From similar titles (Gespräch im Gebirg by Celan, “Gespräch in den Bergen” by Buber) to the common concern with engaging in dialogue with a “Thou,” the poetry of Paul Celan reveals strong affinities with the writings of Martin Buber. This originates in part with the common tradition of Hasidic Judaism from which both drew. But beyond this, Celan also owes a debt to Buber. His quest for a Thou, the underlying dialogical impulse, and the tone of the language of his poetry echo much that is found in Buber's work. Structurally, seventy-five percent of his poems address themselves to a Thou and try to effect an encounter with this object of address. But whereas Buber finds his Thou in God, for Celan there is often no respondent. He seeks through poetic language to establish or create an ultimate poetic reality of words, though in contrast to Buber his desperate attempt often fails. The large number of objects addressed as “Thou” in the internal landscape of Celan's poems confirms that essential reality can be perceived only through creative poetic dialogue, however anguished and inadequate. In this sense, Celan defies a dogma that proclaims modern poetry to be essentially monological, since a dialogical impulse underlies his entire work.

1. Sievers' Law of Syncopation of middle vowels has laid the foundation for our present understanding of the forms of the preterite and past participle of the first class of weak verbs: The medial vowel disappears before the period of mutation if the stem syllable is long, and is preserved if it is short. While Sievers had stated the law for West Germanic only, its somewhat modified application to Norse was obvious, so that chaos was apparently reduced to order. Irregular forms like leƷde, sœƷde were termed “anormal” by Sievers, and he adds the objective statement that several short stems in k, t, d, l form their preterite “nach Art der langsilbigen,” e.g., OE. reahte, sette, tredde, tealde. Two years later, Paul added the hypothesis that these preterites had had no medial vowel since Germanic times, supporting his view by certain criteria of such Germanic origin. He remarks: “Das Angelsächsische repräsentiert für uns im grossen und ganzen noch die eigentümlichste Stufe, und zwar liegt das offenbar daran, dass hier im Gegensatz zum Althochdeutschen und Altsächsischen der Umlaut der Synkopierung vorausgegangen ist.” It seems that Sievers never quite agreed with Paul's generalization of the scope of these preterites. As late as 1898, he postulates only a West Germanic basis for the “Rückumlaut” in verbs of the type cwellan-cwealde, sēceansōhte. But otherwise the view has been fairly generally accepted.

Artegall's limitations and those of his Legend are largely inherent in the nature of justice. The subject of justice leads to the dream of a Golden Age in Book v, but it leads also to the presence of historical allegory, often a painful reminder of Elizabethan shortcomings. Artegall's experiences in Book v reflect both the historic and the symbolic poles in the poem; hence they mirror a strain and a more general duality in the techniques and concerns of the Book. From the beginning of Book v, Artegall is divided against himself. With two exceptions, brief moments of unified identity found in his meetings with Arthur and Britomart, Artegall has always a choice between being Justice, a virtue and an abstraction, and being a Knight, a virtuous man and a human being. (JHA)

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April of 1939 there was little likelihood of its being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. Because of its nominal subject, it was too readily confused with such high-class reporting as Ruth McKenny's Industrial Valley, the WPA collection of case histories called These Are Our Lives, and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's An American Exodus. The merits of The Grapes of Wrath were debated as social documentation rather than fiction. In addition to incurring the disadvantages of its historical position, coming as a kind of climax to the literature of the Great Depression, Steinbeck's novel also suffered from the perennial vulnerability of all social fiction to an attack on its facts and intentions.

In Our Nig (1859), Harriet E. Wilson offered the story of her life for sale to save her son's life. In her appeal for patronage, however, Wilson looked not for charity but rather for an economic exchange by which the cultural value of her critique of the mid-nineteenth-century northern states could be acknowledged. The narrative defines this exchange as an entrance into a moral economy — a new system of social relations based not on an ideal of cooperation but on the recognition that conflict and distrust among and within culturally defined social groups are inevitable. In this way, Our Nig responds to proslavery forces that found ready arguments in the injustices of capitalism and calls attention to the ethical motivations behind economic relations. (JE)

Since 1937, critics have been discovering integrated into the structure of literary works various numerological and symmetrical patterns. Lines, chapters, books, episodes, characters, images, etc. are found in symbolic numbers like 3, 4, 10, 33, etc. and in symmetrical arrangements (concentric, triadic, or parallel). Both were known in classical times, but nowhere in surviving classical theory is there explicit recognition of any large-scale use of number or pattern in literature; nor are there important references in modern critical writing before this century. Nevertheless, even though the esthetic relevance of highly complicated or esoteric number systems is doubtful, many symmetrical (often concentric) and numerological patterns have been convincingly demonstrated in works from the Iliad to the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as well as in other poems and novels from the Renaissance to the present. But problems remain as to what can properly be measured and what validates the patterns detected.

Despite the efforts of recent scholars who have argued for an ironic reading of Fragment x of the Canterbury Tales (the Parson’s Tale and Retraction), dramatic and symbolic propriety both dictate that at this penultimate moment in the pilgrimage “earnest” should emerge from “game.” Dramatically, the imminence of the approach to the Holy City urges—as with all pilgrimages—certain penitential expectations, the sacramental obligations of which require the ministrations of the Parson. Thus, his tale—a confessional manual appropriate to the penitential occasion in both length and oral device—serves the pilgrims with an examination of conscience indispensable to the aural rubric of the sacrament. Symbolically, the earnestness of the ending is prepared by the promise of the supper (with its manifold biblical implications), by the eschatological haste of Harry Bailly in urging completion of the tales, and by his unwitting use of Pauline imagery relating to doomsday drunkenness and nocturnal thieves in the Prologue to the Manciple’s Tale (Fragment ix).

Reason as the medium of truth and freedom—though suppressed, the idea returns; it is presumed by our very participation in discourse. Its opponents say that only practices are real. But, as Milton and Habermas know, reason is itself a practice. Milton's “free and lawful debate at all times … of what opinion soever” recognizes interestedness, perspectivity, and struggle; Habermas's unconstrained communication is a never-achieved goal (an “ideal”) regulating discursive practices here and now. Both writers recognize that meanings are cultural, social, and existential, that knowledge cannot be separated from interests; but they do not therefore stand outside praxis rhapsodizing about struggle and contingency. Instead, they seek to move toward social freedom and individual autonomy through reason-able communication—that ongoing search for unforced agreement which is our usual and best alternative to violence, our usual and best way to find meaning in the world, in our selves, and in one another.

Across a range of disciplines and discourses, translation has become a central concern for many scholars working in the humanities. Indeed, the notion of translation has begun to inflect the most compelling and consequential debates on meaning and representation. My essay gives attention to Walter Benjamin's redemptive and generative notion of translation as survival and to postmodern currents in translation studies alongside a contemporary Nigerian diasporic novel written in English, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. Framed by a passing on of the story of the Women's War (the Igbo women's tax revolt against the British in 1929), Echewa's narrative critiques the complicitous practices of translation, colonialism, and anthropology. In this exemplary instance of a type of hybrid postcolonial textuality, processes of intergenerational and intercultural transmission, conceived as both acts of translation and instruments of historical consciousness, perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory.

When hamlet is first preparing to leave his mother's chamber after harrowing her to repentance, he turns to the dead Polonius:

For this same lord,
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. (III.iv.172-177)

On the evidence available, it is possible to arrive at a considerable variety of views on the artistic technique of the author of Beowulf. Even so, it is doubtful whether we should attribute to him the subtlety of a Sartre, as, apparently, does J. L. Rosier in his “A Design for Treachery: The Unferth Intrigue.”

It is in the Lettres Philosophiques that Voltaire speaks of China for the first time. In these pages the oriental empire is already “la nation la plus sage et la mieux policée de l'univers.” By 1734 the cult of Chinese things had begun to exercise a decided influence on French art and thought. The movement had developed under two aspects: a material manifestation in the vogue of “chinoiseries” or “magots de la Chine,” and an intellectual manifestation which took the form of a profound admiration for Chinese culture and, more particularly, for Confucian thought. The first of these two aspects had made itself felt from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. Russian, Portuguese, and English merchants had brought to Europe a vast quantity of Chinese objets d'art which were greatly admired and extensively copied in the Western countries. Of the second aspect of the movement Leibnitz, in the seventeenth century, was the undoubted progenitor. The German scholar, the most universal mind of his time (to quote the opinion of Voltaire), read the maxims of Confucius, newly translated, and his brilliant imagination was fired by the wealth contained in the literature of the Eastern people. He dreamed of a universal culture in which Orient and Occident should pool their resources to produce a new intellectual universe. As instruments for the creation of this new culture he looked first to the Society of Jesus and then to Peter the Great. The former had already given ample reason for being chosen. Under the impulse of the literature produced by the missionaries of the Society, and particularly that polemic element which dealt with the famous quarrel over the Chinese ceremonies, Europe had begun to acquire extensive knowledge of the great Oriental empire, a knowledge hitherto inaccessible.

The present paper reprints the text of Dümmler's expert edition of the important and much studied Latin prose text by Otfrid of Weissenburg i. El., medieval Germany's Martin Opitz namely, a petition for episcopal approbation of his Liber Evangeliorum, addressed to his diocesan Liutbert, archbishop of Mainz (863–889). To this is joined an essay at a translation into English and a commentary. This document, commonly known as Ad Liutbertum—though it is without manuscript title—is one of five pieces closely connected with Otfrid's poem. These may be briefly described: there is an explanatory preface, like the poem itself, written in German verse and forming Bk. i, i, 1–126, of that work; it is commonly cited as Cur Scriptor from the MS heading “Cur Scriptor hunc librum Theotisce dictaverit.” The three remaining, all written in the verse of the poem, are dedicatory epistles in acrostichs and telestichs: “Ludovvico Orientalium Regnorum regi sit salus aeternal,” addressed to Ludwig the German (regn. 843–876) as king of the East-Frankish domains (Francia Orientalis), and “Salomoni episcopo Otfridus,” to Salomo, bishop of Constance (839–871). Similar in language and style is a less formal letter “Otfridus Uuizanburgensis monachus Hartmuate et Uuerinberto Sancti Galli monasterii monachis,” addressed to the St. Gall monks Hartmut (later abbot, 872–884) and Werinbert; this comes at the very end of the work, i.e., after Bk. v, xxv(“Conclusio voluminis totius”).

“There is a wooded place in the midst of a vast wilderness and at the center of the peoples to whom we are preaching. There we have placed a group of monks living under the rule of St. Benedict, who are building a monastery.” So writes St. Boniface, in the year 751, to Pope Zacharias. Several years earlier Boniface had sent his favorite pupil, Sturm, into the forest of Bochonia to find a suitable location for a monastery. The site they finally agreed upon was a place called Eichloh, on the banks of the river Fulda. Here the monastery was dedicated in 744. So pleased was Boniface with this haven in the wilderness that he, born an Anglo-Saxon from Wessex, adds in his letter to Pope Zacharias: “Here I am proposing, with your kind permission, to rest my age-worn body for a little time and after my death to be buried here.”

Medieval studies are big—in fact, have rarely been livelier … or more controversial. This energy has succeeded in breaching the ramparts that traditionally divided the field into a series of vigorously defended fiefs. In a word, the discipline has gone interdisciplinary. Visual literacy, patristics, modal logic, grammar, rhetoric, onomastics, philosophical anthropology, sociology, historiography, linguistics, codicology, vernacular literature, classical and medieval Latin thought and letters, philology, and myriad other subsets conjugate in dizzying and unexpected configurations to produce exciting views of the period.

Many of Kafka's stories in the first person either use the present tense throughout or shift from past to present in the course of narration. The stories told entirely in the present render the inner monologue of a speaker caught in a durative psychic struggle; the stories in which the tense changes tell of a past calamity that leads to an everlasting predicament. “Ein Landarzt” is structured on an “einmal-niemals” pattern, and thus belongs to the second of these general types; but in this story Kafka also tries—again by shifting to the present tense—to achieve within the narration of past events the immediacy of present experience. He thereby effaces the demarcation between outer event and inner reflection and eliminates the temporal distance between the narrating and the experiencing self. This use of the present tense results in mutually exclusive verbal gestures and contradictory temporal references. The stylistic incongruities in “Ein Landarzt” thus point up the difficulties of rendering the immediacy of experience in a first-person narrative, and help to explain why Kafka usually preferred to use the third person in his novels and novellas.

Many critics of James Fenimore Cooper's early novel The Pioneers (1823) have called attention to the excellence of various individual aspects of its manner and matter, but few have been willing to accord the book the coherence and unity that are the first measure of a genuine work of art. The orthodox critical view insists on Cooper's failure to integrate the three major elements of his novel: the lengthy descriptions of natural scenery and of village habits and occupations; the conflict between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple, usually regarded as the thematic center of the narrative; and the main plot, the discovery of Oliver Effingham as the true heir to Judge Temple's huge land holdings. Customarily this approach first stresses the divergent origins of Cooper's materials as the basis of their discordance. Since the novel draws both on the real world of personal recollection and family tradition and on the powers of pure imagination, it somehow must lack unity. “Incongruously,” writes Alexander Cowie, Cooper tied his “warm boyhood memories to a superannuated plot involving the temporary dispossession of an estate.” Consequently, “there is in The Pioneers a more definite disjunction of the action from the illustrative material than in any of Cooper's tales of the frontier.” Professor Cowie invites us to set aside the action of the novel so that “the setting and characterization may be enjoyed for their own sake.”

In spite of great obstacles, modern arabic children's literature has seen remarkable developments lately, both in quality of text and illustrations and in breadth of subject matter. Moreover, the intricate question of which variety of Arabic to use in writing for children can now be answered in different ways, closely linked to different conceptions of Arab culture.

Toni Morrison's Sula develops out of and centers on images of violence and violation, proffering itself as a catalog of traumatic experiences, of literal and figurative deaths. Such traumas almost invariably register as watched, the novel thus functioning, by means of its characters, as an act of bearing witness. Inasmuch as the story Sula tells is framed by passages mourning the loss of the world the novel imagines, the narrative structurally articulates an absence. Together these elements—Sula's thematic preoccupation with witnessed dying and its insistence that the narrative mark loss—locate the novel's center of interest in grieving. Folding the history of loss it narrates within a recursive structure, Sula pitches itself against the conventional notion that mourning must be worked through: indeed, the novel implicitly argues for—and persistently works to effect—a sustaining of grief. To move beyond mourning in the context of continuing cultural fragility, the novel suggests, may well constitute a surrender to the processes of cultural absorption and dispersal Sula describes toward its conclusion.