The national model of literary history—with its developmental, teleological narrative of emergence and its vision of ineffable belonging and uniqueness—has lost much of its traditional pedagogical centrality, but it has not vanished. Rather, it has migrated from the center to what was once the periphery, where it now flourishes as a way of affirming the identity claims of hitherto marginalized groups. Literary historians speaking for such groups may openly acknowledge that the terms associated with the old historical narrative—evolutionary, continuous, organic, and the like—are largely fictive, yet these writers self-consciously embrace the fiction in order to appropriate its power. But this embrace entails serious risks: cynicism, enforced performativity, and repetition compulsion. A more powerful alternative lies in the emerging practice of mobility studies.

“World literature” will always fail because there is no such thing as the world. I draw on speculative realism to elaborate how all formations of a single world literature stem from problematic world concepts (particularly “the globe”) that write certain literary traditions out of the world. Using Gayatri Spivak's concept of the planetary, I move toward a mode of reading that attends to how individual texts regionalize the planet vis-à-vis their own centers of production. Instead of imagining a single world sectioned into center and periphery, this method recognizes that, far from dwelling on their own marginalization within the global economy, all localities (and literatures) posit themselves as center and regionalize outward from this center. Reading for regionalization pluralizes the possibilities of literary worlding. This practice requires us to understand and to honor the formal character of introversion, which I theorize through the case of the Swahili novel.

In many ways this particular section meeting has become one of the most significant in the annual program of the Modern Language Association. It serves to provide us with a measuring device which we can use to determine the extent to which we are fulfilling our international educational obligations. Considering the speakers who have been invited to address you today, if this afternoon's program has a theme, it might well be characterized as International Responsibility.

History offers many examples of individuals who have occupied the center of the stage during their life-time, only to be forgotten by posterity; but in modern times few writers have risen so high, and then sunk so completely out of sight, as did the abbé Corneille de Pauw. From 1768, when his first work appeared, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, he stood in the very center of cultural discussions in Europe. Learned societies and academies devoted whole sessions to arguments over his theories; he provoked controversies which not only stirred up all Europe, but extended to China and America. His books passed through edition after edition, and were translated from the original French into English, Dutch, and German. Yet today few people have heard of him, and his name is in only the largest encyclopedias.

If the Normans were, as ten Brink has called them, the foremost representatives of chivalry, they certainly had good measure of instruction to fit them for the part. Among the flood of Anglo-Norman didactic literature which has come down to us, we find a number of treatises on manners for the benefit of budding chivalry; they differ from the many Continental Arts d'aimer in that they are mostly written for quite young boys, and the elaborate doctrines of courtly love are replaced by practical details of a page's service, mingled haphazard with moral precepts of a more general nature. Even when the pupil is considered as having emerged from pagehood and attained to the dignity of a lover, we never exchange an atmosphere of reality and common-sense for the complex artificiality of the first part of the Roman de la Rose, any more than we approach the literary grace and finish of that poem. The little Norman pages were instructed in no fantastic chivalry, such as bound the heroes of the romances, but in a doctrine calculated to assure their success in this world, without endangering their chances in the next.

In a recent series of studies I developed at some length the general background of cosmological thought which gave rise to and in large measure explains both the astronomy and the astronomical comment of Paradise Lost. The present essay continues this investigation of Milton's cosmological beliefs, but restricts discussion to the Raphael-Adam dialogue of Book VIII, interpreted in the light of its immediate sources. In brief, these sources consist of a number of related passages from three English books contemporary with Milton.

Paradise Lost traces evil through three inceptions—Satanic, Adamic, and historical. Each origin seems to envision a different etiology: Satanic evil springs exclusively from the self in an instant of radical “Pelagian” freedom. Adamic evil emerges from the ambiguous interplay between self and seductive environment. Historical evil contaminates the whole race by means of necessary “Augustinian” inheritance. Ricoeur's analysis of the “Adamic Myth” and original sin clarifies etiological traditions Milton assimilates from Christian symbol, myth, and dogma. Through Ricoeur, we can identify the contrasting modalities of evil (inherited and imitative, physical and moral, ontological and existential, necessary and free, communal and individual) fused in Paradise Lost. Ricoeur's work reveals Milton's text to be a subtly inclusive etiological myth, one whose complex genesis of evil recovers Scripture's fullness of meaning in a new mythopoesis.

This essay discusses the origins of the literary canon in mid-eighteenth-century England, looking in particular at the changing reputations of Shakespeare and Spenser. Situating the writing of English literary history within the context of the cultural market, print culture, and nationalism, I argue that the mid-century model of literary history both represents the dialectical outcome of previous decades of thinking through the problem of cultural change and puts in place the terms for the modern narrative of the literary canon. An earlier aesthetics of gendered and sociable refinement separated itself from a Gothic past later recovered as the singular moment of literary achievement. The Gothic account was then challenged by a rethinking of consumption as reading abstracted over time. Together, Gothic historicism and abstract reading formed the antithetical basis on which critics established the modern canonical account of English literary history.

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

This essay is concerned with the relations between praise and aesthetic freedom exemplified by the practice of making odes. The ritual, economic, and agonistic functions of Pindaric odes and the mastering of subjective enthusiasm and objectification of value that Hegel found at work in such poems are compared with the belated, self-transforming expression of emotion characterizing Coleridge's composition of his “Dejection: An Ode” of 1802.

The Number of Conferences, Books, Essays, and Anthologies Dedicated to the Topic of World Literature Amply Testifies to a growing interest in the subject among literary scholars. In one sense, this interest within literary studies is perfectly comprehensible. It corresponds to a profound sense of a shrinking globe in which once-distant cultures are put in ever-closer proximity. The thinking goes something like this: if the world is becoming one, mustn't the literature of that world, too? In essence, the idea of world literature is the affirmative answer to some such commonsensical question, never mind that all the evidence points to a more complicated reality. Despite all the falling walls and speeding planes and globally communicating technologies (which doubtless do shrink distances), the world does not seem to be becoming one and indeed remains as complexly riven today as it ever was. There is no need to rehash the multiple genealogies—most often traced back to Goethe through René Wellek, Erich Auerbach, and Karl Marx, sometimes with a brief detour to Rabindranath Tagore—that underlie contemporary notions of world literature. The books, essays, and anthologies I allude to above sufficiently provide these genealogies. I have written elsewhere about my skepticism regarding the intellectual and political viability of the world literature project, suggesting that the notion of world literature always, and to little advantage, produces a fixed notion of the world (Flesh xvii, 124-36). In contemporary versions of the world literature project, the world becomes a reductive enumeration of cultures that have produced “masterpieces,” or “great works,” deemed good enough to enter a global canon. I am mainly skeptical of the idea of world literature because of this reductive impulse: I don't believe the idea can ever avoid a problematic diminution of the world or of the literary work.

Critics' imagining of Victorian history has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogies. Yet Foucault's famous account of modern discipline is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its “liberal” disdain for state interference. Discipline and Punish offered a mid-1970s response to Marxist dilemmas and to the problems of twentieth-century welfare states. In the early 1980s, Foucault discerned the resurgence of liberal economic ideologies, including neo-Victorian beliefs in free trade, self-help, and laissez-faire. Foucault's later essays on today's neoliberal “governmentality” therefore provide better critical tools for the study of nineteenth-century Britain than does Discipline and Punish. Literature offers a key context for this reimagined history. Works by self-consciously progressive writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill elucidate a distinctive liberal quandary: the quest for a modern governing or “pastoral” agency that would be rational, all-embracing, and effective but also antibureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory.

This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson's novels. It places Alex Woloch's literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.

The task I have set myself is not the discovery of new meanings in Hopkins' poem—it has been so widely studied that we rather suffer from a plethora than a paucity of interpretations. I shall try instead to work out some principles which will enable me to choose between alternatives in a fashion which will be systematic. My interest is double: first, in such principles of method as may emerge; and, second, in their contribution to the elucidation of the poem by presenting a unified and logical whole.

Despite the fact that the interpretive literature on Chaucer's Knight's Tale is extensive, the poem has remained one of the most baffling of the Canterbury Tales. It has resisted satisfactory interpretation where poems of much more complicated structure—as the Merchant's Tale—and much more varied style—as the Nun's Priest's Tale—-have yielded brilliant results to criticism. The critics of the past fifty years have lacked neither learning nor ingenuity, but somehow their interpretations remain marked by a characteristic indecisiveness—made particularly evident where equally acute analyses produce conflicting and contradictory results—and by a simplicity that does not do justice to the poem and its five hundred years of popularity. It is possible that this critical unsuccess is owing to an error of perspective, that the poem has been generally examined and evaluated in the light of assumptions which are not central to its method. It is the purpose of the present essay to establish this as more than a possibility, and to suggest a viewpoint from which the poem may be seen to have a coherence and fullness of meaning which the traditional critics have hardly touched upon.

Ever since 1879, when Arthur Fritzsche in his discussion of the authorship of Andreas suggested that the Old English religious poem was heavily indebted to Beowulf for its military and seafaring elements, scholars have generally assumed that the Andreas poet not only used Beowulf as a model for his life of St. Andrew but also consciously borrowed therefrom numerous phrases in order to adorn his work with the military spirit of the heroic poem. George Philip Krapp, in his edition of Andreas, discusses at some length the general similarities between Andreas and Beowulf, and then gives as evidence of literary indebtedness the impressive number of approximately 145 verbal parallels to Beowulf distributed throughout Andreas. Klaeber, without reservation, agrees with the conclusions of Krapp; he remarks in his edition of Beowulf that “the legend of Andreas exhibits abundant and unmistakable signs of having been written with Beowulf as a model. Wholesale borrowing of phrases, which more than once are forced into a strange context, and various parallelisms in situations and the general heroic conception of the story leave no shadow of a doubt that the author of the religious poem was following in the footsteps of the great secular epic.”

The essay argues that Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) grapples with the role of things in the constitution of persons. It is a paradigmatic novel about the fortunes of private, psychological interiority under commodity culture; its immediate context is the empire of things after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Villette represents subjectivity as a cabinet of curiosities, an interior–like a parlor–filled with intensely meaningful, even fetishized, bibelots. Lucy, the novel's narrator, longs to retreat from the public spectacles of commodity culture but, ironically, finds her identity also through relations with things. The novel suggests that bourgeois subjectivity, though it points to a thorough intimacy with objects, is paradoxically defined by the nostalgic notion that true interiority has been beset by or even lost to the pressure of things.

Ralph Ellison's critical formulations often suggest a radical dichotomy between lived experience and artistic representation. This dichotomy entails such antinomies in his critical canon as social and artistic, folklore and literature. Yet in the Trueblood episode of his novel Invisible Man literary art does not comprehensively transcend folklore. This episode, in fact, provides a metaexpressive commentary in which an agrarian folk storyteller par excellence inversively parodies Freudian and Christian myths and Anglo-American economic, philanthropic, and psychosocial practices. Trueblood emerges as a mediating blues site reconciling seemingly fixed distinctions between commercial and creative dimensions of Afro-American expression. The folk character's crafty realization reveals Ellison's Afro-American genius in brilliantly reflexive ways.