In a now famous article published in 1920, “Comment on est passé de ce suis je à c'est moi”, Lucien Foulet described the evolution by which the neuter pronoun ce, once representing the predicative in the pronominal formula of identification, came, by a complicated system of analogies, to be felt as subject, thereby necessitating a change of construction from ce suis je, ce es tu, etc., to c'est moi, c'est toi, etc.

No period in the history of Mexican journalistic literature is more brilliant than that extending from 1894, the date of the establishment of the Revista Azul, to 1911, which witnessed the demise of the Revista Moderna—the two best literary periodicals Mexico has known. During these years the entire country, under the iron rule of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, was at peace; and a new aristocracy with means and leisure to devote itself to the fine arts was developing. When civil strife began late in 1910, it made small impress, for a time, on the intellectual life of the nation. The discontinuance of the Revista moderna in the following year was occasioned not by the revolution, as one might surmise, but by the death of the editor, Jesús E. Valenzuela, who had personally financed the publication. Except for the coup that made Victoriano Huerta provisional president in February, 1913, Mexico City was largely undisturbed until the latter part of the next year, when the hordes of Villa and of Zapata invaded the capital and paralyzed, for a time, almost all activity of a journalistic nature.

As she struggles to get her bearings in the subterranean world of wonderland, a disoriented alice finds that the act of fanning herself or eating a cake has become uncanny; instead of refreshing her and lifting her spirits, the items she encounters alternately telescope her body, nearly breaking her neck, and shrink her down toward the point of nonexistence. At least Alice experienced these dizzying changes sequentially; her scholarly successors in comparative literature are not so lucky. We find ourselves caught in the turmoil of a field that is exploding to global proportions even as enrollments shrink to levels not seen for half a century, putting severe downward pressure on faculty size, and no helpful mushroom is at hand to help us achieve a stable comfort level. Our inability to encompass the world by adding a wealth of new hires is a practical problem with theoretical consequences. Traditionally focused on the relations of a few literary “great powers,” our discipline increasingly needs to take into account a much wider range of cultures, and of languages, than ever before. If we wish to respond to the opportunities and the challenges offered to comparatism by globalization, we will need to rethink our relation to the national languages and literatures that have long been the focus of comparative study.

This essay aims to define certain fundamental differences between two types of rhythmic patterning indigenous to English verse, and to suggest that full recognition of these differences can do much to clear up standard confusions in our prosodic terminology. A recent essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley went part way toward performing such a service by reinforcing a traditional distinction between non-syllable-counting “native” or “strong-stress” meter, patterned entirely on the accentual principle, and “syllable-stress” meters, patterned on the principle of an “interplay” of native accentual rhythms with syllable-counting techniques inherited originally from Romance-language prosody.1 It is my contention, however, that, valid as this distinction is, there is a more important one which is blurred by the tendency to emphasize regularization of the number of syllables in the verse line as the primary, if not the sole, factor differentiating the two chief metrical modes. I hope to show that, of the four so-called “syllable-stress” meters in English—iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic—only the iambic has developed in a direction radically different from the native accentual tradition; that the other three, as characteristically used in English poetry, are simply variants of the strong-stress mode; and that the very term “syllable-stress” is misleading because syllable-counting techniques may occur in strong-stress verse and the stress-factor alone does not account for all rhythmic discriminations in iambic verse. The distinction with which this essay is concerned—between the entire iambic tradition and all English verse written in strong-stress meter, whether syllable-counting or not—is, I believe, the most basic one in English prosody, necessary not only in performing formal scansions but also in understanding and appreciating significant contrasts between two very different ways of hearing and composing a poetic line.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's revolutionary paradigm encounters its greatest crisis to date. As the state's cultural institutions struggle to cope with severe material limitations and strive to square socialist ideology with world events, Cuban writers increasingly publish their work with foreign companies. Not uncommonly these authors reassert the aesthetic priorities that state institutions are said to have repressed or subordinated to political imperatives. It may appear, superficially, that Cuban writers are out to revive some notion of an autonomous literary art. In situating aesthetic discourse in profoundly dialogic, historically specific, and politically charged narrative contexts, however, these writings challenge traditional universalizing formulations of the aesthetic category. Such historico-narrative rearticulation of social practices and theories of art is prerequisite to a more progressive cultural politics than the socialist state has managed to implement and than an uncritical reengagement with the global market can bring about.

Critical writings may be seen as fictions about literature and reading and writing. One hero of these fictions is the ideal reader. The sort of ideal reader a critic creates indicates the literary form of his criticism. Dr. Johnson's ideal reader is an everyman, and Johnson's criticism imitates allegorical epic literature in its concern with mankind in general. Dryden's division of readers into classes, headed by “the most judicious,” is an aspect of the dramatic form of his critical literature. Coleridge's lyrical mode of criticism centers on a reader so close to his author that he becomes his tautegorical representative. Northrop Frye's criticism is a kind of comic romance leading to an apocalypse in which his heroic ideal reader redeems cultural history and experiences it as part of his present life. The criticism of these four writers embodies and imitates, as it asserts, a vision of literature.

It is doubtful whether any other great literary reputation of the Renaissance has survived in so ambiguous and confused a state as that of Marc-Antoine Muret, recognized in his own time and ever since as the best writer of Latin prose in the second half of the sixteenth century. The most important event in the history of literary ideas during that period was the controversy concerning the imitation of Cicero; and in that controversy and the various conflicts connected with it Muret was more or less engaged at all periods of his career. Yet modern literary history tells us nothing intelligible of his part in it; or, to speak more exactly, it records two conflicting statements. On the one hand, he appears as the associate of Bembo, Sadoleto, Longueil in the stricter sect of the Ciceronians, a more accomplished, and not less devoted, imitator of the master. This is certainly the commoner view among those who have any acquaintance with his name; for generations he has been held up to the admiration even of school-children as the modern Cicero. How confusing it is then to find that he also holds a conspicuous place in the sketches—few and inadequate—of the movement of opposition that finally triumphed at the end of his century over the great rhetorical scheme of education. From his letters and orations one or two passages have been cited which outdo the sarcasm of Erasmus' Ciceronianas and display a latitude of classical taste which even a modern critic cannot regard without dubiety.

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.

In my boyhood—more years ago than I care to remember—we used to define an expert as “a damned fool a thousand miles from home.” Since I am considerably less than a thousand miles from where I grew up, and stand but a few minutes from my residence in Hyde Park, it behooves me to avoid any claim to expertness about the problems faced in practical situations where the dialect of the school child is sharply divergent from what is expected of him in the classroom. For many of these situations, neither I nor any other working dialectologist knows what the local patterns actually are; for some, there has been no attempt, or at best a partial and belated one, to find out the patterns. Nevertheless, the implications of dialectology for the more rational teaching of English in the schools—and not only in the schools attended by those we currently euphemize as the culturally disadvantaged—are so tremendous that I am flattered to have John Fisher ask for my observations. The problems are not limited to Americans of any race or creed or color, nor indeed to Americans; they are being faced in England today, as immigrants from Pakistan and the West Indies compete in the Midlands for the same kinds of jobs that have drawn Negro Americans to Harlem and the South Side, and Appalachian whites to the airplane factories of Dayton. In fact, such problems are faced everywhere in the world as industrialization and urbanization take place, on every occasion when people, mostly but not exclusively the young, leave the farm and the village in search of the better pay and more glamorous life of the cities. In all parts of the world, educators and politicians are suddenly realizing that language differences can create major obstacles to the educational, economic, and social advancement of those whose true integration into the framework of society is necessary if that society is to be healthy; they are realizing that social dialects —that is, social differences in the way language is used in a given community—both reflect and perpetuate differences in the social order. In turn, the practicing linguist is being called on with increasing frequency to devise programs for the needs of specific groups—most often for the Negroes dwelling in the festering slums of our northern and western cities; and generous government and private subsidies have drawn into the act many teachers and administrators—most of them, I trust, well meaning—who not only have made no studies of dialect differences, but have ignored the studies and archives that are available, even those dealing with their own cities.

During the past several decades, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been widely represented in novels, memoirs, film, television, and other genres and media. What distinguishes representations of OCD from depictions of other mental disorders is the frequency with which OCD is treated with humor and levity. Drawing on genre theory, disability studies, and philosophies of humor, this essay explains why OCD symptomatology evokes laughter and resonates with contemporary popular culture. The essay focuses on the ways in which popular portrayals of OCD distort the actual experience of the disorder.

At the risk of sounding like a parody of a conversation about opera and illness in the 1987 movie Moonstruck, we would like to relate a postperformance dialogue about Richard Wagner's last opera. Parsifal (not Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, as in the film). While descending the same staircase at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Loretta and Ronny, the film characters played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, a man turned to his wife and said, not “You know, I didn't think she was going to die! I knew she was sick,” but “Do you think audiences today understand that Amfortas had syphilis?” Since this man is a physician, his wife was used to his medical observations, though this time he took her by surprise: “Syphilis? He was wounded by a spear when caught in the arms of the seductress Kundry!” “Yes,” he replied, “but that might just be Wagner's indirect or allegorical way of invoking nineteenth-century obsessive worries about venereal disease. Did you notice that this is a wound (one inflicted in a moment of amatory indiscretion) that won't heal, whose pain is worse at night and is eased only slightly by baths and balsams? To any nineteenth-century audience these symptoms and signals would have meant only one thing: syphilis.” “If that's the case.” his wife suggested, “then people must have written about this and we can find out.” “Not necessarily. People didn't talk openly about this kind of disease; it was secret and shameful, remember. And today, thanks to the discovery of penicillin, we luckily don't have to know about such things anymore,” said he.

Pope’s “Grace beyond the Reach of Art” is not an irrational, inexplicable poetic effect, as critics often assume, but an essential, vitalizing illusion: a seemingly incomprehensible deviation from a norm of expectation that proves harmonious and coherent in the context of a work’s overall design. Poetry imitates Nature, and rules are “Nature methodiz’d,” but rules are incomplete formalizations of Nature’s order that gain systematic coherence only in relation to the ends of specific poems. Thus, grace breaks rules yet conforms to Nature; its aberrance is a function of the limitations that readers necessarily have before they arrive at aesthetic comprehension. Analyses of Pope’s “Preface to the Iliad,” Epistle to Burlington, and Essay on Man show that the movement from initial confusion to final understanding that informs grace is also central to his perception of Homer’s art, his theory of landscape design, and his conception of cosmic order.

In nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Recent studies in the early history of semiotics allow us to trace an open concern with the problem of language in Goethe's Faust. The protagonist appears as a quest hero in search of a revelatory sign, whether verbal or pictorial, that will release him from the world of mediating representations. The folly of the quest is consistently satirized from the viewpoint of Romantic aesthetics and its theory of the symbol. For the Romantics, the aesthetic symbol is a sign that paradoxically effects a revelation by affirming its own semiotic nature. But in elevating semiotic phenomena to the status of epiphanies, Goethean symbolism in Faust confronts the same impasses that beset the hero as he seeks to escape the rule of signs. The recurring quandaries arise when the Romantic text responds to the initial challenge of semiotics by attempting to reconcile semiotics and theology.

A casual reading of the Pensées is apt to leave one with the conviction that Pascal held Montaigne in low esteem. When Montaigne's name appears, it is usually coupled with a word of disapproval. And yet, as everyone knows who has studied the sources of the Pensées, Pascal owes more to Montaigne than to any other writer. Nearly every one of the most famous fragments contains at least a passing allusion to the Essais, and many owe their whole idea, even their expression, to Montaigne. The editors have duly noted these debts, until, as Léon Brun-schvicg says, an edition of the Pensées becomes almost inevitably a partial reëdition of the Essais.1 Even in the matter of style, Montaigne seems to have exerted a considerable influence. It is evident, then, that Pascal read Montaigne carefully and extensively, that he was profoundly impressed by him, and that he saw much in him to admire. On the other hand it is equally evident, from the explicit criticisms, that he found Montaigne distasteful, even reprehensible. How can we explain this double attitude? The present paper is an attempt to do so.

Drayton's Epistles are imitations of Ovid's Heroides only in a limited sense, for they were strongly influenced by the vogue of complaint poems (like Daniel's Rosamond), popular during the 1590's. The Epistles resemble both the Heroides and the complaint poems in their rhetorical embellishment and their moral sententiousness. In a few cases, Drayton clearly intended some parallels between Ovid's characters and his own (Hero and Leander-Queen Mary and Charles Brandon; Paris and Helen-Edward IV and Jane Shore). However, unlike Ovid, he informed his poems with a unifying purpose: to show how Providence had guided England through its turbulent past into the glorious age of Queen Elizabeth. Although Elizabeth does not appear in the Epistles, it is clear that Drayton selected his historical events so as to anticipate the greatness of her reign. The patriotic tone of these poems is typical of much historical literature of the 1590's; their concern with Providence evolves from the concept of Fortune in the Mirror for Magistrates. The Epistles, then, are far more Elizabethan than Ovidian, and contemporary praise of Drayton as “the English Ovid” can be misleading.

Much in Frankenstein suggests that the novel and classical psychoanalysis are meant for each other. The creation becomes a significant act, at once paradigmatic and intensely human, when viewed as a repetition of Frankenstein's primal-scene trauma, with the Creature emerging as a representation of the scene and the related oedipal complex. A psychoanalytic interpretation, however, requires a drastic secondary revision of Frankenstein, and not enough insight is purchased by so much blindness. The analyst repeats, yet fails to elucidate, the misreading of world, self, and Creature that renders Frankenstein a tiresome neurotic. But before this personal collapse Frankenstein achieved the sublime. His catastrophe of origination, engendering a creative self that anxiously pursues an impossible desire and an artifact that both represents and eclipses the creator, serves as a paradigm of the genesis of any sublime artwork, any uncanny reanimation project.

[Les critiques] ont en commun avec les tyrans de plier le monde à leurs désirs.

[Critics] and tyrants have this in common: they bend the world to their desires.

—Yasmina Reza, L'aube le soir ou la nuit (9)

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control.

—Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (225)

Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie is explicit about “Les Indes” ‘The Indies.‘ in explaining why distant landmasses were charted under the incorrect rubrics “East Indies” and “West Indies,” the Encyclopédie states in 1765 that these designations refer to countries situated on either side of the Cape of Good Hope, the southern extremity of Africa:

[L]es modernes moins excusable que les anciens ont nommé Indes, des pays si différens par leur position & par leur étendue sur notre globe, que pour ôter une partie de l'équivoque, ils ont divisé les Indes en orientales & occidentales. … De-là vint l'usage d'appeller Indes orientales, ce qui est à l'orient du cap de Bonne-Espérance, & Indes occidentales, ce qui est à l'occident de ce cap. … [P]ar un nouvel abus, qu'il n'est plus possible de corriger, on se sert dans les relations du nom d'Indiens, pour dire les Amériquains. (“Indes”)

[T]he moderns, who are less forgivable than the ancients, have called Indies countries so different by virtue of their location and their size on our globe that these had to be divided into East and West Indies in order to correct the ambiguity. … Hence the custom of calling East Indies what lies to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and West Indies what lies to the west of that cape. … [T]hrough a new misuse, which can no longer be corrected, the name Indians is used in travel relations to refer to Americans.

The influence of Count Volney's Les Ruines upon Queen Mab has long been known to Shelley scholars, but it has apparently been assumed that Shelley's interest in the work ceased shortly afterwards. Such, however, was not the case. The Ruins had made so deep an impression upon Shelley that he derived from it much of the central pattern of The Revolt of Islam, some four years later than Mab, and echoes of it are to be found in Prometheus Unbound, some six years later. In fact, Shelley's debt to the work in The Revolt of Islam is of so extensive a nature that it is clear he must have reread it shortly before, or even during, the composition of that poem. It is the purpose of this paper to indicate the nature of this debt.

In the history of literature the change from the idealized worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the pícaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and hunger; from romance to irony—in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced a new genre—could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men’s lives and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth of the Renaissance had made highly visible. The genius of the Spanish author of the Lazarillo consists in his having found the literary voice for such a profound transformation of European society. The Lazarillo, of course, did not annihilate the past, but it gave artistic form to the all-pervading crisis that was destroying the basis of the traditional order.