This essay tracks relations between Laurence Sterne's sonorous prose and his discussions of time in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), identifying a novelistic technique of rhythmic narration geared to represent experiential temporality. I call this technique sonorous duration, and I demonstrate how it conveys a pulsating embodied experience shared by intradiegetic communities as well as by readers. After giving a brief account of early musicology and eighteenth-century elocutionary treatises to indicate the cultural context in which Sterne develops his notions of rhythm and duration, I offer close readings of key scenes in Tristram Shandy that exemplify a novelistic interest in sonority as a means for representing shared and embodied temporal experience. In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as Gérard Genette and Garrett Stewart.

Once Were People Without Writing. This is the Dominant Narrative of Pacific Literature. Such a View Rarely Takes the Lack of a recognizable alphabet or script in most of the inhabited islands of the Pacific at the time of contact with Europeans as a neutral difference. Lack is deficiency. Curiously, both detractors from and celebrants of Pacific literature agree that Pacific societies and cultures were introduced to writing by Europeans. The detractors see this originary lack as a permanent impediment to the development of worthy literature. (Few ever say, They lacked a written script, and they haven't produced any literature of note—it must be because they have a superior civilization.) The celebrants see the lack as a difference to be treasured along with the eventual acquisition of writing. So how can we better understand Pacific literature: where it came from and where it could take its readers?

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje's haunting novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, probes paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictional representations of transnational violence. What is conveyed by novels of war and genocide that cast the whole of a decolonial territory as a “deathworld”? The prism of death in Anil's Ghost requires readers of this text to relinquish settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude and our entanglements with the deaths of others. Postcolonial fictions of violence conjoin historical circumstance with phantasmatic expressions to raise important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies. Advancing a theory about “postcolonial crypts” in fiction, I argue that postcolonial fictions' attention to violence transforms notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework.

This essay takes up the issue of chaste intentionality in John Milton's A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity. Each of these narratives presents a female protagonist who simultaneously embodies and theorizes sexual virtue, creating a problem of will: when women intentionally participate in the ideological structures that constrain their acts, whose agency is at stake? The essay locates this question in the context of early modern conduct manuals and other prescriptive codifications of feminine sexuality, in which the performance of chastity, even as it is idealized, often involves actual or potential acts of violence against patriarchal structures and the male subjects who inhabit them. Milton and Cavendish raise the stakes by creating characters whose chastity is militant even as it tends toward marriage, identifying intentional virtue as a profoundly social problem.

The Tales of Belkin have suggested that they are not what they seem—a cycle of simple, diverting stories. Why Pushkin chooses to filter the telling of the Tales through several narrative voices, why he puts “poetic” epigraphs into ironic play with “prosaic” narratives, and why he develops the narratives around a web of allusions to major Western literatures and to Russian literature have led to a lively, expanding discourse among Pushkinists. But why Pushkin frustrates the Russian character who imitates a foreign model, why he takes the poetic models of the epigraphs as points from which to “step down” to prose, and how he sees the parodic debate between foreign and domestic models as a necessary step in the development of Russian prose are unanswered. Moving toward a new reading of “The Coflmmaker,” the asymmetrical story generally considered of only anecdotal interest, our essay addresses these questions.

Fagin, the first of Dickens' great villains, is a Jew. In making Fagin a Jew, Dickens drew on a tradition of villainy that had been in English literature from the beginning. Only in our own time has there been a widespread reaction against this literary injustice. One effect of this reaction has been to introduce into our response to characters such as Barabbas, Shylock, and Fagin problems that are not only insoluble but perhaps irrelevant. No responsible critic has, to my knowledge, ever called Dickens an anti-Semite. If the character of Fagin arouses racial hostility in the reader of Oliver Twist, as some overzealous guardians of the public weal would have us think, it is more because this character, by its archetypal nature, appeals to emotions and prejudices already firmly set by custom and tradition. The main fault is not in Dickens but in his readers. Dickens' only sin was that writing at a very early age his first real novel and writing rapidly under the pressure of serial publication, he drew on a tradition already widespread in English literature and, with Fagin at least, made it powerfully and uniquely his own.

In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer as commentator occupies an unusual role. It is indeed common for authors to enter their own works in many ways. Writers as diverse as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Fielding, Thackeray, and George Eliot all do so. Sometimes, as with Fielding, the author may keep a distance between himself and his story; sometimes, as with Dante, he may penetrate into his story as a major or the major character; and sometimes, as with Homer, he may both enter and withdraw at will. When Homer directly addresses one of his characters, he is deliberately breaking down, for artistic reasons, the aloofness to which he generally holds.

In 1904 I ventured to write an article entitled “The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl,” in which I advanced opinions at variance with those previously held on the subject. Since then have appeared a new edition of the poem, five new English translations of all or a large part of it, and several articles on various aspects of the work. In no one of these documents has my point of view with regard to the symbolism, allegory, and autobiography in the poem been fully accepted. To be sure, the chief part of former, fanciful speculations regarding the author's life and incentive to composition have not been repeated; but all who have recently written about the poem have clung tenaciously to the pleasant belief that The Pearl is a personal lament of the poet for a daughter of his own, and therefore strictly elegiac and autobiographical. This belief would be fairly harmless if (because of the primary stress always laid upon it) it did not inevitably obscure the true significance of the poem; but on this account it should not be allowed to establish itself more firmly without frank protest.

For the student of fiction, the most noteworthy accomplishment of Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman de la Rose is his invention of large-scale psychological allegory. C. S. Lewis, who has taught us how to haead the poem, suggests that it is an offspring of Old French romance and the moral allegory of the Prudentius tradition: the Roman deals with the erotic content of the romances in a form made newly potent by the moral allegorists of the school of Chartres. Lewis sees an adaptation or borrowing of allegory by romance before Guillaume in Chrétien de Troyes. There, it is suggested, we can see narrative poetry taking over allegory as a tool whenever psychology is in question. The purpose of this paper is to amplify the history of psychological allegory at this point, and thereby to modify Lewis' admittedly general account. Thus, while there are excellent reasons for using Chrétien as the exemplar of courtly romance writing, it can be shown that the tendency toward allegory in the romances is considerably more extensive than his practice would indicate. The romances constitute a virtual encyclopedia of psychological personifications, including illustrations and discussions of most of the “characters” in the Roman de la Rose. More important, this tendency does not represent simply a borrowing of the forms and procedures of moral allegory. Indeed, the allegory developing within the romances is not even so much a modification of the pre-established species as an independent invention. Specifically designed for psychological analysis, it points to the unique structural achievement of Guillaume de Lorris.

Dissonances within texts may result from contradictions within ideology or the contradiction between ideology and history. The disjunctions between the two parts of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, between both parts and the ending, and the gaps within each of the parts can be explained as arising with the contradiction between Chaucer's ideological project in the tale—an attack on the emergence of productive capital—and the literary means for the attack. The result is a confession told without moral content and then a fabliau made to serve Christian morality. Productive capital, which is virtually unrepresented elsewhere in the Chaucerian canon, is both invisible and glaring in the tale; and it competed in Chaucer's London with commercial capital, which reinforced the feudal aristocracy as well as depended on it.

Overshadowed by “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth's “Simon Lee” has attracted little attention. It is, however, a complex and ambitious poem, the product of a collision between narrative form and the demands of the imagination. “Simon Lee” does three things: it seeks to wean the reader from his low taste for stories; it displays a dramatic speaker learning to exchange narrative for lyric poetry; and, surprisingly, it undermines the whole proceeding, mourning for the very tales in verse that it abandons. Analysis of the poem from these three points of view sheds light on Wordsworth's ambivalence toward narrative. At the same time it helps us reassemble and relate three competing views of Wordsworth: as evangelist or moral teacher; as dramatist; and as the elegiac poet of the “Ode” and “Tintern Abbey,” whose tendency toward self-involution underlies and influences even his attitudes toward audience and genre.

The significance and literary ante cedents of the garrulous bird which seizes Chaucer “at a swappe” and bears him aloft “to a place, Which that hight THE HOUS OF FAME” have long been subjects of controversy. Garrett identified it with “the eagle of folk-tales who carries the hero to a high mountain.” Rambeau regarded it as “ein symbol der philosophie, aber einer sehr humoristischen art von philosophie, die ihn tröstet und mit seinem loos versöhnt.” In Sypherd's opinion, it combined “three functions—1. the messenger of a divinity; 2. the guide to a hero on his journey; 3. the helpful animal” (p. 86). Whereas Lounsbury stressed the influence of Ovid's account of Ganymede, both Rambeau and Chiarini emphasized Chaucer's indebtedness to the eagle of Dante's Commedia.

During the last three decades the in memoriam genre has come to occupy pride of place in the work of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Through his belatedness (which is not necessarily Bloomian), his permanent exile status at the edges of two empires, and his profound poetic speculations on death as the ultimate border crossing, Brodsky now embodies the elegiac tradition in his homeland as no one has since his high‐modernist precursors, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet—and herein lies his distinct contribution to Russian verse of this century—Brodsky has constantly sought out other, nonnative precursors to mediate the dead letter of his primary Soviet culture. In “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” he adopts the “mourning tongue” of Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” while speaking of the death of Eliot in his own distinctive Russian elegy. In this way, not only does he keep “the death of the poet… from his poems,” he keeps death from the door of his own ailing tradition.

It is well known that a heated controversy took place during the eighteen-nineties over the inclusion of fact, brutal fact, in fiction. It is likewise well known that the controversy ended with a partial victory for the “New Realists.” The chief literary historians of the period—W. G. Blaikie-Murdock, Holbrook Jackson, Harold Williams, and Oscar Burdett—agree in dating the change during the early years of the decade. Of these writers, however, Holbrook Jackson alone has indicated—and then only in romantic generalizations—the turbulent clash of ideas which accompanied the transition. In Emile Zola, Novelist and Reformer 1904, Ernest Vizetelly describes with strong partisan feeling the outcry against his father's published translations of Zola's works. But Vizetelly takes us no further than the year 1889, when his father was imprisoned, and he does not deal with the subsequent reaction in England toward tolerance and even sympathy. Accordingly, Vizetelly's account fails to give an adequate appreciation of the important results which followed the controversy over realism, in fixing the chief line of development which English fiction was to take for at least thirty-five years.

Although the thinkers of the Middle Ages il did not develop any theories about the function of the artist which can be compared with those of Plato or the Romantics, they had definite views on art and its relation to society. Art in its broadest sense had for them an ethical and social function which inevitably became part of the grand design of the universe. None of the great writers of romance is without consciousness of this function. In the creation of the Arthurian romance in particular they were fully aware of their responsibilities, but they interpreted them in differing ways. It seems to me that Gottfried von Strassburg realizes most fully the intellectual aspects of his responsibility and takes most note of the esthetic theories which justified the arts, and in particular music, as beneficial for Christian men and women and as leading towards that harmony of the spirit with the eternal which was regarded as the highest good.

Declaring Psychoanalysis “Finally Dead and buried” is “one of the seasonal rituals of our intellectual life” (Žižek 7). In the latest salvo of this battle, Lee Patterson rehearses the argument that debunking the scientific base of Freudianism renders the theory useless to the humanities, and he objects particularly to the application of psychoanalytic models to medieval texts—an exercise, for him, in anachronistic reasoning. Patterson's claim recalls earlier rounds led by Stephen Greenblatt and, a decade before that, in a more totalizing vein, by Frederick Crews. My title indicates my interest in the dispute: where Patterson calls psychoanalysis an “ambulance” or “hearse” (656), I argue that the theory is less a vehicle to be abandoned or replaced and more something organic and renewable—an evolving body of ideas that provides techniques for reading. However, in this short essay I will not construct an apologia for psychoanalytic theory generally but take on the more limited task of characterizing recent uses of the theory in critical engagements with early modern texts. Salient qualities of this work have been overlooked by those who demonize psychoanalysis (a habit suggested by Žižek's image) or are allergic to anything linked to Freud.

Chaucer's Pardoner functions pivotally in The Canterbury Tales, for he personifies illusory goals that can divert or halt the pilgrimage. A walking shrine, carrying spurious relics and questionable indulgences, he offers the pilgrims a meretricious equivalent of what they seek in Canterbury. His diversionary malfeasance gives thematic significance to his unsavory relationship with the Summoner and establishes a close parallel between Chaucer s pilgrimage framework and the rioters' quest in the tale itself. It is fitting that the Pardoner addresses his crucial invitation, at the end of the tale, to the Host, because the Host is responsible for guiding the pilgrims to Canterbury. The violence with which the Host responds is thus particularly appropriate, for he is confronting the man who threatens the impetus of the pilgrimage as a whole. (MS)

The conclusion of Ants Oras as to the chronology of Milton's major poems, based on his important study of the blank vejse, is, I believe, in serious error. Examining strong pauses, both terminal and medial, the distribution of medial pauses over the pentameter line, run-on lines, feminine and masculine pauses, the distribution of polysyllables over the verse line, feminine endings, rhythmical expressions creating shifted stresses, syllabized “-ed” endings, and pyrrhic verse endings, Oras concludes that the traditional chronology for Paradise Lost (from Book I through Book XII), Paradise Regained (from Book I through Book IV), and Samson Agonistes is correct. As a prosodical study, the statistical data presented lead us to a greater understanding of the aforementioned verse techniques as used by Milton than we have heretofore known. Professor Oras' inferences of dated practice are, however, another matter.

Critical art ensemble staged the theory of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as a gamble against a form of the all-too-present future of “dead capital,” otherwise known as late capital. In our 1994 book The Electronic Disturbance, Critical Art Ensemble argued that dead capital was being constituted as an electronic commodity form in constant flow (11). Capital had been, was, and would continue to be reensembling itself, as the contemporary elite moved from centralized urban areas to decentralized and deterritorialized cyberspace (13). For Critical Art Ensemble, it was clear that cyberspace, as it was called then, was the next stage of struggle. The activist reply to this change was to teleport the system of trespass and blockage that was historically anchored to civil disobedience to this new phase of economic flows in the age of networks: “As in civil disobedience, primary tactics in electronic civil disobedience are trespass and blockage. Exits, entrances, conduits, and other key spaces must be occupied by the contestational force in order to bring pressure on legitimized institutions engaged in unethical or criminal actions” (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience 18). As we imagined it in the early 1990s, electronic disturbance was the core gesture that could initiate a new “performative matrix” (Electronic Disturbance 57).

A New study of the life of Robert Mannyng of Brunne finds its justification in the belief that one of Chaucer's most interesting predecessors in the art of story telling deserves to be better known than he is. Since all accounts of the life of Robert Mannyng are based upon his own statements about himself, the present attempt at a reinterpretation may be clarified by quoting the pertinent passages to begin with.