When the last Inca emperor and the conquistador from Extremadura, Spain, met in Cajamarca, Peru, on Saturday, 16 November 1532, a world separated them, but they had one thing in common: neither knew how to read. In Andean popular culture and historical analysis, Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro remain the protagonists of that formidable collision of worlds, in which the most powerful man of the Tawantinsuyo, the Inca empire, which stretched from Ecuador to northern Argentina, confronted a Spanish adventurer who was seeking an easy fortune, well aware that this encounter was his last and greatest opportunity. Beyond a mnemonic system of colored knots called quipus, which registered population numbers and other types of numerical accounting, the Incas did not know writing. Pizarro was an illegitimate child from a rich family and apparently had been a swineherd as a boy. It has been repeated that despite his illiteracy, he belonged to the “civilization of the sign” while Atahualpa, despite his power, was condemned for belonging to “the culture of orality.” However, according to legend, during his months of prison, out of curiosity the Inca learned some Spanish words and wrote on the fingernail of his thumb the word Dios (“God”). It is said that he showed it to Pizarro, asking him what it meant, and found that his rival could not read it. From the prison cell of a condemned man and the site of his punishment, Atahualpa engaged in what might have been the first critical reappropriation of the Castilian language (Garcilaso, Historia 98; bk. 1, ch. 33).

The work of E. L. Doctorow is difficult to place on the map of postmodernism because he is equally concerned with narrative or representational technique and with issues of history, power, and identity. Doctorow has focused his concerns in the question of technology, representing in each of his major works technological principles that not only typify the historical epoch in which the novel is set but also characterize the representational mode of the novel itself. The differences among technologies in his novels produce an arc of development that moves from a critique of the coercive power of a system epitomized by the electrical circuit in The Book of Daniel to a celebration of the possibilities for imaginative and representational freedom created by the computer in Loon Lake. Concentrating on the technology of narrative, Doctorow has contributed striking redefinitions of the historical subject while testing and extending the resources of the contemporary novel.

It has long been recognized that the fundamental ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder's thought are few and consistent, in spite of the fact that their author frequently expressed his deep-seated aversion to metaphysical systematics. Herder's principle of regarding the individual experience as primordial and the abstract statement as derivative has been labeled by his biographers and commentators as “irrationalism,” when, as a matter of fact, his aversion to systematics was merely the result of a sincere concern with the discoveries of empirical science. Though Herder very often gave voice to his belief that all philosophical systems are “fictions” or “poems,” he was unwilling to go as far as do the radical positivists of our own day—Wittgenstein, Carnap, et al., who deny validity to all metaphysics. In fact, certain conceptions frequently used by Herder are admitted by him to be genuinely metaphysical. At the same time, in his use of the conception of “Kraft,” which definitely belongs among these, Herder will be seen to stand in much the same position as the Kant of the first Kritik, i.e., in that of having to reconcile inherited metaphysics and the results of the scientific experimentation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An examination of Herder's attempted reconciliation has long been overdue; it has been neglected in the past because of the outspokenly pro-Kantian attitude of Herder's biographers, among whom Rudolf Haym and Eugen Kühnemann stand unquestionably preëminent. It is the purpose of the following to sketch the conception of “Kraft” inherited by Herder and to indicate the synthesis he attained between the older idea and the scientific conceptions of his age. In addition, the rôle played by the final development of the idea in the break between Herder and Weimar classicism will be brought forward as a better explanation than the purely personal (and hence unfairly derogatory) motives hitherto adduced to explain it.

Gender conflicts troubled Hawthorne's personal life and afflicted his daughter Una badly enough to bring on episodes of disabling psychic isturbance. They are likewise inherent in The Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne subverts the norms of womanhood and manhood that were asserted by the domestic ideal, a middle-class version of male dominance then coming to the fore. Yet the work also affirms that those norms provide a measure against which his daughter's aberrations should be corrected. Hawthorne's solution to Una's problem is depicted in Pearl's redemption, so that Una's unhappy later life—as well as Hawthorne's—provides a biographical countertext. By treating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, and The Scarlet Letter as interdefining arenas of conflict, this essay provides a glimpse into the processes by which gender is constructed in persons and works of art.

Sophisticated readers of A Christmas Carol, moved though they may be by the dramatic reformation of Scrooge, are frequently inclined to question the psychological validity of the old man's change of heart. Far from being a sign of the story's inadequacy, however, this divided reaction is the key to its effectiveness. Dickens' chief target in A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's nineteenth-century rationalism, and the reader's skepticism about the old man's moral and spiritual recovery is an exact analogue of that rationalism. What the reader's delight, in the face of his skepticism, suggests, therefore, is that there is a level of the story on which Scrooge's regeneration is entirely authentic; that if A Christmas Carol is less than convincing as a psychological case history of an elderly neurotic temporarily reformed by Christmas sentimentality, it is certainly a success as the metaphysical study of a human being's rediscovery of his own innocence.

Joseph Hall, whom Fuller designated “our English Seneca”, is chiefly remembered as a satirist, character-writer, and indefatigable champion of the Anglican faith against the onslaughts of “Smectymnuus” and Milton. But Fuller's phrase suggests a further claim on our attention. Bishop Hall was the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century, a notable practitioner of the so-called “Baroque” or “curt” style (stile coupé) of the Attic writers. It was to the Neo-Stoic brand of theology which Hall so enthusiastically preached that Sir Thomas Browne had reference when he observed in his Religio Medici that “truely there are singular pieces in the Philosophy of Zeno, and doctrine of the Stoicks, which I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current Divinity.”

Roland Barthes's S/Z brilliantly details the way Balzac's Sarrasine undermines traditional understandings of realism's reference to the world. Considered through J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, however, Sarrasine appears not only to detach names from their referents but also to assert the irreproachable validity of every naming process sanctioned by the linguistic community in which it occurs. According to Austin, successful representation depends not on faithfulness to objective reality but on conformity to social conventions. Balzac's narrative illustrates Austin's point by depicting an unsexed castrato successively given opposite sexes in different communities. As exemplified in Sarrasine, the realist project insistently negates language's referential ground while just as insistently affirming its supreme representational authority.

Introduced at the start of The Prioress's Tale but then dropped as an overt topic, usury nevertheless informs that anti-Semitic text. This essay situates Chaucer's narrative in the complex and contradictory history of medieval lending as a theory and a practice. I stress the architectural ironies of usury in the tale and in medieval English history. The tale demonizes Jewish usurers by associating them with the most abject of built environments, the latrine, and celebrates Christians through their links to the exalted space of the church. But, in a move that reflects the flow of capital throughout Christian society, the tale ultimately undermines the opposition of church and pit. Analyzed not as fixed entities but as contingent, fluid spaces joined through the usurious infrastructure of the tale, the minster and the privy suggest a materialist critique of efforts to conceive of a purely religious space.

The range of subject-matter treated in the German drama of the sixteenth century will appear wide and varied only to the scholar who does not think of the vast expanse of the Biblical field as featureless and barren. Beyond the confines of the Bible-drama there are, of course, some religious battle-plays, of the Pammachius type, the morality-plays of the Homulus-Hekastus series, a few dramas built on classical material, sundry “Türkenschauspiele,” some scattered romantic comedies, drawing on foreign or native legend and, exceptionally, plays from contemporary history; the Latin school-drama often mirrors delightfully the color and bustle of everyday life; but, in the end, all this is of secondary interest: and the fact must be recognized that sixteenth-century drama stands in the sign of the Book. It might be fairly said that there is hardly a chapter in the Bible which was not adapted for dramatic use or, at least, dragged upon the stage. As one reads the titles, the conclusion, as Froning remarks, almost inevitably presents itself: either the dramatists of those times must have possessed an extraordinary faculty of dramatic adaptation, or else they had no inkling of the demands of stage-craft.

In 1866 Emily Dickinson Ended a lapse of eighteen months in her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson by sending him three lines that connect the major concerns of her work: death, subjectivity, and the conditions of knowledge. When Higginson later published these lines in “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” he explained that the poet would on occasion include “an announcement of some event, vast to her small sphere as this,” the death of her dog who had been her companion for sixteen years (450). In measuring Dickinson's loss biographically by the “small sphere” of her life, Higginson sets aside her ability to “wade grief” (Franklin 312) and situates her letter within the sentimental culture of pet keeping, which had transfigured a predominantly agricultural practice (pet initially referred to a lamb) into a staple of genteel domesticity and bourgeois subjectivity (Mason; Grier; Kete; Ritvo; Thomas). Far from participating uncritically in the roles and relations Higginson projects onto her, Dickinson interrogates the formation and gendering of sentimental subjectivity (Dillon; Blackwood) by placing “Carlo died” in relation to the other two lines—the signature and the call for instruction. “E. Dickinson” refers ambiguously to Emily or to her father, Edward Dickinson (Holland 146). The signature pluralizes the subject; it doubles and ultimately obscures “E.”'s gender. This ambiguous subject hinges on the animal's death as a scene of pedagogy: it stands in the liminal space between the announcement of Carlo's death and the request: “Would you instruct me now?”

The texts of the late-nineteenth-century European male avant-garde reflect an imaginary identification with the feminine. Examined here with specific reference to Huysmans's Against the Grain, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, this topos is evident both in the representation of “feminized” male subjects (the aesthete and the dandy) and in a self-conscious writing practice that foregrounds style, parody, and quotation. While ostensibly challenging sexual and textual norms through a subversion of bourgeois masculinity and realist aesthetics, these works in fact reinforce gender dichotomies by persistently associating woman with vulgarity, materiality, and the tyranny of the natural. The preference for art over nature in early modernism thus reveals a misogynistic dimension that is intimately linked to, rather than dissolved by, its parodistic and antirealist aesthetic.

Any modest attempt in comparative rhetoric to think beyond aristotle and beyond a single culture is enough to reveal Diversity in the use of language to converse, to instruct, and to persuade and in the concepts and theories developed to inform language practices. Since the publication, in 1971, of Robert Oliver's Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, one of the early studies that recognized the need for and benefits of studying non-Euro-American rhetorics, comparative rhetoric has made significant advances as interest in moving beyond Euro-American-centrism in studies of rhetoric steadily grows. Comparative rhetoric, committed to different ways of knowing and speaking and to different forms of inquiry, investigates across time and space communicative practices that frequently originate in noncanonical contexts and are often marginalized, forgotten, or erased altogether. Acting in response to globalization, comparative rhetoric aims to transform dominant rhetorical traditions and paradigms. As an interdisciplinary enterprise, it intersects with cognate studies and theories to challenge the prevailing power imbalances and patterns of knowledge production.

Olaudah Equiano manipulates the binary terms of racial representation in eighteenth-century England to establish himself as at once a reasoning black subject and, paradoxically, as what I term a “transgressive” subject: one who refuses any definitive racial (perhaps even social) categorization. A profile of the transgressive I in his autobiography reveals a fluid positioning rather than an essence. Initially identified as an African slave, Equiano goes on to depict his narrative self as a social reformer, someone both in and of English society whose differences with it seem resolvable within the existing order. When he suddenly reintroduces evidence of the narrative self's liminal status, therefore, white readers perceive a revolutionary challenge to the binary logic of their social world. Out of this ambiguity arises the possibility that individual and collective identities might be reimagined in a nonbinary mode. Moreover, subsequent black narrators have inherited Equiano's liberating ability to envision a transgressive self. (SMM)

Middlemarch has been criticized as a work that subordinates politics and history to an ethics of universal sympathy. Such criticisms grant too much authority to narratorial commentary over what is represented in the novel: the grip on the bourgeoisie of an ideology derived from the aristocracy as model class of Victorian society, resulting in a baffling of the movement of democracy. The disastrous consequences of the mystification of the sources of wealth by the allure of “aristocratization” are depicted in the figure of Lydgate; the possibilities of liberation from class ideology in the interests of democracy are evident in that of Ladislaw, who emerges as, in Raymond Williams's words, the novel's “thread to the future.” The contrast between these two figures shows the novel as a whole to be a critical analysis, not a symptom, of the historical impasse of Victorian society.

Is Othello a puppet, an Englishman, or a Moor? No less estimable a Shakespeare scholar than Professor Stoll has pointed out what he has called the “great heap of contradictions” in the character of Othello and has come to the conclusion that Shakespeare is merely following a dramatic jealousy tradition in the play of Othello—that he “but leans on the convention of slander and ‘diabolical soliciting’… . Only, in order to expedite matters, Shakespeare leans hard, and Othello presents little or no resistance to temptation, is eager, excited, is, for all his protestations of faith, won over in a trice.” One cannot help feeling, according to Stoll, that Othello is “wrenched and altered” by the dramatist in the temptation scene. A. C. Bradley, on the other hand, whose opinions I cite as typical of the opposite point of view, insists that “any man situated as Othello was, would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous.” Othello, in other words, is behaving like a normal human being of our own race. Bradley repudiates the “mistaken view” that Othello “retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood.” His nationality is incidental, and “in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important.” He even goes so far as to say that “if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.”

In the continuing controversies over the value of the 1805 Prelude versus the 1850 text-to which some voices have added a case for the 1799 version-the importance of Wordsworth's character as a revising poet has been neglected. One episode present in all three versions, his boyhood discovery of a man drowned in Esthwaite's Lake, offers a productive case study-both for the play of Wordsworth's revisions and for a view of The Prelude as a poem constituted by its many texts, rather than by anyone authoritative text. Wordsworth's most emphatic revision is the addition of a commentary that denies the boy's fear and converts the corpse into a figure of “ideal grace,” like something in a literary “romance.” Yetother revisions of both text and context reveal Wordsworth's ambivalence about the strategies of argumentative mastery with which he would govern the mysteries that inhabit his imagination.

Jonson's relations to the supper table mirror his relations to royal authority. Thus, while his work promotes gastronomic moderation, stoic restraint, temperance, and the plain style, he repeatedly seeks to assimilate those virtues to the social context of the Stuart court, where conspicuous consumption and intemperate behavior reign supreme. In this untenable situation, forced to reconcile contradictory values that typify discrete social circumstances, Jonson generally proceeds by renaming conspicuous consumption temperance and vice versa. This stratagem re-creates him in the image of a court whose abuses he theoretically rejects, and in poems like “Inviting a Friend to Supper” and “To Penshurst,” he emerges as an absolutist figure who sacrifices his stoicism for courtly success. Jonson becomes the embodiment of literary moderation, yet he weighs 280 pounds.

In moby-dick, Melville alluded to various eastern religions in addition to Christianity. Scholars noticing these allusions have tended to group without much discrimination Zoroastrianism (the fire worship of the Persians), Manicheism (belief in a universal duality of good and evil as coeternal principles), Hindu myths (such as that of Vishnu in Chapter lxxxii of Moby-Dick), and, less frequently, Gnosticism (without indicating how the particular doctrines apply to the novel). In proposing to treat chiefly of Gnostic influences on Moby-Dick, I shall contend that Melville applied Gnostic myths and doctrines more specifically and consistently than has been recognized, that he carefully distinguished between Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, and that certain passages in Moby-Dick require familiarity with the Gnostic mythos to be understood. But only when discussing the most obscure of these passages would I claim that the Gnostics alone were in Melville's mind. No influence on his great book was exclusive. In proving the influence of Gnostic thought upon it, I have no wish to minimize the importance of, let us say, Zoroaster, Milton, or the Hindus. Thus in demonstrating one eastern religion's influence upon Melville, it is not my intention to unseat another's.