Este estudio pretende ser un examen minucioso de los numerosos afijos de que se sirve el pueblo mexicano para ponderar, apreciar, calificar, y en cierta medida poner su sello personal a una buena parte de lo que dice. Estos afijos, especialmente los llamados diminutivos y aumentativos, le brindan al mexicano—así como a toda persona de habla española—un medio de exteriorizarse, un vaso sumiso en donde descargar su subjetivismo. En la formación y aplicación de los “apreciativos” es donde el idioma cede más, y más libertad le concede al que lo habla.

When co-opted into certain contexts, postcolonial criticism and antiapartheid rhetoric tend to produce conservative rather than emancipatory effects. In the dynamics of their performance, both antiapartheid discourse (exemplified here by Jacques Derrida's “Racism's Last Word” and by nondomestic stagings of Woza Albert!, a prominent antiapartheid play) and postcolonial criticism in the academy risk invoking the imperialism of those contexts. Drawing on the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber and the postcolonial writer and critic Wilson Harris and on contemporary attempts of ethnology and anthropology to re-create themselves as nonimperialist disciplines, I outline a number of options available to postcolonial critics—specific strategies calculated to counteract the neoimperialist politics of the academic milieu and of race-based literary categorization.

The drunken porter in Macbeth says: “Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (ii.iii). The speech has often been used as one of the means of dating the play because “equivocation” became notorious at the trial and execution of Father Henry Garnett that followed the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. Also, it has been well recognized that equivocation is a major theme in the play, both in the narrow sense of common duplicity and in the larger sense of a blur between appearance and reality. There is equivocation between Macbeth as a man and Macbeth as a woman, and it is Lady Macbeth who cries out to become unsexed. The play is filled with equivocal appearances—women with beards, Macbeth in “borrowed robes,” day turned into night, a peaceful castle without and a burning cauldron of evil within. “All nature's germens” tumble together, and “the whole frame of things” becomes “disjoint.” This paper does not deny these usual interpretations of equivocation.

The Latin Grammar of Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, was a well-known and influential book in late Old English times; the number of extant manuscripts in which it appears in whole or in part and the range of dates represented by them indicate the extent of its currency then.Less familiar to most students today, perhaps, than his homilies and other scientific and pedagogical treatises, it is still a significant part of the corpus of Ælfric's work. Investigation of its pages extends our knowledge of methods of teaching at that time and of the particular needs of English students not yet ready for the more extensive and detailed Latin grammars of Priscian and Donatus, the standard texts of the Middle Ages, parts of which are adapted and translated in the Grammar for use in English schools. More fully and in a particular way the Grammar reveals Ælfric himself at work: his aims and methods in the translation and adaptation of original Latin works for use in England; his mastery of Latin and of English; his great skill in adapting the native English tongue to new uses. There has hitherto been no adequate account of Ælfric's procedure, with the result that his aim and method in this work have been imperfectly comprehended, and critics have tended to bestow praise and blame somewhat at random. The present study attempts to present such an account, through analysis and example, and to estimate the subsequent importance of his grammatical terminology as a contribution to the development of the English vocabulary.

In this paper I wish to suggest in broad outline a hypothesis concerning the unity of Fragment vu of the Canterbury Tales, based upon the thematic significance of the terms, “sentence” and “solaas.” I will not attempt to explicate any of the tales here, nor elaborate very fully upon their interplay of theme; rather, in introducing such a hypothesis, I will concentrate on the place inquiry must start: with the way Harry Bailly puts his own terms to use. This evidence will be drawn from the links, and lends itself to a fuller understanding of Chaucer's intent in putting Harry into the foreground of this series of tales, even as it leads towards the discovery of Chaucer's own principles of craft.

At the risk of seeming peevish, i should begin by noting that the title “what is a text today?” is not mine. this point strikes me as important, perhaps even urgent, but not because the title must be discarded. On the contrary, it has become all the more important to retain because it contains today, a word that in denoting the interval between yesterday and tomorrow used to call up that which is simply now but which in the wake of 11 September 2001 has come to connote the rupture that separates “America” from the world it thought it had been contracted to police. Thus, if one were to rephrase “my” title, would it not make sense to write, “Is there a text after 11 September 2001?” (to evoke yet again Theodor Adorno's still-haunting question concerning the link between poetry and the Holocaust)? Put this way—and why not begin by raising the stakes as high as possible?—the query tempts one to reply, “Even if there is a text that belongs to this state of exception, who could possibly care?” Are there not more pressing matters? If there are, if the matter at hand is as clear as all that, then neither you nor I have any business persisting beyond this point.

Good evening, colleagues and friends. Tonight I have the honor of talking with you about my decided passion, narrating lives.

Emerging from dispersed global locations, circulated for difering purposes, life narration moves along predictable and unpredictable routes to publics and to archives near and far. High forms and low forms. Long forms and short forms. Lyric forms and documentary forms. Narrated lives in the irst, second, third, and plural persons. Life stories in print, comics, photography, ilm, and Second Life.

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

In this essay, I take A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene as case studies that show how critical commonplaces may become so entrenched that they limit the horizons of what we can see in a given text, genre, or period. The essay has two purposes. The first is theoretical. I aim to make explicit the often unspoken (perhaps even unconscious) theoretical subtexts that have shaped readings of female sexuality, and I propose some historical reasons for the dominance of certain strains of feminism—those best known as “subordination feminism” and “cultural feminism”—in criticism of early modern literature. The second purpose is hermeneutic. I explore the alternative readings that become available if we approach Shakespeare's and Spenser's work through the lens of one competing strand of feminist thought, described by its practitioners as “prosex” or “sex-radical” feminism. In this essay, my reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene limits its interpretive frameworks to those offered by sex-radical feminism and the strands of queer theory that emerged from it. Drawing on these often overlooked frameworks, I explore the tensions and hierarchies among women in the play and the poem to challenge the assumption that women's relationships are always egalitarian and nurturing; I propose that homo- and heteroerotic desires are not mutually exclusive but may coexist in these works; and I argue that female masochism is not always a pathology that enables patriarchy but can be a legitimate form of desire that challenges traditional ideas of normal and proper female behavior.

In the past two decades, scholars of world literature and transnational literary studies have called for an overhaul of the national literature model, in favor of a model based on literature's movement beyond national boundaries. Yet across the spectrum of approaches, scholarship on world literature has focused on the languages of the metropolitan center while largely overlooking the literary cultures of the so-called peripheries. We examine Jewish literature as a transnational and multilingual body of writing whose networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint to the center-periphery model of global literary circulation. Moreover, the essay offers one of the first comparative studies of Eastern European Jewish literature and Middle Eastern Jewish literature, furnishing new methodological tools for a comparative approach to Jewish literary culture.

Positivist science has been marked by its reliance on an objective, transparent, and purely descriptive language, an approach that modern philosophers of science have questioned and rejected. With the advent of the theory of relativity, followed by the theoretical framework of quantum physics, many physicists themselves have been led to wrestle with the traditional concept of representation and language. They have joined poets and literary critics in questioning the definition and function of metaphor. Echoing Magritte's famous “This is not a pipe,” David Bohm and David Peat suggest “this is not a universe” as an inscription to be borne in mind for each new scientific hypothesis. Scientific metaphors as well as literary metaphors need to be recognized, unity and difference unfolded. This exploration of “metaphorical play” might help define fields of interpretation and true interdisciplinary convergence, which is only a broadening of metaphorical activity.

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of Victorian realism. With In the Cage James proves to be more alert than such predecessors not only to the social and technological mechanics of telegraphy but also to the significance of mediation—in telegraphy as well as in realist fiction. Analyzing the conjunction this essay calls “telegraphic realism” indicates the ways in which a medium's imaginative possibilities may change over time and suggests the connections between the histories of media and of literature.

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.

Little is known of Malraux's life before his Indochina adventure in 1924. Most scholars dismiss his activities during this early period with the brief statement that he worked “in the art department of the publisher Kra,” or that he was “editor of their literary series called ‘Editions du Sagittaire’.” This lack of interest is partly due to the absence of much concrete information, Malraux being particularly reluctant to discuss what he calls his “vie privée.” Even more important, however, is the fact that most critics have never considered a knowledge of his publishing career to be very important for an understanding of his literary formation. This position hardly seems justified when one considers that publishing has always been a major interest of Malraux, particularly during the period preceding La Condition humaine. Since his work at Kra was in the nature of an initiation into this field, it is of considerable significance and deserves more attention than it has previously received.

The general election of 1831, part of the high tide of Reform feeling, swept many new men into the last un-Reformed Parliament, among them Edward Bulwer. Bulwer, later Bulwer-Lytton, for whom the first flush of literary success had become a more or less permanent roseate glow of popularity, had determined to make his mark as an MP as well as a novelist, and he became, in his own mind at least, the spokesman for literature in the House. As a political neophyte, he needed a cause and he found one in the theatre, whose wretched state was generally decried. In espousing its legal reform, Bulwer saw a means of advancing not only the cause of the drama but also his own political fortunes. On 31 May 1832, therefore, he presented a motion for the creation of a select committee to investigate the state of dramatic literature. He was not seeking information, for his speech showed him to be well-informed on theatrical matters. Neither was he impartial; his mind was clearly made up: he was anti-monopoly, anti-censorship, and pro-copyright. The committee was to make an “inquiry” into the decline of the drama, but under Bulwer's direction it was not to be a forum for airing the grievances of the patent theatres, whose “monopoly” was continually violated. Its purpose was to display to Parliament and to the country at large the inadequacies of the legal status quo. Although earlier attempts to form such a committee had been unsuccessful, Bulwer's motion was passed, and the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature was appointed with Bulwer as chairman.

The sexual ambiguity of Shakespeare's boy Cleopatra embodies the clash between two poetic theories the theory that poetry imitates Nature and is therefore subject to rules of decorum and verisimilitude and the theory that poetry creates a new, “golden” world to which the truth-criteria for extrapoetic experience do not apply. Both theories were prevalent in Shakespeare's time, as we see in Sidney's Apology for Poetry; and both persist today, as we see in modern controversies about the play. Shakespeare's dramatic strategy in Antony and Cleopatra involves the interplay between these two notions of poetry and poetic truth: the first is associated with the Roman viewpoint and the kinds of dramatic evidence that support it, the second with the Egyptian viewpoint and the kinds of poetic and dramatic evidence that support it. Only by studying the play with both theories in mind can we approach its structural and thematic center and see that its problematic features Cleopatra's enigmatic character and motivation. Antony's ambiguous stature as a tragic hero, and the eccentric structure are – like the boy Cleopatra, necessary components of its dramatic strategy, functional embodiments of its themes.

The critics have emphasized the “romantic” aspects of Shakespeare's work to such an extent as almost to ignore any possible connection of his plays with the people of his day and the problems that occupied their minds. His characters are treated as sheer creations who live in a sort of vacuum. But there are numerous indications that Shakespeare was not utterly detached from the life that was going on about him.

Diese Arbeit stellt sich die Aufgabe, die in den Grundzügen der Fabel aufs engste verwandten Graldichtungen Crestiens und Wolframs auf ihre Behandlung der epischen Zeit hin zu untersuchen. In erster Linie muß es sich darum handeln, die in jeder der beiden Dichtungen tatsächlich obwaltenden Zeitverhältnisse ins Klare zu stellen. Die zeitliche Aufeinanderfolge der erzählten Ereignisse und die Zeitdauer sowohl der einzelnen Abschnitte wie der Gesamthandlung prägen sich nämlich nicht ohne weiteres dem Gedächtnis des Lesers ein. Zumal von dem Punkte an, wo die Erzählung sich gabelt und streckenweise die Laufbahn eines zweiten Helden ins Auge faßt, um dann wiederholt zum Titelhelden zurückzukehren, geht auch dem aufmerksamen Leser die Uebersicht leicht verloren. Wie sich im Lauf dieser Arbeit herausstellen soll, hat manches schiefe Urteil und manche vorschnelle Hypothese der Forschung unklare Vorstellungen über den epischen Zeitverlauf mit zur Voraussetzung.

In recent years, North American literary studies has been marked by a double movement: outward from the Euro-American sphere toward the entire globe and inward within national traditions, in an intensified engagement with local cultures and subcultures. Both directions might seem natural stimuli to comparative study—most obviously in the transnational frame of global studies but also in more local comparisons: a natural way to understand the distinctiveness of a given culture, after all, is to compare it with and contrast it to others. Yet journal articles and job listings alike have not shown any major growth in comparative emphasis in recent years. Is the comparatist doomed to irrelevance, less equipped than the national specialist for local study and yet finding the literary globe expanding farther and farther out of reach, accessible only to a multitude of, again, local specialists?