crane returned to William Blake and Walt Whitman, whose poetry of pure possibility does not mediate the present into a durative past but recovers it as a possible present, a coming again of what is ever more about to be.

I have always pictured Meursault as a stranger to the sentiments of other men. Love and hatred, ambition and envy, greed and jealousy are equally foreign to him. He attends the funeral of his mother as impassively as he watches, on the following day, a Fernandel movie. Eventually, Meursault kills a man, but how could I feel that he is a real criminal? How could this man have any motive for murder?

Emerson's economic thought has most often been interpreted from the perspective of a Marxist analysis of trade and production. Such a perspective fails to distinguish between the different levels of Emerson's thinking—spiritual, commercial, and natural. Following the logic of symbolic exchange employed as a critique of Marxism by Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard, and others, this essay argues that Emerson's economy of expenditure not only contradicts the basic premises of Marxist doctrine but also alters our understanding of such fundamental Emersonian concepts as self-reliance and compensation.

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

Scholars who deal with Italian letters generally recognize, although they may deplore, the overriding importance of literary academies in the intellectual life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, just as students of French literature know that the salons and academies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France had much to do with the refinement of taste and manners, with the evolution of critical standards, and with the vogue of the pastoral novel or of the vast historical romance such as Mile de Scudéry's Clélie. Students of Spanish seventeenth-century literature, however, have been remarkably incurious about literary academies, knowing at most, perhaps, that there was an Academia de los Nocturnos functioning in Valencia from 1591 to 1594, or that Lope wrote his much-debated Arte nuevo for an “Academia de Madrid,” and have seemed to regard them as no more than idle games through which the participants passed untouched. Few have asked how widespread the academies were, and even fewer have speculated on their connections with the literature of the time.

The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

The term bildungsroman has long been one of the most problematic entries in the lexicon of literary studies. Although it is often used innocuously, to refer to almost any novel that focuses on the development of a young protagonist, matters look rather different in the more secluded world of academic German departments. Here, the Bildungsroman is the object of fierce debates that illustrate how even such arcane fields as classificatory genre studies tenuously float on ideological undercurrents.

Virginia Woolf in her last novel, Between the Acts, explores fascism from the vantage of the new physics and of information technology. Her knowledge of the new physics is attested to by myriad diary entries; her knowledge of information technology was largely intuitive. In Between the Acts, she uses a gramophone to brew patriotic emotion and thus to transform a group of British pageant goers into a herd. Ultimately, however, she short-circuits the herd impulse by privileging the audience members' interpretative acts. In the novel, patriotic messages of authority are deliberately adulterated by the gramophone's static or noise. The audience members must therefore make meaning out of noise; these interpretative acts break their visceral connection to the sound waves, the rhythm and rhyme, of patriotism. Woolf's intuitive grasp of the concept of noise inherent in information technology allows her to articulate an antiauthoritarian pluralist politics.

A new kind of world studies is emerging. This is a world studies 2.0, since some forms of world studies, such as world literature, world music, and world cinema, have existed for some years in the humanities. These categories have been more narrowly defined and refer to literature, music, and cinema from places other than the West—that is, “the rest,” as seen from the West. In this vein, world literature has sometimes been euphemistically called “literature of the world at large,” conjuring a chase, if only halfhearted, after a world that somehow slipped away: at large.

This essay situates the problem of twenty-first-century work in the global South—specifically, in South Africa—to challenge northern theories of the crisis of work. Addressing the break between Fordism and post-Fordism peculiar to the postcolonial context, it argues that new regimes of work should be understood in relation both to longer histories of colonial resistance to proletarianization (to the racisms of the shop floor) and to colonial Fordisms, as well as to the way these two factors inform the current expansion of informal employment. What practices and forms of life emerge from the precarity of informal economies and informal settlements? How are precarious modes of life connected to and informed by the steady dematerialization of the economy through financialization?

Everyone has an interest in time, but historians are interested in it professionally. they have been remarkably fecund in devising ways to carve up and label the mysterious workings of time. They have named it after rulers or other leaders (what the great French historian of the Annales school Marc Bloch referred to tartly as “stumbling from reign to reign” [177]), so that students encounter periods called the Napoleonic, Jacksonian, Victorian, Meiji, and Wilhelmine, to give just a few examples from the nineteenth century I know best. Then there are the centuries, the building blocks of so many survey courses and textbooks that one can only wonder at the powerful hold of the decimal system on the historical imagination. Not least, of course, we find history divided into conceptual units. These may be variations on ancient and modern; they may be periods defined by a body of ideas and practices (Renaissance, Enlightenment) or by overarching political and social developments (the revolutionary era, the age of empire). Once we enter the terrain of conceptually defined eras, titles given by historians are limited only by the number of abstract nouns that can be employed after the phrase “age of,” starting with “anxiety” and continuing through the alphabet.

Forty years ago Tatlock published a short paper on “Puns in Chaucer,” but since then very little has been said on the subject, until just recently appeared Helge Kokeritz' article on “Rhetorical Word Play in Chaucer.” Tatlock pointed out a dozen puns, together with a few “coarse” ones not directly specified. In 1892 Lounsbury had said that Chaucer was “free from these verbal quibbles”; he saw only one, Calkas-calculynge. Before Tatlock, also, Skeat had noted a few, and apropos of style (F 105 f.) commented: “such puns are not common in Chaucer.” Similarly Robinson, apropos of philosophre (A 297) said: “Puns are unusual in Chaucer and it is not always easy to determine whether they are intentional”; but he added as “more or less clear” six of Tatlock's and one of his own, the Latin play on eructavit (D 1934). Preston mentioned six or seven in passing (Chaucer, 1952). Kokeritz conceded that real “double entendres” (significatio, or pun in the modern sense) appear in Chaucer, “though not very often.” He instanced a baker's dozen, along with a few more already noted by others, which he found unacceptable.

Few literary critics have received such differing evaluation as James Russell Lowell. On the one hand are those who refuse to recognize in his criticism any permanent value. Professor J. J. Reilly concludes his three hundred page study of Lowell as follows: