Like today's masses, the characters in J. G. Ballard's Crash are fascinated by what Jean Baudrillard calls the accident, especially when it involves the death of a celebrity. Ballard's characters, however, reenact their accidents as sexual rituals of a marriage between technology and death that are beyond the realm of moral judgment, making Crash sci-fi, hypothetical, unrealistic. Calling Crash “the first great novel of the universe of simulation,” Jean Baudrillard has drawn heavy criticism for missing the alleged moral point, both in Crash and in the still-real world. As a fiction writer, Ballard is given a wide moral berth, but when Baudrillard's theory turns sci-fi, the question of ethical boundaries is broached, and leniency is less likely. In defense of Baudrillard, I read him, like Ballard, in the Nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which I argue is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.

WHEN Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis—not to name readers as disparate in time and temperament as Pope, Blake, and Shaw—find the God of Paradise Lost unattractive, it may be ill-advised to attempt the justification of Milton's ways with Heaven. Even the excellent refutation of the Satanist position in John S. Diekhoff's book on Paradise Lost ignores rather than answers, perhaps quite properly, those who have objected to Milton's God as not so much a tyrant as a wooden bore. My paper is addressed to such readers and to any others who are willing to start from the assumption that Milton may have known what he was about in the first half of Book III as surely as in Books I and II. I put it thus because objections have generally turned on the first episode in Heaven and have rather consistently echoed Pope's quip that “God the Father turns a school-divine.” I wish to argue that we have mistakenly read the scene as a mere presentation of doctrinal assertions conveniently divided between the Father and the Son, and that to take it thus is to forget both how highly Milton prized poetic economy and how central he made this episode to the action of his whole poem. For may not the trouble be that we have incautiously misconstrued as dogma what Milton intended as drama? In short, the failure may be not in the scene but in our reading of it.

Milton uses the contrast between “plain” or “unpoetic” speech and “ornate” or “obviously poetic” speech as an important resource for presenting to the reader of Paradise Lost the difference between perfection and imper fection, innocence and corruption. The poem associates rhetoric, oratory, and most ornamental verbal contrivances with Satan and the fallen angels, and the contrast between their style and the bare and unemotional dialogue in Heaven is intended to make the reader suspect the arts of language as devices for concealing or manipulating the truth instead of stating or revealing it. The speeches of the unfallen Adam and Eve treat words as a set of counters for the truths of the created universe, but after the fall they, like the fallen angels, use language in ways which imply that its correspondence to the “truths” of the universe is a matter for speculation. When Adam and Eve are reconciled with each other and to God, their speeches contain striking reminders of the style of the Son in Book in. Of course, all the effects of Paradise Lost, both plain and ornate, are artful, but the criticism of reliance on persuasive and immediately appealing styles implied by the structure of the poem may help to explain Milton's deliberate forgoing of such effects in Books xi and xii and in Paradise Regain'd.

Ever since its appearance in 1924 Rivera's novel La Vorágine has been widely discussed. Its literary merits are beyond dispute, and the nature of its plot is sensational. Editions and translations into foreign languages have rapidly succeeded one another. Discussed as a literary work by several critics, La Vorágine has not yet been analyzed in sufficient detail to reveal fully its documentary character. It is a historical record of importance, containing an accurate summary of the barbarous conditions that prevailed in the Colombian interior and adjacent lands from about 1905 to 1920.

Many contemporary critics are returning to the old credo that human reason “is often unreasonable.” This probably helps to explain the current revival of that famous study of emotional and intuitive responses, the Émile (1762) of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In as much as contemporaneous English reactions to that work have never been extensively studied, I present my findings.

In any study which involves the consideration of a network of stories, it is chiefly necessary to regard the skeleton upon which the tales in question are built up. Although it is impossible to decide upon the relationship of the various members of a cycle without some consideration of individual incidents and even turns of thought or phrase, it is constantly necessary to check and control the information thus gained by the larger matters of motive and purpose. Individual incidents and all the flesh and blood of a narrative are so easily changed that the skeleton appears stable in comparison. With due regard to the kaleidoscopic changes which are familiar to every student of this field of comparative literature, it furnishes the clue by which the labyrinth of plots must be threaded, if at all.

In beginning a discussion of the structure of Rasselas one need not spend much time clearing the ground of previous arguments before advancing one's own. What the new commentator must face—and this is perhaps more disturbing than arguments would be—is the almost universal opinion that Rasselas has only the slightest structure and that the little it does have results from Johnson's not too successful effort to write an ordinary novel or “oriental tale.” The narrative is “episodic,” unimportant, dull, say some critics; the ending concludes nothing, the work merely stops. The action—and some of the characters —say others, lack dramatic power. At the same time that they thus observe, either directly or indirectly, the tale's failure to conform to their notions of what the structure should be, most commentators recognize a fundamental difference between Johnson's piece and those works in the light of which they attempt to judge Rasselas. Wishing to make the difference clear and to do justice to what they feel is a manifest accomplishment, they praise the wisdom set forth in the book and the skill and power displayed in individual chapters.

In her article “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” Miss Evelyn May Albright seeks to establish a “vital connection” between Shakespeare's Richard II and John Hayward's Henry IV. Such a connection she thinks would prove Shakespeare's interest in and adherence to the Earl of Essex in his quarrel with the Queen and certain of her counsellors. In presenting her case, however, Miss Albright has failed to give full evidence which, if given in an unprejudiced manner, would destroy the value of her conclusions. It is my purpose in this paper to supply the evidence available concerning both the playing of Shakespeare's Richard II on February 7, 1601, and the publication of Hayward's Henry IV. This account will, I think, show that there is no evidence of any connection between either Hayward and Shakespeare or Shakespeare and Essex.

The theory of exile as a form of intellectual empowerment strongly influenced writers of the Romantic and modernist periods, when major figures from Byron to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett sought to take advantage of a dissociation from native customs to embrace the authenticity of their art. More recently, however, displacement from indigenous cultures has become such a commonplace that it appears difficult to credit the process of migration with any special qualities of critical insight. Nevertheless, literary scholarship remains to some degree in the shadow of the idealization of “exiles and émigrés” that ran through the twentieth century. Edward Said, a Palestinian in the United States, consistently linked his “politics of knowledge” with a principled alienation from “corporations of possession, appropriation, and power,” while looking back to the exiled German scholar of comparative literature Erich Auerbach as a model for transcending “the restraints of imperial or national or provincial limits” (Culture 335). Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian in France, associated a similar perspective of estrangement with Christian narratives of exile and purification, along with their negative correlatives, psychological traumas of disinheritance and depression; but she also attributed to the foreign writer a levitating condition of “weightlessness”: “since he belongs to nothing the foreigner can feel as appertaining to everything, to the entire tradition” (32).

In the Life of Johnson, Boswell suggests that Rasselas echoes the vanitas vanitatum theme of Ecclesiastes. Boswell's suggestion is quite discerning, for Rasselas is, in fact, designed to recall both the Preacher's futile quest for perfect happiness and the meaning of that quest as interpreted by a post-Reformation school of commentators on Ecclesiastes. This school includes Bishop Simon Patrick, whose scriptural writings, in conjunction with those of William Lowth, made up the “standard” Augustan commentary on the Old Testament. Rasselas is informed with a complex of images, sentiments, and ideas drawn from Bishop Patrick's paraphrase of and annotations to the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the thematic structure of the apologue follows the thematic structure that the post-Reformation school attributed to Ecclesiastes.

If the survival of human and nonhuman animals depends on challenging beliefs about our species' exploitation of nature, it also depends on posthumanist perspectives that question more widely the ways in which humans perceive and inhabit the environment emotionally. I argue here that drama can make a valuable contribution not only to the process of interpreting emotions but also to raising awareness that emotional feelings have material efects. he capacity of drama and its performance to grapple with emotional responses to climate change and with broader scientiic knowledge seems particularly prescient.

Using the noble obligations to give, receive, and repay, the Gawain poet makes Pharisaism real. In the gift, prestige is at stake; likewise, those who would submit themselves to the Law would glory before God. The poet links two exchanges to end reciprocity itself. The one in the middle of the poem, where Gawain plays courtesy matches with Bertilak's wife and where hunters make return gifts to the forest, involves Bertilak's and Gawain's presenting each other with whatever wealth each acquires during the day. In this exchange, Gawain finally declines to repay—to trump the fox skin. The other exchange, at the ends of the poem, is the submission to blows. Gawain's failure and his beheading of the Green Knight, each exchanged for the “tappe,” are exchanged for each other. Thus, Gawain owes the Green Knight a death, which the Green Knight pays. Forgiveness absorbs the subtle self-assertion of the gift.

The Hebrew Bible depicts interpretation as a continual process of losing and finding, of forgetting and remembering. Texts are lost and found, and in the Joseph story (Gen. 37–50), Joseph himself is abandoned and recovered, with all memory of him repressed until it is dramatically recalled. His story demonstrates that repression is the condition of interpretation, and that interpretation—not resurrection—holds forth the promise of a future life. Nonetheless, the repeated losses that punctuate the Joseph narrative have inspired the opposite conclusion: that Joseph is a type of Jesus, that his descents and ascents prefigure the final one. Typology, a mode of biblical interpretation that prevailed during the early church, has enjoyed a recent revival in the context of literary studies; but I argue that the typological language of “fulfillment,” of shadows and truth, is alien to Hebraic—and postmodern—understandings of textuality.

In his Apology, Sidney makes what appears to many readers to be an adroit synthesis of humanist defenses of poetry, joining Neoplatonic idealism to claims of ethical utility and delivering this synthesis with the winning playfulness of a shrewd rhetorician. A closer look at his argument, however, reveals it to be a complex and self-conscious fiction, which gestures toward external values only to turn back on its own assumptions. The playful tone shows that Sidney is fascinated by the conceptual difficulties that confront him but that he is incapable of resolving them. Sidney’s intellectual performance in the Apology demonstrates his affinities with Renaissance thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, who imagined all mental activity to be a ceaseless fabrication of conjecture and metaphor.

The Nietzschean presence in Spain between 1890 and 1910 needs more ample documentation even though Nietzsche is already considered the spiritual leader of the Generation of '98. Critics have overlooked his effect on other intellectuals who were not members of the '98 group but whose attitudes constitute an important chapter in Spain's history of ideas. At least three different generations affect a given historical reality by a process of conflicting rhythms that Ortega has called “el anacronismo esencial de la historia” (En torno a Galileo). It would be useful, therefore, to isolate the intellectual background against which the Generation of '98 acted in order to see how the former differed in its position toward Nietzsche. I have tried to do this by excluding from this study members of the Generation of '98 whose positive orientation to the philosopher is known. Since periodical literature is, because of its rapid gestation, the most accurate reflection of evolving ideological positions, I have relied a good deal on such material here, although in several cases I was unable to consult complete sets (Juventud, Mercurio, Revista Blanca, Revista Ibérica, Vida y Arte). This essay is descriptive and synthetic rather than analytic. It begins with the reception given Nietzsche in Spain, tracing the extent to which he was read and discussed (I). Next is an account of the diffusion of his ideas and their influence upon young intellectuals (II). Then follow sections dealing with specific topics: critical reaction to Nietzsche's method (III), the Superman and his sociological relevance (IV), ethics and will (V), art (VI). The final section attempts to focus the Nietzschean phenomenon historically, and weighs the importance of the German's biographical image in Spain (VII).

Women's studies in english departments in germany have developed in a special and, when seen from an Anglo-American perspective, rather peculiar way. The irregularity, which seems to have been overlooked up to now, is caused by institutional and ideological conditions characteristic of German universities.

It has often seemed strange to lovers of Shakspere that the most genial of dramatists should have written plays which, while not attaining the horror and pathos of tragedy, arouse distaste and even repugnance. Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, despite superb poetry and marvellous delineation of character, are so repellent in theme and treatment that they are seldom represented on the stage today, and seldom lie close to the affection of readers of Shakspere. This is even more the case with All's Well that Ends Well. “Everyone who reads this play,” says the editor of the Arden Shakespeare volume, “is at first shocked and perplexed by the revolting idea which underlies the plot ... it leaves so unpleasant a flavour with some people that it is not tasted again.”

The figure of Sordello, who appears in Purgatorio vi and guides Dante and Vergil to the valley of the princes, has long puzzled critics, since his stature in the Comedy seems greater than his historical achievements warrant. He is noted chiefly for a planh with political overtones, the lament for Blacatz. Of the Comedy’s lyric poets, the other known especially for political poetry is Bertran de Born, among the “sowers of scandal and of schism” in Inferno xxviii. By comparing Dante’s treatment of these two “political poets,” we see that they are used within the poem in a way that necessarily transcends their historical identities: they have become emblematic, respectively, of the good and bad uses to which poets can put their verse in the service of the state.

Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution may be regarded as a prodigious cento of fragments from the memoirs and histories which made up the great bulk of his sources. Those sections which are not devoted to running commentary on the Revolution, on democracy, or on other problems, are Carlylean renditions of various dull or hopelessly biased accounts, selected for color and drama, arranged according to climax or contrast, and presented so as to secure the result desired, a “flame-picture.” “While other historians sought to blend . . . details [from memoirs] into a smooth equable narrative, as rags are fashioned into a sheet of paper, Carlyle took the rags themselves and hung them forth gay or grimy or blood-stained, dancing in air or trailing in mud.” Instead of considering Carlyle as a scientific historian we may more properly regard him as an artist, dealing with reported fact from a confusing number of directions, and handling materials which, however manifestly unreliable they themselves might be, always demanded some degree of accuracy and good faith, and which on the other hand permitted various turns of interpretation, emphasis, perspective, or moral judgment. From a great number of incoherent and carelessly inaccurate narratives, he attempted to winnow that thing which he revered with his whole soul, the significant human fact.

For almost two centuries the nature and significance of Samuel Johnson's work in the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia have been obscured. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins denied that any traces of Johnson's style exist in the translation, and, following their lead, most scholars have been willing to accept at face value Johnson's explanation of what he had done: