It two articles based on his study of the Bodleian MS of Shelley's “The Triumph of Life” G. M. Matthews has presented evidence which, he suggests, proves that, during the weeks immediately preceding Shelley's trip to Leghorn with Edward Williams and their subsequent drowning, Shelley and Jane Williams engaged in “a love-affair, passionate on Shelley's part and at least complaisant on Jane's, cutting across the pattern of marriages within the confined little community of Casa Magni,” and that much of the somber tone of “The Triumph of Life” can be attributed to this domestic crisis.

A new interest of late has awakened in Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, through the realization that he is the fountain-head of much of the æsthetics and ethics prevalent in the last century and in our own time. While it has been generally recognized that the background of Shaftesbury's thought is classical, as was to be expected of any student and thinker of his period, deriving both from Stoicism and from Platonism and neo-Platonism, attention and interest have chiefly been concentrated upon those aspects of his thought which look toward the coming romantic movement. Also, such classical influences as have been recognized are usually interpreted from the post-renaissance point-of-view, as agreeing in the main with such modifications of Platonic and neo-Platonic thought as are referred to in discussing “Platonism” of Shelley. Thus C. W. Weiser enlarges upon Shaftesbury's indebtedness to the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions—terms which he uses, as he explains, in a very general sense, as pertaining to the life of the feeling (the Platonic way) in opposition to the life of the reason (the Aristotelian way).

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned with exploring differences of interpretation than with describing the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to reexamine the assumption that numbers are useful only for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy. (TU)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's meditations on artificial society's perversions of natural sentiment, specifically on the theater's contribution to societal degeneration, provide a historical context for the dialogue between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine about the nature of the French Revolution. Much of the debate over the political rights of man consisted of an analysis of his affective rights. It was in many ways a controversy over what could be considered a moral method for attaching an individual's sympathies. The problem of affective liberation stands behind Paine's quarrel with Burke's Reflections and with the victim Burke offered for the world's consideration in that text: Marie Antoinette. For Burke the emotions aroused by theater and by the tragic representation of historical events could liberate the spectator into constructive action. Exposing Burke's own affective imprisonment by the spectacle of revolution, Paine demanded instead a liberation through rational inquiry.

Russian studies are still in love with their fascinating and unpredictable subject, despite radically changing geopolitical realities and shifts in the academic climate. We in the field have been through something resembling the free-market shock therapy prescribed for newly non-Soviet Russia, a major shake-up in intellectual orientation and logistics. Our methodologies, perspectives, and projects are always in this sense a reflection of our present-day subject, but they are also a self-portrait, the latest in a series.

It is often said that a century ago the author and the reader occupied the same space. I am told that much of modern literature is the result of a separation in that sense of space. It could also easily be said that a century ago archives and history occupied the same conceptual and methodological space. This sense of partnership in the study of the past has undergone a variety of stresses and strains over recent decades, to the point that what constitutes the archive has become a question fundamental to how our knowledge of the past is acquired and shaped. History and archives now occupy very different spaces, a condition that has conceptual, technical, and practical causes. Among the many consequences of this intellectual divide is the need for a new understanding of the archive apart from its historical roots.

Critics have failed to grasp that Yeats's “tragic joy” is a version of the sublime. The phrase captures the affective dynamic of the sublime—the transformation of defeat and terror into joy—as do similar concepts in Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, and Schiller. Yeats can help us understand death as the ultimate occasion of the sublime. Through his lyrics of tragic joy we can trace the psychic and rhetorical resemblances that connect diverse modes of the sublime: curse, prophecy, and apocalypse. These modes encode affirmative responses to destruction, so that the psycholinguistic violence in the poems may owe less to fascism than to the Romantic sublime. Although Yeats turns the sublime of Blake and Shelley in a reactionary direction, the politics of the sublime are inherently neither right-wing nor left-wing but open to either articulation.

Among the many survivais which have come down to us from the childhood of humanity nothing seems to be so widespread, so prominent, so persistently vital, as the belief in Metamorphosis. Mythology and Legend are filled with it. Literature is indebted to it for some of her brightest jewels; in fact, some of her grandest monuments, without it, would hardly have a raison d'être. In all nations and times the gods enjoy this, their peculiar privilege, as a matter of course, and they use it, both on themselves and on others, with varying motives and more or less discretion. Among men, those who come by the gift naturally are comparatively rare, and seldom encountered outside of the most primitive nations; of the remainder, a few are presented with the gift by some higher power, but the great majority derive their ability wholly from the use of magic arts. There are the Bear-Men or“ Berserkers” and the Swan-Maidens of Scandinavia, the Tiger-Men of India, the Hyena-Men of Abyssinia and many other people of a similar character in all quarters of the earth.

La Cousine Bette was written at a time when the classification scheme of La Comédie humaine no longer seemed adequate for its raw materials and was marked by a prodigious expansion in the length of Balzac's customary exposition. The ending of that exposition (desire gratified, desire frustrated) hints at the thematic unity of the work. Thus Bette embodies frustration, negativity, and ultimately the death wish itself: this drive is then parceled out among the other destructive women characters as well. Hulot in contrast expresses the force of Eros. Not only are both characters allegorical: they are shown in the process of becoming allegorical, and the deeper subject of the book is the very history of obsession itself. Balzac is able to record this instinctual system because his work is pre-individualistic: at the same time, the very symmetry of the instincts requires a third character, Madame Hulot, to function as consciousness or ego, and it is from this third pole that Balzac's sentimentalism (and his political ideology) derive, as necessary and inherent structural distortions.

The debate about validity in interpretation has pitted monism against pluralism. Some theorists insist that any literary work has a single, determinate meaning, and others argue that there are no limits to the readings a text allows. Neither view adequately describes the field of conflicting interpretations. Critics can and do have legitimate disagreements about literary works; yet we can also say that some readings are wrong, not simply different. The hermeneutic field is divided among conflicting systems of interpretation, each based on different presuppositions that decide what its procedures will disclose and what they will disguise. But several tests for validity–inclusiveness, efficacy, and intersubjectivity– act as constraints on reading and regulate claims to legitimacy. While these tests have limitations that prevent them from resolving all hermeneutic disagreements, literary criticism is nevertheless a rational, disciplined enterprise– though an inherently pluralistic one.

Antonioni’s Blow-Up is one of the most significant and controversial films of the 1960s. Its success brought increased international recognition not only to its director but to Julio Cortázar, the author of the story that inspired the film. Because of the extreme complexity and ambiguity of both Blow-Up and its source, “Las babas del diablo,” critics have been unable to agree in their interpretations of either work, and they agree even less on the extent of Cortázar’s influence on Antonioni. A close analysis of the two works, with careful focus on the relationship between the creators and their protagonists and on the tension between the narratives and their self-conscious forms, reveals that many of the difficulties in interpretation are due to a priori assumptions of readers and viewers alike and that the similarities between the film and the story are far greater than has been supposed.

This essay argues that our inability to map the circulation of William Blake's proverbs in contemporary Anglo-American culture is critically and politically instructive. Opening historicist literary criticism and reception study out to each other, I contend that mainstream citations of the proverbs today point the historicist critic to the radical political potential that Blake's poetic form possessed (but never successfully unleashed) in the original historical contexts in which Blake wrote. Understanding the proverb form and its centrality to Blake's poetry sheds light on how and why his work resists analysis through familiar literary-historical categories like text, corpus, reader, and reading formation. Recognizing this resistance clarifies in turn how, through its use of proverbs and proverblike sentences, his poetry constituted a heterogeneous regulatory challenge to the regulatory power of systems of laws–common, religious, and divine. (MG)

Let me begin by quickly spelling out what I take to be the intellectual and disciplinary basis of this forum as implied in its title. I'll also say a little about the general assumptions that may have governed or provoked its convening at the MLA convention this immediately premillennial year.

Any discussion of how the humanities can contribute to sustainability or how the humanities are sustainable must begin with what critics of the sustainability concept have called its cultural deficit: academic humanists and artists have not been central to discussions of what sustainability is and might be. Sustainability is most commonly understood in economic terms, as production that respects ecological carrying capacities. Because the sustainability concept is “squishy,” in Bill McKibben's words, it invariably drifts toward the more pragmatic project of sustainable development, the goal of which is keeping modernization viable—a goal dubious to many environmentalists as well as to cultural critics (102). In an era when the rhetoric of crisis dominates public conversation about political, social, educational, and environmental affairs, the term sustainability can seem anemic. Its emphasis on long-term planning and stewarding of resources has none of the dramatic appeal of apocalyptic visions of a world in which all human and natural ecologies are in collapse. For many environmental critics, it is a term that in some sense fails to account for the necessity of drastic changes in how resources are protected, much less distributed, and it relies too heavily on protecting the very state of affairs that got us into trouble in the first place. For its critics, and even for its reluctant supporters, it is a term about managing anxieties that shuttle between local and global concerns, individual and corporate responsibilities.

In Gothic, as in Proto-Germanic, primary word stress was fixed on word-initial syllables, including roots, reduplicating syllables, and prefixes; the Gothic negative-pejorative prefix un- appears to have been no exception to the rule. Secondary word stress occurred initially on second immediate constituents of compounds and quasi-compounds; the stress of gudhŨs ‘temple’ and faurhāh ‘curtain’ was not exceptional. Weak word stress fell medially on vowels between syllables bearing other degrees of stress and on syllable-forming suffixes directly following primary or secondary stress; finally, weak word stress occurred on syllable-forming endings. Evidence for primary phrase stress is very limited. Excepting ga-, proclitics of verb phrases–as distinguished from compound verbs and adverbs plus verbs–bore secondary phrase stress. There appears to be no evidence to show that this stress remained in Gothic feminine compound verbal abstract nouns. The phonologic development of forms like sg. dat. pamma ‘this, that,’ sg. dat. hiamma ‘whom, what,’ and pi. 3 sind ‘they are’ reflects a stress alternation that was dependent upon their syntactic context. Go. ga-, -u -u-, and -uh -uh- bore weak phrase stress. The Gothic stress of most Biblical proper names is obscure. Alliterative passages in Gothic shed no light on the problem; rather, it is the evidence for primary word stress that serves to identify the alliteration.

Some critics cite book 4 of Augustine's De doctrina Christiana as a source of the anti-rhetorical style of Renaissance English prose. However, such critics do not recognize that book 4 offers instruction in extemporaneous oral performance. Nor do contemporary critics note Augustine's pervasive orality, though a substantial critical literature addresses this fact. The relation of orality to literacy was complex in late antiquity, particularly as illiterates converted to Christianity, a text-based religion. Augustine's prescriptions can be seen to illustrate the development of “innerness” among Christians. Book 4 shows how Scripture reading, prayer, and style can be marshaled to produce extemporaneous oral performances that provoke interior religious experiences. Modern criticism of book 4 that views oralily and literacy as simple opposites and that privileges literacy can lead to misreading. As a document imbricated in the complex relation of literacy and oralily, however, book 4 makes a different kind of sense.

Previous commentaries have emphasized the correlation between this piece and the host of motifs and problems that Franz Kafka never tired of treating. While this method seems mandatory in an overall account and has led to stimulating insights as well as aberrations on various levels of symbolic interpretation, a close analysis of “The Burrow” on the primary level, granting the given data of its non-Euclidean geometry, is attempted for the first time. Outstanding features include a demonstration of the unique quality of the recital as the synchronous coexistence of a ninety-minute monologue in the form of an emergent or progressive present with a life span of many years extending from maturity to senility. The progressive derangement and deterioration of the hero are analyzed, and his persecution mania is correlated with manifestations of a repressed, abnormal libido that allows inferences regarding a traumatic experience of his youth. Finally, it is shown on inner grounds of both a formal and a material nature that the piece is complete, allowing of no meaningful continuation.

In the summer of 1961, three brilliant young scholars at the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow set out by train to see Bakhtin for the first time, in the far-off provincial town of Saransk, where he taught Russian and foreign literatures at the University of Mordovia (until declining health forced him to retire in August 1961). The three devoted admirers were Sergey Georgyevich Bocharov (the author of the following article), Georgy Dmitryevich Gachev, and Vadim Valeryanovich Kozhinov (the enterprising and resourceful leader of the group).

Don Juan and Le Misanthrope depict a comic world in which success, defined as immunity to ridicule, depends largely on the aristocratic “virtues” of dexterity, style, and form—a world in which the “social esthetic” of honêteté has degenerated into a “moral anesthetic” (Krailsheimer). Thus, Don Juan and his female counterpart, Célimène, enjoy an almost constitutional invulnerability to the comic fate which overtakes their often morally superior antagonists. Don Juan is a dazzling rhetorician and consummate actor who, in contrast to the inept Sganarelle, among others, manages to exploit his individuality to the bitter end with an elegant, lordly coherency. So complete is his impunity that only a deus ex machina can thwart his self-aggrandizing schemes. Although morally wrong, he remains esthetically right. So does the devious and corrupt Célimène whose artful self-possession allows her—where Alceste, the moralist, fails—to assert her personality and speak her mind freely even in the conformistic, hypocritical society that she typifies. Don Juan s deft histrionics, like Célimène's imperturbable grace, constitute an art of living, intended by Molière perhaps as an esthetic compensation or consolation for the irremediable moral ugliness that he discerned in a still splendorous but decadent civilization.