In Paradise Lost Milton introduces Adam and Eve by lingering on their appearance, but instead of presenting a detailed catalog of the couple's physical attributes, he focuses on their hair. This essay challenges earlier readings of Adam and Eve's locks by examining Milton's imagery in the context of hair's cultural and spiritual value. Comparing depictions of hair in sixteenth-century sonnets and cavalier seduction poetry reveals how Milton appropriates the early modern aesthetic of sprezzatura to convey Adam and Eve's unique innocence. The essay shows that Milton's description is not merely superficial, nor even merely symbolic. Rather, when read in relation to early modern theories of hair's etiology and to Milton's own animist materialism, hair in Paradise Lost literally embodies Adam and Eve's prelapsarian love. Their clustering and curling locks enact the couple's amorous reciprocity and signify the paradoxical strength and fragility of their Edenic marriage.

We respond in language to catastrophic, or traumatic, shocks to symbolic systems, for which the fall of the Tower of Babel can be seen as a mythic model. One response is an exploration of new uncertainties; another is a fearful rigidity that seeks to return to an imagined Adamic wholeness of language; another is an effort to transcend language altogether. This essay examines two contemporary responses to a perceived “fall” of language—several case studies of Oliver Sacks's and two novels by Don DeLillo—and places them in the context of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences and what I call a “counterlinguistic turn” that is contemporaneous with the linguistic turn and represents developments of some of its key assumptions.

The prospect is sublime. Off the coast of the mainland are islands—in fact, sweeping archipelagoes—inhabited by educators and students. The residents have built massive modern classrooms, high-rises, clock towers, conference rooms, amphitheaters, auditoriums, and libraries among the evergreens, campuses with spacious lawns. To get to one of these islands, you can go directly from certain information kiosks or portals. Or, if you know the way and don't run into any invisible Plexiglas walls extending far up into the sky, you can just levitate, tilt into the wind, and fly there, while the landscape scrolls along below you like a map (which it is).

“Human rights” is now a technique deployed to measure the progress of states. In the last two decades it has become both the normative language of how injustice is evaluated and a means through which powerful states discipline the new world order (Grewal 121). This disciplining often relies on a relation posed between gendered violence and human rights violations, whereby the denial of women's human rights represents the pathological cultures of repressive states. But this representation—commonly assumed by states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the public—is founded on the ignoring or effacing of political violence. Discourses about human rights attribute responsibility for gendered violations to purportedly pathological cultures, rather than to political sources. This tendency becomes apparent in the narrative told of why violations occur, as well as in the solutions proposed to these violations. What lurks beneath this disappearing act is a presumption that the world is made up of two kinds of states. One kind, described as rogue states or failed states, has a pathological culture in the place of a civil society. The other kind of state enjoys both a civil society and a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Human rights doctrine defines its brief inclusively to encompass “all members of the human family” (Universal Declaration, preamble). But the vantage point from which human interactions are viewed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), although it invokes the family metaphor, is partial: all humans “should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (art. 1). This disjunction between inclusive membership and partial perspective encapsulates the position of children in human rights doctrine: they are included in the broad scope of protection but peripheral to the framing conception of agency. The particular conception of “human” motivating the doctrine is restrictive in other ways relevant to childhood: article 1 of the UDHR states, “All humans … are endowed with reason and conscience,” which is manifestly not true unless “endowed” is interpreted to indicate a capability rather than an ontological state. But “endowed” suggests a current reality, not a future possibility. As the Brazilian delegation to the UDHR drafting process wryly noted, “[U]nfortunately it is not exactly true that all men are endowed by nature with reason and conscience” (qtd. in Morsink 297). And it is certainly not true that all children are. How, then, do children fit into the human rights project?

Recently, it seems, some of my colleagues have been trying to “save my soul” from such dishonest things as rhetoric! They think that hermeneutics is no noble pursuit and that we must be suspicious of rhetoric. I had to reply that rhetoric has been the basis of our social life since Plato rejected and contradicted the flattering abuse of rhetoric by the Sophists. He introduced dialectically founded rhetoric as in the Phaedrus, and rhetoric remained a noble art throughout antiquity. Yet one wonders why today everybody is not aware of it.(55)

The true nature of the so-called Gothic novel has been misunderstood, and the problem of its origin rendered unnecessarily difficult in consequence of a classification which takes only one of the many features into account. The critics who have hit upon supernaturalism as the most distinctive and significant element, have done this in spite of the fact that a part of the body of the fiction they pretend to describe is plainly controlled by a rationalism that forbids anything more than a mere toying with the appearances of the marvellous. No procedure of the authors of such novels is more usual than the lifting of the mask when the mysterious scene has gone far enough to produce its emotional effect. To insist upon the usual classification is to render oneself incapable of differentiating between the Radcliffian novel on the one hand, and Otranto, the Monk and the German Schauerroman on the other.

Feminist film theory sees the instruments of both gynecology and filmmaking as tools for examining women; this equation is made in a different register by David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, a film that subordinates the examination of women to the relationship between twin brothers who are gynecologists. Dead Ringers imagines that the camera and the speculum extend each other's province, thus drawing our attention to the way women are figured in the film even when they do not appear. Cronenberg also uses the camera, however, to establish identities where they do not otherwise exist. His film therefore occasions questions about the analogous status that film theory has given to its various analytical devices. By making us ask about the similarities and differences between the functions of the camera and those of the speculum in investigation and representation, Dead Ringers interrogates the ways feminist film theory can integrate psychoanalysis.

Using archival sources, interviews, and memoirs, this essay documents the surprisingly extensive connections between London's extant modernists and West Indian writers during the 1950s. With the support of Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, T. S. Eliot, and other luminaries, a vibrant group of Caribbean artists quickly established themselves as known literary commodities. Such forms of collaboration between metropolitan intellectuals and their colonial counterparts were structured by shared interests in high culture. London's modernists feared English culture was faced with terminal decline; West Indian writers exploited that fear by insisting that the metropolitan culture industry badly needed an infusion of colonial talent. The brevity and fragility of these bonds, however, led to the emergence of postcolonial literature as a distinct but marginal cultural niche. London's postwar identity as center of global cultural production, I suggest, was intimately connected with the recruitment and assimilation of colonial intellectuals.

Lope de Vega's El primer Fajardo (c. 1610–12) chronicles the rise of a hero of the Christian Reconquest who triumphs over a Moorish opponent, Abenalfajar, and thereby earns the Moor's Castilianized name and a place in history. A gambler, he “plays [or ”wagers“] a Moor” and, in the process, subdues the images of Spanish orientalism. His parodies “transcontextualize” Moorish motifs and challenge the Reconquest's codes. During a key re-creation of a traditional ballad, “Jugando estaba el rey moro” ‘The Moorish king was playing,‘ Fajardo attacks the metaphorical depiction of Muslim-Christian tolerance. His transgressive moves colonize the domain of balladry, while his Morisco servant's malapropisms mock conventions that are elsewhere an enabling legacy. Lope's official writing as secretary to the duque de Sessa parallels some of these motifs: the aptness of a name is borne out in performance, and playing the Moor involves impersonating cultural differences, even when the aim is to eliminate the communities of represented “others.”

All discourse evolves in all three dimensions of verbal practice: doing, making, and meaning. While there are special links between speaking and action, between writing and creation or production, and between quasi-verbal thinking and signification, we should avoid reducing any instance or type of discourse to nothing but action, creation, or signification. The analogous triad of intersubjective culture, objective nature, and subjective identity likewise points to three complementary modes of existence: the social, the physicobiological, and the personal. At any given time, we tend to experience human beings, including ourselves, in just one mode: as players of socially assigned roles, as physically situated and genetically determined organisms, or as free and responsible selves. Yet we should not turn any of these ways of experiencing into a master doctrine designed to debunk the other two as mere delusions.

LaЗamon's Brut, from a moment in English literary and cultural history whose sense of tradition is particularly difficult for us to comprehend–a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, at the beginnings of Middle English–has a notoriously complex relation to England's past and traditions. This essay focuses on how The Brut takes a traditional social and literary preoccupation in pre-Conquest England, the lordly gift exchange, and expands it to explore a new range of spiritual gifts (or deceptive claims to them), including professional knowledge, counsel to the powerful, and literary fame. This expansion of the gift corresponds to broad cultural shifts as well as to more topical matters in King John's reign, the probable period of the poem's composition. The poem fashions itself as a gift in these volatile terms, repeatedly embracing an unknown literary future while it accurately limns some fundamental new features of Middle English literature. (AG)

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”

In midsummer 1855 the announcement that Alfred Tennyson would soon publish a new work stirred the reading public with eager expectancy. He was acknowledged to be the foremost living English poet and had worn the bays as Victoria's laureate for almost five years. His new volume was awaited, wrote one reviewer, with much of the avid anticipation that had attended the productions of Scott and Byron. Yet it is generally said that when Maud, and Other Poems appeared on 28 July 1855, there was serious dissatisfaction with the title poem. Indeed, it has become a commonplace of literary history that “Maud” was vociferously condemned by the British periodical press, and Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet's latest biographer, writes, “Poor Maud was received with almost universal reprobation.” But John O. Eidson main-tains, with some evidence to support his claim, that “the British criticism of ‘Maud’ was rather sharply divided,” and Amy Cruse unqualifiedly asserts that the poem “was received with tremendous enthusiasm.” In view of the conflicting testimony it seems valuable to determine as accurately as possible the critical reaction to “Maud” and also to examine its effect upon Tennyson's revision of the poem and upon his decision to proceed with the Idylls of the King.

The purpose of this paper is to point out certain elements in the development of the rhetoric of the “classical” pentameter couplet in the middle seventeenth century and to show how the development of this rhetoric is bound up with the establishment of its formal metrical pattern. The rhetoric and metre interacted and helped to shape each other into the integral form which we know in Dryden and Pope.

Let us anchor ourselves, for a start, to some acceptable terrain of cultural definitions. I shall use an example from our not too distant encounters. Few will disagree with me today, if I propose that we reject the concept of culture as realized in that manifestation known as Festac 77 [Festac: Black and African Festival of the Arts, Lagos, Nigeria, February 1977]. For, in the main, our people were offered a narrowed-down, reductionist aspect of culture in a gargantuan orgy of ill-organized spectacles. That negative reference is meant to limit the field, to eliminate decisively what often imposes itself on public consciousness as Culture with a capital C, or as something pronounced into being by a Ministry of Culture. What Nigeria exhibited was Culture as a sum, not even of parts, but of spectacular parts. Now, “spectacle” need not be superficial. Revelry can attain profound Dionysiac proportions, involve an inner ennoblement, almost cathartic—but it requires a consciously organizing hand, with an integrated motif around which even disparate acts of revelry are drawn. In those extravagant fields of “Festacian” revelry, however, such complex, enriching offerings were relegated to token, or symbolic, expositions, starved of funds and given scant coverage even in the media, and were finally relegated to the archives of that supracultural monstrosity known as the National Theatre. The theater of which nation, by the way? Of Nigeria? Or of Bulgaria, from where the concrete carbuncle was lifted, then grafted onto Lagos marshlands? What, in that general's cap or Christmas cake of a structure, constitutes even a fragment of Nigerian or African architectural intellect, modern or traditional? But more on that building in another place.

Pater's thought is thoroughly pervaded by the Teutonic element; indeed, when he begins his essay, Apollo in Picardy, with an unidentified quotation which reads like a synthesis of his own reflections and credits it to “a writer of Teutonic proclivities,” the observant reader is inclined to suspect that Pater is really quoting from himself. Even if this identification should prove to be mistaken, Pater's interest in Goethe, in Hegel, and in Winckelmann still points to his indebtedness to Tuetonic thought, for the substance of his work constantly shows how the ideas of these Germans fertilized his own thinking on such matters as the aim and ideal of life, the fundamental principles of æsthetic theory, Romanticism as a mood of the mind, Greek art and Greek mythology. The present paper is not concerned with this Teutonic influence in all of its phases, but confines itself to a single theme, to be traced not only in Pater's critical essays but also in his more creative and fanciful pieces, in which an idea derived from Heinrich Heine comes to its blossoming. Pater met with this idea in the writings of Heine as early as 1869 and he continued to show his interest in it down to 1893, so that its influence is discernible throughout almost the whole course of his literary career.

The fame of Abraham Vander-Mylius (Abraham van der Myl, 1563-1637) as a linguist persisted through many generations. The Lingua Belgica of the Dutch theologian, which appeared at Leiden in 1612, had a clarity, freshness, and persuasiveness which were vital factors in establishing its reputation. Even today, the work has value as revealing, both explicitly and implicitly, views on language that were current in the author's time. This article is particularly concerned with the attitude which Mylius displayed toward the historical, diachronic aspects of language. The primary aim is to present as clearly as possible Mylius' own views on this phase of language; only incidentally are we concerned with his sources.