It is generally known that despite Petrarch's widespread reputation in his own day as a man of letters and scholar, his opinion of Dante as a poet was at variance with the literary fortune enjoyed by Dante in subsequent centuries. Many attempts have been made, especially around the turn of the century, to explain why Petrarch failed to perceive Dante's true genius as it appears in the Divine Comedy. For the most part, these explanations fall into one of three categories. Some ascribe Petrarch's attitude toward Dante to his aversion for the vernacular; others to envy; while still others to an inattentive reading or misunderstanding of the Divine Comedy.

Milton's references in the preface to Samson Agonistes and in The Reason of Church Government to the Book of Revelation as tragedy have great significance for his drama. His cited authority, David Pareus, and several other Protestant commentators identified the Book of Revelation as tragedy on the basis of form (the alternation of dramatic episodes and Choruses) and subject—the spiritual combat of the Elect with Antichrist and their torment and suffering at his hands throughout all time, reversed only at the end of history when they share Christ's Apocalyptic victory over him. Protestant exegates often linked the Samson story typologically with the Book of Revelation, presenting Samson as type of the suffering Elect and the exercise of Samson's vocation as Judge (deliverer of God's people and executor of the wrath of God upon His enemies) as type of the Elect judging the world with Christ at the last day. This context assists the interpretation of Milton's Samson, bringing into focus its treatment of Samson's judgeship. The Samson Apocalypse link also brings a new perspective to certain moot questions: the date of the play, the interpretation of Samson's character, the presence of contemporary political reference, the nature of the drama's tragic effect.

Edward Capell in his Notes and Various Readings (1781) pointed out a parallel between Montaigne's essay “Of the Caniballes” (Florio's translation) and The Tempest, II, 1, 148, ff., where Shakespeare follows the wording of Florio so closely that his indebtedness is unmistakable. Since this discovery various attempts have been made to prove further the influence of Montaigne upon Shakespeare. In 1871, G. F. Stedefeld published the first extended study of the relationship between the two writers, and from that time on there have appeared from time to time books and articles on the subject, some of which make extravagant assertions in regard to the extent of Montaigne's influence upon the dramatist. For example, J. M. Robertson in Montaigne and Shakespeare (1897), after gathering numerous parallels from the Essays and from Shakespeare, made the sweeping claim that much of the growth of Shakespeare's mind was due to the influence of Montaigne. G. C. Taylor in Shakespeare's Debt to Montaigne (1925) makes almost as large claims as this. He “proposes to demonstrate” by means of parallel passages “that Shakespeare was beyond any doubt, profoundly and extensively influenced by Montaigne; definitely influenced in regard to vocabulary, phrases, short and long passages, and, after a fashion, influenced also in thought.” In an article published shortly after Robertson's book appeared, Miss Elizabeth Hooker, after citing numerous parallels, comes to the more guarded conclusion that Shakespeare used the Essays as a store-house of material only. Conservative students of the literature of the Renaissance have questioned the soundness of assigning definite sources, especially for material of common knowledge, on the basis of parallel passages. A. Brandl, in his review of Robertson's Montaigne and Shakespeare, warns against assigning to Montaigne sources which were common to both writers, such as Plutarch, and C. R. Baskervill, in his review of Taylor's Shakespeare's Debt to Montaigne, states the same objection, and says that most of the parallels cited by Taylor may be due to a common inheritance of Renaissance thought shared by the two writers. Pierre Villey believes the passage in The Tempest is the only instance of Shakespeare's borrowing from Montaigne. After reading the exhaustive parallels cited by Robertson and others, he concludes that “cent zéros additionnés ensemble ne font toujours que zéro.” Yet, in spite of the skepticism of the more conservative scholars, parallels are still cited to prove a direct relation between the two writers. Miss Suzanne Türck has brought together numerous passages which she believes show unmistakable influence of the Essais on Hamlet. J. Dover Wilson cites Montaigne frequently in his notes to his recent edition of Hamlet. And Joseph E. Baker, in his essay “The Philosophy of Hamlet,” says that in Hamlet “direct echoing [of Montaigne] seems very probable.”

At the outset of his first pamphlet . Martin Marprelate announces his discovery of a novel use for the critical precept of decorum personae. The announcement deserves a place among the significant critical declarations of English literary history, for it contains the vital principle of a satirical method which was to develop profound and disturbing implications in Martin's own work, influence the evolution of the Elizabethan novel in an important way, and, in the hands of Andrew Marvell nearly a century later, be adapted surprisingly to what may be called the “pacification” of satire.

Although the so-called nonfiction novel is ordinarily seen as a distinctly post-World War ii phenomenon, Afro-American literature has from its beginnings relied to a marked degree on the documentary mode. Close scrutiny of Afro-American prose narrative provides the basis not only for revising some common literary-historical generalizations but also for examining the nature of mimesis and historicity, since Afro-American writers have employed a wide range of techniques to persuade their readers of the truths proposed in their texts. A consideration of the uses of factuality in this body of literature enables us to make broader theoretical distinctions among the kinds of propositions conveyed by various types of fictional narratives and to illuminate the shady borderline between factual and fictive discourse.

The Orpheus tapestry in Garcilaso's third eclogue is an intertextual construct, a rewriting of the myth through a dismembering and reconstruction of classical and Italian models. Revisionary and corrective, Garcilaso's creative imitation of his antecedents involves a deliberate act of subversion; his text not only remakes its sources but seeks to overcome them. Thus Garcilaso's version of Orpheus and Eurydice rivals its predecessors by its own accuracy of presentation; it depicts exquisite, fragile beauty violently destroyed and a brooding, solipsistic lover deprived of his lyric power. By subverting the ancient artist-magician, Garcilaso appropriates the Orphic power of song for the lyric speaker's self-presentation as poet, providing the speaker, in the process, with a rite of passage into the mythological world of the nymphs. Finally, an elaborate game of voices, anchored on the Orphic, reveals the text both as an artifact and as a product of an act of rewriting.

Throughout her theoretical writings, Julia Kristeva calls into question the privileged position of the symbolic order in Jacques Lacan's teaching and clinical practice. In particular, she argues that the Lacanian “algorithm” S/s inadequately accounts for nondiscursive pathological and creative phenomena, for experiential dimensions that elude the language function. She would shift psychoanalysis away from its fascination with language and toward operations that are “pre-meaning and pre-sign (or trans-meaning, trans-sign).” As a part of this larger project, Kristeva's essay “Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’ ” presents a concentrated critique of the linguistic interpretation of the unconscious. Her essay focuses on the analytic encounter with “borderline” patients. However, Kristeva's characterization of the limitations of Lacanian theory in relation to borderline discourse has wide-ranging implications for other forms of communication as well.

Earlier writers have erroneously assumed that Symbolism exercised a significant influence on the Imagist aesthetic. Hulme and Pound derived their conceptions of the image from the writings of French psychologists and philosophers. In the empiricist-associationist psychological tradition (represented in the writings of Taine and Théodule Ribot), I'image corresponds to David Hume's “impression”: it is the mental representation of sensory experience, the virtues of which are clarity, precision, and complexity (as opposed to the vagueness and simplicity of ideas). Hulme read works by Taine and Ribot, and his “Notes on Language and Style” embodies their theory of the image. Pound's conception of the image is similar to that contained in Ribot's Essai sur I'imagination créatrice. After 1908, Hulme adopted Bergson's organicist theory of the image; for Bergson, l'image was the linguistic embodiment of intuition. Imagism was not the culmination of the Romanticist aesthetic, as some critics have argued; it was the first attempt to transcend the subject-object dichotomy of nineteenth-century poetic theory.

When we interrogate a concept like genre, there are advantages to beginning with the way we use the word in the common language. In reading a text, we “identify” or “recognize” a genre. If we attempt to define or describe a genre as such, we are engaging in an entirely different order of activity, one remarkably close to legislation or border control. To identify something assumes a paradigm with a limited set of choices. We may identify a given text differently as a “novel,” a “realist novel,” a “pastoral”; we may debate whether a work is a “novel” or a “prose romance”; but in each case we presume sets of categories on various levels of specificity, whether we deploy particular categories to confirm or surprise common expectations in our identification.

This essay aims to contribute to current studies of language and empire by considering arabic and persian in the ninth and tenth centuries. Following the lead of Edward Said on colonial empires and translation, I focus on the political aspects of language and translation in “premodern” trans-Asian societies, which have not received the nuanced attention they deserve. Accentuating the act of adopting and supporting a language as political, I argue that the wax and wane of imperial languages were predicated on two usually simultaneous dynamics: intra-imperial interests and, to use Laura Doyle's term, inter-imperial competition. Imperial patronage aimed, on the one hand, to consolidate power, exercise control, stabilize administration, and order lived reality for imperial subjects and, on the other hand, to create a discourse to fashion and project an image of rule capable of competing with rival claims in Afro-Eurasia. On both fronts, the promotion of one vernacular as “high language” entailed resisting another one in an already filled political, sociocultural, and linguistic space. The new language thus proceeded in an intrusive and even disruptive way since it involved a construction of new meanings to conform to alternative sociopolitical and cultural norms and priorities and to tame the multiplicity of language. Yet, such a political engagement or competition with existing language(s) and discourse(s) also led to new forms of hybridity of language and discourse, as was the case for Persian when the Samanids (819-999) adopted the script of the Arabic language and much of its vocabulary and idioms to express their thoughts.

In a 1966 lecture to the american anthropological association, Ray L. Birdwhistell presented a silent film showing families visiting elephant exhibits at zoos around the world. This film, along with the audio of Birdwhistell's lecture and an epilogue, was then released in 1969 by the East Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute with the title Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos. Using his theory of kinesics (roughly, the study of “body language”), a “context control method,” and “purposive” filming of families viewing elephant exhibits, Birdwhistell hoped to demonstrate that physical gestures are not universal but are rather culturally specific and only comprehensible in carefully described contexts (fig. 1). Microcultural Incidents positions the ethnographer as a detached observer dissecting scenes for his audience, translating the language of gestures with the use of a slow-motion projector he calls a “perceptiscope.” Even with his many hours of raw footage and the subsequent analysis with the perceptiscope, however, Birdwhistell's conclusions are remarkably small. Among the gems we learn, for example, are that on trips to the zoo English fathers are the keepers of food and knowledge and unselfconsciously teach their children to speak to elephants and that when the French stick their kids' hands into elephant trunks, the children look at their hands with a mixture of surprise and horror before wiping them off on their clothes. Still, for Birdwhistell kinesics held the promise of revealing hidden truths about people and cultures.

This essay considers the instability of the typewriter as a writing machine and as an object within the media history of the twentieth century, examining how the typewriter keyboard and the transcriptive protocols of the modern office materially shape writing practice. The standardization of the typewriter system produces a textual aesthetics of error and uncertainty rather than of mechanized circumscription. Andy Warhol's a is a novel whose mode of production explores the limits of the typewriter's transcriptive uncertainty. Written by a distributed network of typists and inundated with errors and ambiguities, a offers a radically defamiliarizing representation of how the typewriter system opens new pathways of authorship, embodiment, and literary production. Drawing on a's aesthetic experimentation, this essay argues that the localized, idiosyncratic, yet often suppressed disruptions produced by the typewriter suggest the possibility of an alternative to linear, teleological conceptions of media history. (PB)

The quarrel between Adam and Eve in book 9 concerns not only relations between the sexes but also the nature of human government. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve, who, like the antinomian Christian, possess total spiritual liberty, deal with an epistemological dilemma that confronted antinomians like Milton during the English revolution: In the absence of intrinsically authoritative external laws, how can one know when one's decision to act is based on the direction of God's spirit dwelling in one's heart and when it is based on personal desire? In the light of Milton's historical answer to this question, we can see that Milton dramatizes in Eve the voluntarist antinomian's tendency to overconfidence and in Adam the humanist antinomian's struggle with right reason. While neither person sins in this scene, both lose their balance in particularly antinomian ways that grant us insight into the necessarily precarious nature of human freedom.

It is admitted by all critics that the Beowulf is essentially a heathen poem; that its materials are drawn from tales composed before the conversion of the Angles and Saxons to Christianity, and that there was a time when these tales were repeated without the Christian reflections and allusions that are found in the poem that has reached us. But in what form this heathen material existed before it was put into its present shape is a question on which opinions are widely different. In the nature of the case we can look for no entire consensus of opinion and no exact answer to the question; the most that one can expect to establish is at the best only a probability.

In 1768 the first batch of certain supposed transcripts from ancient original manuscripts was shown to Messrs. Catcott and Barrett of Bristol and offered for publication by Thomas Chatterton, who alleged that he had copied them from original documents in the muniment room of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He declared them to be mostly the compositions of one Thomas Rowley, a secular priest of the fifteenth century. Towards the end of 1768 Chatterton communicated with James Dodsley, the famous London bookseller, in the hope of publishing his manuscripts; but Dodsley, after a little hesitation, refused to take up the matter. Then Chatterton attempted to secure Horace Walpole's patronage, (March 1769), and for a moment succeeded; but Walpole, after a little further reflection realized the imposture. In 1770 after some fruitless correspondence with Walpole, Chatterton set out for London in person, to try his fortune; the end came very soon, August 24.

It is well known that stressed post-vocalic [r] has been lost in many dialects of Modern English. Besides this recent loss historians of English have recognized that some [r]s in stressed syllables were lost at an earlier date.

As I sit down to write these words in late October 2014, my Latin American news digest has just informed me that archaeologists in Peru have confirmed that toolmaking human beings lived in settlements 14,700 feet above sea level in the Andes over twelve thousand years ago, a thousand years earlier than anyone was known to have lived at such altitudes (Ritter). The goalposts marking the longue durée in the Americas have been receding continuously in recent years. Until the 1990s, received wisdom had it that human beings arrived in the Americas no earlier than thirteen or fourteen thousand years ago, across the Bering Strait land bridge, which disappeared underwater a couple of thousand years later. But in the late twentieth century archaeologists began finding human remains over fourteen thousand years old, like those in the 14,800-year-old settlement at Monte Verde, far south on the coast of what is now Chile. There had to have been migrations well before the fourteen-thousand-year mark. Since the discovery in Chile, human remains more than twenty and even thirty thousand years old have repeatedly been found. Aggressively defended by archaeologists, the accepted story held up longer than it should have, but accumulating evidence has finally dislodged it. How and when the Americas were populated by human beings remains a terrain of lively controversy.

Many people on occasion prefer a textual error to an authentic reading. One mistake by a compositor of Melville's White-Jacket—setting “soiled fish of the sea” instead of “coiled fish of the sea”—achieved an adventitious fame some years ago. Various readers have since declared themselves in favor of the error, on the grounds that “soiled fish” makes a richer, more interesting passage than the ordinary “coiled fish of the sea.” In short, the error seems to them to create a better work.

On 18 august 1492, the lexicographer and grammarian antonio de nebrija'S castilian grammar—variously referred to as Gramática castellana, Gramática de la lengua castellana, and Gramática sobre la lengua castellana—was printed in Salamanca. Modeled on his earlier Latin grammar, Introductiones latinae (1481), it was the first such systematization of a modern (vernacular) European language and part of an emergent print and lexical humanist culture in the early modern period. Nebrija dedicated the project to Isabel I of Castile in a prologue that opens with a declaration for which the text is notorious: “language was always the companion [compañera] of empire, and followed it such that together [junta mente] they began, grew, and flourished—and, later, together [junta mente] they fell.”

Pixar's animated feature wall-E (2008) revolves around a sentient robot, a small trash compactor who faith fully continues his programmed duties seven hundred years into the future, after humans have long abandoned their polluted home planet. Landscaped into skyscrapers of compacted waste, Earth no longer seems to harbor any organic life other than a cockroach, Wall-E's only and constant friend. Similarly, in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004; ), sequel to the groundbreaking first Ghost in the Shell anime, the love of the cyborg police officer Batou for his vanished colleague Motoko Kusanagi is surpassed only by the care and affection he displays for his pet basset hound. These films are two recent examples of works of science fiction in which the emergence of new kinds of humanoid consciousness in robots, cyborgs, or biotechnologically produced humans is accompanied by a renewed attention to animals. Why? In what ways does the presence of wild, domestic, genetically modified, or mechanical animals reshape the concerns about the human subject that are most centrally articulated, in many of these works, through technologically produced and reproduced human minds and bodies?