The early-twentieth-century Russian debate on the place of tragedy in Dostoevsky's novels included interventions by the leading figure of the symbolist movement in Russia, Vyacheslav Ivanov; by the philosophically minded literary historian Lev Pumpyansky; and by the author of the most formidable analysis of Dostoevsky's poetics to date, Mikhail Bakhtin. From the perspective of a certain widespread vision of modernity, the project of thinking the modern novel and tragedy together is paradoxical. It is thus noteworthy that such a project seemed urgent to major Russian intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s and that it frequently relied on the articulation of an implicitly exceptionalist narrative about Russian modernity and its proper forms. Additionally, staging the three-way debate among Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin allows us to see that Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky as a modern novelist par excellence is conceptually tied to the largely occluded theory of the tragic.

How much the New World Spanish dialects owe to those of Spain has long been a subject for dispute among Hispanic scholars. Belief in the theory of Andalusian influence, based, as it is, largely upon seseo and yeísmo, has been seriously shaken by recent studies on the chronology and diffusion of these two phenomena, by more exact knowledge of the modern peninsular dialects, and by the hitherto available statistical studies on regional emigration to America. But though statistical counts tend to show that during the sixteenth century as a whole no single region contributed an over-all majority of colonists to the Indies, claims are still made that individual parts of the New World were first colonized chiefly by settlers from this or that region of Spain. For example, Andalusians and Extremefios are generally credited with a major part in the colonization of Peru, but so far actual figures are lacking either to confirm or refute this. Amado Alonso and Raimundo Lida, while rejecting the theory of the Andalusian origin of New World dialects in general, concede that Andalusians probably did predominate during the first 30 years in the Antilles. But Tomás Navarro, in his study of the Spanish of Puerto Rico, concurs with the belief of José Padín that that island's first settlers were principally colonists from Old Castile: again there have been no statistics.

Lermontov's “Bela” (the first part of A Hero of Our Time) is deeply connected to the realities of Russian expansion into the Caucasus during the nineteenth century. The mistreatment of the story's heroine, Bela, by its Russian heroes, Grigoriy Pechorin and Maksim Maksimich, has its roots in the culture and ideologies of Russian imperialism.

Although the Oxford-educated Thomas Traherne is indeed “thoroughly representative” of the “salient ideas” of the Cambridge Platonists, and without a doubt should be classed with them philosophically, he is most akin emotionally to that maverick among the Cambridge men, Peter Sterry. Yet ideological differences separate him from Sterry, and even the emotional intensity which seems to link them takes radically variant forms. The case is the same with Henry More, whose work we know Traherne read, and whose spiritual autobiography resembles Traherne's: their responses to the new ideas of space were remarkably alike in feeling, yet Traherne took issue vigorously with More's theories of space and deity, and in general lacked More's intellectual extravagance in other theological matters. We may, then, speak best of affinities with, rather than debts to, the Cambridge Platonists: the portrait of Traherne's mind shows an eclectic intellect and—more important in shaping Traherne's persistent individuality—original, highly personal feelings.

There exist in Old English a number of compilations in which an address of the soul to its body is a conspicuous feature. The best known is the poem in the Vercelli and the Exeter Books, in which the soul returns to its body once a week and communes with it, the sinful soul reproaching it vituperatively, the righteous comforting it lovingly and joyously. The fourth Vercelli homily has a remarkable scene, an elaborated account of the judgement of the soul at Doomsday, in which the souls address their bodies as they stand in the presence of the Judge. The Last Judgement is again the scene of an address, and that in one of the homilies presented by Assmann. There is, finally, the Old English vision, printed by Thorpe and Napier, of the bringing forth of the soul, wherein the newly-released soul of a sinner vituperates the body it has just left. To this literature, I wish to add passages from two unpublished Old English homilies, in which the address is made, not at the moment of death, as in Thorpe and Napier, nor at the Last Judgement, as in Vercelli Homily iv and in Assmann, but at some intermediate time, when the soul returns intermittently to its body for that purpose, as in the Old English poem. These two texts are Homilies ii and iv of MS. Junius 85 of the Bodleian Library, and Homily xl of MS. Ii. 1.33 of the Cambridge University Library.

The title of this work, Object-Pronouns in Dependent Clauses: A Study in Old Spanish Word-Order, is perhaps too inclusive. The investigation concerns itself only with the phenomenon which I shall call interpolation. Throughout this study, interpolation will be used to mean the interpolation, between an unstressed object-pronoun and its following governing verb, of another word or other words, not unstressed object-pronouns in similar construction. In Old Spanish this phenomenon is almost without exception confined to dependent clauses, i. e., clauses that begin with a subordinating conjunction, a relative pronoun, or a relative adverb with conjunctional force.

What is comparative literature? Not a theory or a methodology, certainly (which raises the question of why this article should appear in a series so entitled), though theories and methodologies aplenty occur as part of its typical business. Is there, or can there be, an object of knowledge identifiable as “comparative literature”?

When I began hearing about comparative literature in the middle 1970s, there was a fairly straightforward means of distinguishing comparative literature on the university campuses where it was done. The English department pursued knowledge of language and literature in one language; the foreign language departments pursued similar studies in two languages (typically English, assumed to be most students' native language, plus the foreign tongue); and comparative literature committees, programs, or departments carried out literary analysis in at least three languages at once.

While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.

CAPE TOWN, A GLOBAL CITY IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN POSTCOLONY. The emancipatory or transformative moments signaled by the prefix post are often incomplete, unfinished, haunted. This essay is about the human bones on which the foundations of Cape Town are built. It is a story about the human cost of the city's development, which led to the resurfacings of disavowed histories of violence. It is a recounting of a slowly unfolding reckoning with the haunting claims of the dead as they return, in their time and on their terms.

Particularly because the mla lacks a division on environmental literature, it is gratifying that the organization is turning attention to environmental studies through forums such as this one. Many more in the profession than the fourteen hundred members of the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment take some interest in environmental literature and would like to foster sustainability through their teaching or research. Yet the term is problematic: a popular buzzword, its parameters are vague, and consequently the more difficult questions underlying the concept are too easily evaded. Sustainability of what and for whom? we might ask. Are people talking about sustaining complicated, interwoven biotic communities, sustaining humankind, or sustaining a comfortable lifestyle currently enjoyed by the privileged classes around the globe? What are the term's qualitative implications? What constitute appropriate standards for sustainability, and who decides? What political and economic policies will be necessary? Where will we get the motivation, the will to institute them? Where does sustainability intersect with issues of environmental and social justice, and how will we address the many ethical questions it raises?

Climate change, I argue, is a catastrophe that resists the revelation promised by apocalyptic narrative. My case study is William Cowper's poem The Task (1785), which I situate in two climatic contexts: the year of its composition, which saw meteorological extremes caused by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, and an era of geologic modernity, the Anthropocene, which commenced with the industrial combustion of fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century. As volcanogenic haze migrates in Cowper's descriptions from the countryside to the greenhouse and the imperial city, the poet fails to identify a meteorology with which to distinguish nature's seasonal “revolvency” from eschatological presages or from the modernization process itself—the historical “revolution” embodied by worsening urban pollution. Climate change poses a crisis, in the dual etymological senses of a decision and a turning point, because it unsettles the duration of the present, what returns and endures and so measures alteration.

What would an epic be without simile? Its tone and landscape would be too often austere and bleak but for these fleeting views of an earth we know, these apt reminders of things men have done, endured, or imagined. Homer would diminish by a thousand lines, Paradise Lost by some four hundred; and what lines! Without them how could we picture Satan, his infernal host, his punishment, his revenge, or the actors in Paradise?

On may 30, 1667, Samuel Pepys attended a meeting of the Royal Society at Arundell House where he found “much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle, who had been desired to be invited to the Society; and was, after much debate, pro and con., it seems many being against it; and we do believe,” he observes, “the town will be full of ballads of it.” Thomas Sprat, in his history of the Society published the same year, after pointing out to “Wits and Railleurs” that experimental science will afford them new material for their “wit” and fancy, declares:

I acknowledge that we ought to have a great dread of their power: I confess I believe that New Philosophy need not (as Caesar) fear the pale, or the melancholy, as much as the humorous, and the merry: For they perhaps by making it ridiculous, becaus it is new, and becaus they themselves are unwilling to take pains about it, may do it more injury than all the arguments of our severe and frowning and dogmatical Adversaries.

Milton's notion of self-knowledge places him in the Socratic-Christian tradition which distinguishes between man's rational part, or self-like-God, and his passional nature, the aspect of self most easily subverted by Satan. Only the self-knowing man, by introspection and by seeing the reflection of self in the mirror of the world's stage, achieves a harmony between the two aspects of self. Milton's concept of self-examination, apparent in his prose and verse, is symbolically represented in Paradise Lost. The world of Adam-Eve mirrors both God's realm of pure truth and reason and Satan's realm of unreason and unrestrained passion. These realms represent those aspects of self that man must necessarily discover within. The Fall is inevitable and irrevocable in the creation of self: in Adam's discovery of his obligation to know himself “aright,” he understands that his rational self-like-God must rule the darker passionate self. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes also represent man as achieving self-knowledge by the twofold means of introspection and viewing the reflection of himself in the external world.

“It is a melancholly object to those, who walk through this great [country] or travel in the [world], when they see the Streets, the Roads and Cabbin-doors crowded with [would-be authors] importuning every Passenger for Alms.” Thus Jonathan Swift, but now I want to make my modest proposal to you. I propose that modesty be our guide. Once I sought to make my way in the world by publishing articles and books and teaching and thereby winning tenure, and my heart goes out to all those who crowd the aisles of the book exhibits at the MLA annual meeting and the corridors of the hotels where interviews are taking place. Those corridors, where you cannot make eye contact with anyone, I will never forget. But does the current system for granting tenure make sense, based as it is in large part on the imperative that those who would win tenure publish one and often two books? I think not, and I think the members of the MLA should rise up and insist that these expectations be demolished and that other, more modest expectations be erected in their place.

The Death of the Author creates a hermeneutic vacuum that must be filled by some other determinant of meaning. For many of the new Marxist critics of Shakespeare, this author surrogate is a universal law of textual behavior. The text becomes an enemy that adopts various strategies (displacing the real subject, concealing contradictions, offering an imaginary resolution, etc.) to trick us into accepting its hegemonic ideology, but it always manages to expose and defeat itself. This construction of the text serves the political professions of these critics, since it enables them to wage—and win—a war against the forces of evil represented by the textual project and thus to act out in this displaced arena their “commitment” to transform society. Many feminist neo-Freudian critics of Shakespeare use a similar universal law wherein the text's masculine project (or fantasy) is always subverted by a feminine subtext, often embodied in an absent but omnipresent mother.

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.

Literary historians of the French Renaissance have long since conceded to Camille de Morel a place of distinction among the learned women of her time. Nor is this an empty honor in a century which, following the example of the Italian Renaissance, produced a goodly number of women whose thorough humanistic training and literary accomplishments have aroused the admiration of succeeding generations. The complete story of Camille de Morel, however, has never been told. She has been too lavishly praised by some and neglected by others, and it is only through diligent examination of the many traces which she left in sixteenth-century French literature that one can come to know her true nature and appreciate her learning while pardoning her shortcomings.

Comedy is the genre of collective experience; however, comic modes differ in the degree of inclusiveness that each implies. By examining the interactions of satiric, amiable, and liminal comedy, we can see how Woolfs final novel, Between the Acts, becomes a fully inclusive form. This form is radical and subversive, standing in antithetical relation to the epic genre. Woolf loosens the habitual dominance of the leader or spokesperson figure through a decentering of authority and creates a new choric voice that implies a fluid and noncoercive sense of community. This handling of genre is thoroughly political in substituting, for the definition of politics as the exercising of power, a model of community as the dynamic inhabiting of mutual space.