For those who regard Troilus and Cressida as a play marred by incongruous elements and an uncertain purpose, Act iv, Scene v, will always constitute an obvious source of dissatisfaction. Here, a long-awaited andloudly heralded climax—the duel between Ajax and Hector—rapidly subsides into anticlimax: before Ajax is even warm with action, Hector calls an end to the combat on the ground that he and his opponent are cousins. Moreover, Hector explains his motive for withdrawal, and comments on Ajax's reply, in speeches whose diction and style merely add to the discordant effect of his behavior:

The use of law in Middle English literature is not extraneous but grows naturally out of a profound faith in law as the tie that binds all things, in heaven and in earth: all law—divine, natural, and human—is, in essence, one law. Hence, Christ's victory over Satan is dramatized in the language of Westminster, the promise of salvation is seen in terms of the emerging law of contracts, and our place in heaven is treated as real estate. The process is seen most clearly in the Château d'Amour, Piers Plowman, Pearl, and “Quia Amore Langueo.” With the disintegration of the belief in a single, coherent law, however, the legal metaphor lost most of its force and economy. As heirs of that disintegration, we must be careful not to impose it unwittingly on Medieval literature and thus fragment a vision that was whole.

The conferences on which this report is based were financed by a contract between the MLA and the U. S. Office of Education. The Advisory Committee of the FL Program, at its November 1963 meeting, recommended that the report be published in PMLA as a thoughtful consideration of an important problem.

The parish and the social systems it sustains are prominent in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. His parochial vision, formulated across the range of his literary, critical, and juridical writings, constitutes an intricate scheme of surveillance, discipline, and care that Fielding hoped to see applied throughout the nation. He combines a plan for reforming oversight of the poor (from the intimate confines of parish management through the supervisory offices of the county and the magistracy) with a heuristics of judgment and discrimination, based on the visible authenticity of poverty and verified by the ridiculousness of affectation, which he exemplifies through the antiromance of Joseph Andrews. Romance, for Fielding, is the literary version of affectation, a transgressive masquerade that belongs to social emulation and that can be unmasked by a “test of truth,” derived from the third earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.

Tendentious as these definitions are, they refer to the colliding conceptions from which academic activism issues. The often reductive contrast between theory and practice, thinking and doing, has been used to regulate what is admissible as campus politics as if it were apparent in advance which actions were insufficiently imbued with reflection and which worldly commitments compromised disciplinary or institutional loyalty. Suffice it to say that drawing the boundary between activity appropriately inside and outside the academy has always been anxiously freighted. The pursuit of practically engaged knowledge has been constituted in a taut exchange with the very powers it has been called on to serve—persistently but not exclusively those of the state, of industry, and of professional associations (Newfield, Ivy; Readings; Chomsky; Starr). In the lineage of the Western university, degrees of critical separation from these authorities were hard-won and were conceived of as autonomy or academic freedom (Kant). The emergent disciplinary formations of the late nineteenth century made activist claims for equality in a self-designated professional cohort under the rubric of peer review. This compact, advanced by the American Association of University Professors, ceded institutional control to administrators in exchange for noninterference with the pursuit of specialized knowledge (even if manifest as political speech), which was apportioned to those elevated to the peerage through conferral of tenure (O'Neil; Thelin).

Feminist theory has argued that in a literary tradition overburdened by patriarchal legends and signs, women writers who wish to develop authentic, autonomous voices must devote themselves to their feminine precursors and abandon a masculine canon. In The Golden Apples, however, Eudora Welty appropriates images and themes of several poems by Yeats to dramatize the concerns of her heroines. Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism and of heteroglossia suggest a critical framework for exploring Welty's expropriations, but Bakhtin's method fails to consider the category of gender as a potent source for the dialogic tension characteristic of the novel as genre. Viewed from this perspective Welty's writing is more subversive than many of her critics have perceived, while Bakhtin's insights into the nature of novelistic discourse are useful in describing the restructuring of traditions that occurs in women's texts. Bakhtin's ideas must be understood and amplified, however, in the light of recent feminist theory.

In the consolidation of the nation-state, literature has served as one of the most prominent “representational machineries” of national culture (Prasad 72), but claiming that all or most Third World fiction writers articulate the national defeats the most important attribute of literature—its political and aesthetic autonomy. The articles in this cluster all discuss authors who, in Orhan Pamuk's term, do not feel “at home” at home. These authors' literary and philosophical expressions of alienation illustrate the necessity to challenge the universalisms of global literary studies, particularly the way Third World literatures are nationalized. Global literary studies has categorized Third World literatures as enunciations of the national, reserving the moment of emancipatory critique too easily for diasporic, exilic, immigrant, or postcolonial literatures produced in the West, with the underlying assumption that exposure to the West, through a Western language, literary tradition, or audience, is a precondition for critique. Concomitantly, latent in this “modernist conception of exile as a privileged state of consciousness” is the belief that a critique of the national is only possible outside the Third World nation-state (Giles 31). Jale Parla's and Nergis Ertürk's articles illustrate that many of the writers who felt not at home were indeed at home and in Turkey did not leave home to voice their critique of or reluctance to participate in linguistic engineering.

The normative understanding of “the clash of religions” assumes external conflict: we think, for example, of christianity's historical struggle with Islam; of the clash between Hinduism and Islam in the partition of the Indian subcontinent; or, in the field of empire, of the imperial contest over the souls and bodies of colonial subjects, in which material rationales for control and expropriation appear as theological motivations, rendering religious conversion virtually interchangeable with cultural conquest. Viewed in this light, the notion of a clash of religions bypasses conflicts internal to individual religions, which are equally if not more important in shaping the content of religious thought. Internal conflicts often play out as debates over the meanings of key concepts in the religions.

Recent interpretations of The Mill on the Floss distort the novel's emphasis in two principal ways. According to one, it is a tragedy of repression and regression; Maggie is responsible for her downfall because she is flawed by her acceptance of Kempis' philosophy of renunciation and by a fixation upon her father and brother, both of which fatally pull against her legitimate desire for wider fulfillment. According to the other interpretation, however, this desire is itself Maggie's flaw, whereas her acceptance of Kempis and her family devotion are good; thus, the main subject of the novel is not her downfall, but her spiritual development, which is climaxed by her two rejections of Stephen and her attempt to rescue Tom from the flood. Although both contain valid insights, neither of these readings is satisfactory, for each oversimplifies George Eliot's complex outlook, which presents Maggie's frustrations and her ultimate defeat as springing from both the fact that she has intense and legitimate desires for a full and rich life which Tom and Tulliver cannot comprehend, and the fact that she is, at the same time, bound to them by an equally legitimate, indeed noble, love which makes her renunciation of those desires morally necessary.

This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)

That the direct source of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale was a passage in the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Nicholas Trivet was first pointed out by the Swedish scholar Bäckström in 1845. Since then, important studies by Edmund Brock, Emil Lücke, and John S. P. Tatlock have compared these two versions of the tale of Constance and drawn attention to some of the changes made by Chaucer. Thus it is now generally agreed that while he closely followed the French original for the main outlines of his plot, he skillfully condensed on the one hand, and on the other hand added many philosophical, humanizing, and imaginative passages to Trivet's conventional and lifeless story.

The essay returns readers of the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris to the well of Narcissus, or the Fontaine d'Amors, and explores Guillaume's reliance on two additional Ovidian myths, those of Hermaphroditus and Attis, in his re-creation of the Narcissus setting. An examination of the evidence for Guillaume's familiarity with the two myths precedes the discussion of the contributions that the Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis myths make to Guillaume's depiction of romantic sexual love. The essay rejects the notion that Amant's fall into love represents a transcendence of Narcissus's tragedy; instead it urges that Amant himself falls into a destructive passion that has its origin in self-love.

Mr. Ray Heffner's article, “Shakespeare, Hayward, and Essex,” is confused and at times self-contradictory; but the main points which he attempts to maintain against my paper, “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” seem to be these:

1. That the play, founded on Hayward's history of Henry IV, which Essex is said, in Item 5 of the “Analytical abstract of the evidence in support of the charge of treason against the Earl of Essex,” to have witnessed, could not have been the play on the deposition of Richard II which the Essex conspirators are known to have attended in a group on February 7, 1601, the day before the rebellion; and that the performances referred to in this Abstract were not of a play by Shakespeare, nor acted by his company, but of an unknown play, performed perhaps by Essex's own actors at his house on some unknown occasion, which Mr. Heffner dates first as necessarily “after February, 1599,” later, as “in February, 1599,” and, in conclusion, as “in January, 1599.”

This article explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity. In the modern uncoupling of identities from fixed homelands, the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated. In an emerging configuration that interrogates the subject-centered perspective of occidental humanism, we are invited to consider the transit of language, whether in literary expression, television realism, or musical rhythm, as the site of an ongoing elaboration that is irreducible to a single point of view or to the transparency desired by a unilateral politics. Where no culture, history, or identity remains immune to the interruptions and interrogations of a multiple modernity that no longer merely mirrors the First World, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship need to be reconsidered radically.

(This is an exact reproduction of the particular copy of the 1747 text which Garrick used as a foundation for his alteration. All the lines marked by Garrick for elimination are put into the footnotes. All the lines indicated by a quotation mark for excision by Hughs and Wilks which remain in the present text were restored by Garrick. Other Garrick restorations and emendations are italicized.)

The prevalent view that Book III of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes the Royal Society overlooks the fact that this book contains two satires, one on the Laputians and one on the Balnibarbians. The first of these satires gains point if we regard it as aimed at the Cartesians, interpreting Laputa as France, the land of the Cartesians, and Balnibarbi as England, the land of the Newtonians, characterizations made by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques. The Laputians’ fear of the extinction of the sun is fully justified by the cosmology of Descartes’s Principes; their musical mania exaggerates only slightly that of the Cartesian popularizer Marin Mersenne; their influence on the Balnibarbians, inspiring them to build the Academy of Lagado, represents the influence of Descartes on the Royal Academy, an influence that has been hitherto underestimated.