Are we in a posthumanist world? who knows? clever thinkers from Nietzsche and Henry Adams to Foucault and Lyotard have been giving us this message. And if we are in such a world, how can there be a place for the humanities in it? Plodding along behind those brilliant minds, I shall try to puzzle out the situation of the humanities at a practical or pedagogical level, by looking at what some humanists have been saying about the humanities recently and then considering briefly the history of humanism and humanistic education. After that, I shall make some modest proposals about what is to be done.

This essay considers one of the most underexamined characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: Augustine St. Clare's effeminate manservant, Adolph. I evaluate Adolph's critical elision to illustrate how the success of critiques centered on race and gender unintentionally permits other minority identities (and stereotypes) in the book to continue unremarked. While revisionist readings of Stowe's novel complicate racial and gender stereotypes, they nevertheless accept stable (even conventional) categories to describe minority identity. Such formulations foreclose the possibility of seeing other minority identities in the book that intertwine race and gender in ways different from normative standards. In examining Adolph's character, this essay considers how intersectional analysis reveals important representations of social difference—including differences not always acknowledged in present-day culture.

Melville employs theological materials which complicate and deepen his portrayal of cosmic evil in the conflict of Ahab and the whale. Father Mapple's presentation of the Jonah story sets forth Calvinist teachings which throw Ahab's revolt into relief as a revolt against the ultimate. Melville elaborates Ahab's view of his symbolic quarry by drawing upon an anti-Calvinist tradition in which Calvin's God was attacked as a brutal monster. Further, Calvin's interpretation of the Old Testament King Ahab heavily influences the characterization of Captain Ahab. Calvin used King Ahab as an example of the reprobate, those predestinately damned. He stressed Ahab's victimization by Satan and his madness as marks of his reprobation. Melville uses these themes in a way which makes evident the cosmic evil implicit in the plight of one who is thus hopeless. Here also he draws upon a tradition of attack against Calvinism. But while Melville's use of theology is extensive and sophisticated, it is always subordinate to the thematic concerns of Moby-Dick.

A comparison of the text of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy with its sources shows the latter to have undergone substantial alterations apparently wrought unconsciously by the author's memory. These alterations run to type: figures are exaggerated and extraordinary events are made more extraordinary. Sometimes figments are created by the fusion of two remembered names, or the elements of two stories, into one. The resulting distortions and figments often exceed their originals in literary charm, but the effect is never to falsify or misrepresent the meaning of the original.

In seeking to distill into a public image a consciousness that changes over time, Montaigne faced moral and rhetorical dilemmas that confront all autobiographers. Unlike most literary self-portraitists, however, he gives evidence of having consciously tailored his project to the powers and limitations of his medium, the printed word. Montaigne's solution to the problem of imagining and addressing the reader reflects his perception of a new audience for printed books in the sixteenth century. Acknowledging that his public self-image has clarified and defined his private one, he reconciles the conflicting demands of a self in process and a book in print by making successive additions that temper the lapidary finality of the text. The deepest truth of Montaigne's claim to have written a book “consubstantial with its author” lies in the dynamic equilibration of past and current consciousness manifested both in the labile self and on the printed page.

Little Dorrit is both a narrative about authority and an examination of the authority of narrative. The novel links vocation with sonhood and storytelling with fatherhood and self-generation. Little Dorrit, however, tells a double story, of a daughter as well as of a son. If the son’s story relates the search to replace the father and to discover paternal authority, the daughter’s story details the horrors and consolations of incestuous desire and generational collapse. Storytelling that seeks the father as origin reveals paternal deception and inauthenticity; incestuous structures of desire attempt to collapse genealogy on the hero and heroine, making paternal origin unknowable and creating an overdetermined narrative ending. Dickens’ double story, then, identifies yet questions genealogy and the patriarchal family as metaphors for narrative structure.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the controversy over the possibility and desirability of a national American literature had diminished to a somewhat feeble reiteration of old pros and cons. Moreover, Whitman's vigorous renewal of the demand for a distinctly national literature in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass went virtually unnoticed by reason of his own obscurity and the disruption of national unity by sectional disputes. In the upsurge of nationalistic optimism following the Civil War, however, in the promises afforded by a strong and humanitarian Union, the sentiment for a literature distinct through its expression of the new national idealism was both widespread and ardent. But this post-war literary nationalism was short-lived. Before the skeptical attacks of many literary critics and the rising materialism of the Gilded Age, hope for a national literature once more gave way to indifference or despair. If the controversy was to be revived, some new literary stimulus, some new mode or approach toward the achievement of an American literature would have to be forthcoming. Such a stimulus was provided in the rise of realism. The conflict between the new realism and the old romanticism in the 1870's and 1880's is a well-known chapter in the history of American criticism, but the relationship of this new realism to the production of a national literature as it was viewed in the two decades before Whitman's death has not received adequate attention.

When Byron entered Ravenna for the first time on June 10, 1819, roiling up to the Porta Sisi in his heavy Napoleonic carriage, he was weary from the long journey across the flat Romagna plain and distraught by conflicting emotions concerning his liaison with the young Countess Teresa Guiccioli.1 Only a short while out of a convent and married to a man three times her age, she was highly impressionable and her emotions had been quickly engaged by the handsome and diffident English poet whom she had met at a conversazione in Venice in April. Indeed Byron and the Countess had arranged their affair so well that not only was the sixty-year-old husband cuckolded, but, much more surprising to Byron, he and Teresa had formed a sincere mutual attachment. Now that Count Guiccioli, reputed to be the wealthiest man in the Romagna, had carried his wife back to his palace in Ravenna, Byron, reflecting on this new love that had come so suddenly, found it a little disconcerting. Having had his emotions involved so often where his mind could not give full assent, he could not at first adjust himself to the idea—though he felt it deeply enough—that this affair was different. So that when Teresa wrote that she was ill and urgently requested him to come, he hesitated and delayed, not so much from fear of a stiletto in his back (though he dramatized that possibility in his letters to his friends—-and it was a real one so far as he knew) as from reluctance to subside into a regular cavalier servente. Writing to Hob-house on May 17, 1819, he said:

The material available for picturing to us the performances of the popular religious plays of mediæval France is so meagre that any possible addition to it seems worth investigating. Some valuable plates, reproducing the miniatures that accompany the Passion plays of Arras and Valenciennes, have been published by G. Cohen in his Théâtre en France au moyen âge, I (Paris: Rieder, 1928). The same author had previously given us a comprehensive treatment of the whole subject, with a full bibliography and a few other plates, in his Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux (2nd ed., Paris: Champion, 1926). Many suggestive hypotheses regarding the possible contributions of the mediæval stage to the art of the middle ages have been advanced by Émile Mâle in the two beautifully illustrated volumes, L'Art religieux duxiiesiècle (3rd ed., Paris: Colin, 1928), chap. IV and L'Art religieux de la fin du moyen âge (3rd ed., Paris: Colin, 1925), chap. II. In both of these, various iconographical innovations are plausibly traced to the influence of the liturgical and vernacular plays. Except for the works just mentioned, however, we are largely left to descriptive material and conjecture for our ideas about the costuming, staging, and other conventions of the mediæval religious drama. This is the more to be regretted in view of M. Mâle's important conclusions, and it would therefore seem that any illustrations that may give us a conception of the popular iconography of the Passion in the middle ages possess a dual claim upon our attention.

Questions concerning textual referentiality figure among the most controversial in literary theory. The complementarity of semiotic and marxist notions of the literary referent suggests a new understanding of the referent based on the concept of “cultural unit.” The similarity in the relations that marxist epistemology (as defined by Althusser) posits between thought and the real and that semiotics (as defined by Eco) posits between language and the real warrants this reformulation. A discussion of the semiotic and marxist concepts necessary for a theory of the literary referent leads to its definition as a cultural ideological unit that, by virtue of its necessary but unrepresented relation to other, nonidentical cultural units, furnishes in the mode of a dialectical absence the materials requisite for an understanding both of certain textual properties and of the structure of the historical reality to which the text alludes.

The frames that Lewis Carroll provided for the two Alice books have largely been ignored, when not simply dismissed, in recent Carroll criticism. Their conventional form and diction may account for this negative response, but examination of their provenance, their function within the structure of the two books, and the artistry evident in the individual frame components indicate how and why the frames are important to our understanding of Carroll's vision and purpose. The frame poems are designed to lead the reader into and away from the central dream tales through a process of lyric transformation and estrangement.

First of all, thanks to wai chee dimock, the editor of PMLA, and to all contributors for having put this feature together. Devoting time and energy to someone else's work is a very generous thing to do, and I'm grateful to all of you for your attention. Really.

Since Dimock made clear from the start that the discussion would be “on Distant Reading the book,” I will not address Johanna Drucker's and Catherine Nicholson's essays, which, though very interesting, concern methodological and historical issues rather than the book itself. Otherwise, my reply will proceed as follows: a prologue on my relationship to distance; some retrospective thoughts on Distant Reading; a few responses on “facts,” interpretations, “reading,” and “readers”; some reflections on modeling; and a conclusion on what Lisa Marie Rhody calls the “dehumanizing” nature of “scientific discourse.”

Experimentation in prose rhythms is generally conceded to be a sign of mature literary art. It can not, in fact, be conceived to occur unless craftsmen in letters have become so far aware of their aesthetic medium—its physical basis and its principles—that they wish to subject it to deliberately planned tests for effect. The obvious meters of verse require much less awareness. Prose experiments appear characteristically within and just after periods of great artistic productivity, when a galaxy of creative writers has engendered the requisite literary self-consciousness. Such a period was surely the fourteenth century in England, and it should be a matter of no surprise if therefore several prose writers of the time adopted an attitude of experimentation.

I Will Start with Two Stories About This Thing Called Literature and the world it claims to name and possess.

The first takes place in Shillong, in the northeast corner of India, a place far removed from the Indian heartland, closer to Bangladesh, Burma, and China than to New Delhi. The setting is the Shillong campus of the English and Foreign Languages University, where I have come to teach a seminar to junior academics and graduate students on decolonization as a theoretical problem. My students and I will embark on a two-week systematic rereading of the philosophical claims made for decolonization in the writings of canonical postcolonial writers, from Mahatma Gandhi's writing on nonviolence to Aimé Césaire's and Léopold Sédar Senghor's on negritude to Frantz Fanon's on the pitfalls of national consciousness to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's and Trinh T. Minh-Ha's on the figure of woman in difference. Although my students are attentive, their relation to these texts is ambivalent: they recognize the importance of these texts to understanding the making of the modern world, yet colonialism, as a world-historical event, occurred too long ago to be part of their lived experience. Their ambivalence is compounded by the fact that the urgency with which the authors of decolonization write, the sense that they are operating at the end of time—the time of Europe—belongs to a moment that no longer resonates with people struggling to survive in a more complex, globalized world. It is hard for my students to make the connection between Senghor's negritude and his incarceration in a Nazi prison camp in Poitiers during World War II or to see that event, the imprisonment of an African fighting for France, as connected to a paradigmatic break in the discourse of empire.

Despite wide disagreement as to the meaning of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, several recent interpretations point toward what can be formulated by combining (1) Plato's conception of a realm of nonmalicious, daemonic creatures dwelling in unrestricted joy outside human limitations and (2) Plato's conception of the Dionysus-inspired “possessed” poet in a furor divinus as the agent who can in an incantation call up before men the enchanting, terrifying beauty of this daemon world. Suggesting the nature of daemonic beauty and its effects upon people may be a chief aim of the poem, as variant readings in the autograph text indicate. Kubla Khan seems to be a poem about daemonic poetry, a strain that reappears intermittently and thus the search for spiritual and philosophic meanings in the poem could be relinquished. From this point of view, Kubla Khan appears neither as a fragment nor as a poem about evil.

The nature of Joseph Conrad's critique of imperialism, given his novels' pervasive racism, persists as a source of debate. his essay argues that three of his imperial novels, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory, take aim at an emerging system of imperialism organized around the modern, investorowned corporation. his system, referred to here as “absentee capitalism,” was replacing the nineteenthcentury British system of relatively small, familybased irms. he novels idealize the familyowned irm as having a presence of material value, meaning, and afect that contrasts with the wasted value let in the wake of absentee capitalism's invisible and everchanging network of social relations. According to this interpretation, Victory, which has been marginalized in Conrad studies, takes on renewed import for its insight into the relation among imperialism, romance, and modernism in Conrad's oeuvre.

When, in December, 1883, forty teachers met in New York and organized this Association, Victoria was still on the throne; Tennyson, Ruskin, and Arnold, Holmes, Aldrich, and Louisa Alcott were all blamelessly writing; and great scholars like Kittredge, Lounsbury, Grandgent, March, Hemple, Garnett, and Todd had heretically attained preëminence without the doctorate. It was an unsophisticated, safe, and comfortable world. Today it has undergone disintegration. And we, to a certain degree, have disintegrated with it. Never before, unless I mistake, has it been so important as now, at the close of our first half-century, to take stock. In what direction are we moving, and to what end?

Considerable interest has been manifested of late regarding Chaucer's rhetoric. This was occasioned by the French medievalist, Edmond Farai, when in 1924 he edited five poetical treatises which had circulated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Professor Manly in 1926 in a lecture delivered to the British Academy, concluded that the poet had in all probability studied these texts, and that much of his technical art was learned from them, rather than from his French models, as had formerly been supposed. Two years later, Professor Baldwin climaxed his Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic with a concluding chapter on Chaucer's technique, which records the poet's reaction to such doctrines as these works contain. During the past year, PMLA has published three articles related either to Chaucerian rhetoric or the medieval manuals. Two of these, following the thesis of Manly, assume quite definitely that Faral's treatises exerted a primary influence upon the mind of Chaucer. All these studies are based upon a comparison of only the Chaucerian works and the Latin manuals. Consideration has not been given to the poet's source material as a third element of correlation.

The Franklin's Tale, which has caused much disagreement among critics of Chaucer, may best be understood in the light of Chaucer's own writings, particularly The Merchant's Tale and three short lyrics, “Truth,” “Gentilesse,” and “Lak of Stedfastnesse.” The relationship between the characters and events of the two Tales dramatizes a moral ideal that operates throughout The Canterbury Tales and is given explicit expression in the lyrics. It may be summed up as “gentilesse,” which consists, in the Knight's words, of “Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.” In a variety of contexts, this standard operates throughout Chaucer's writings. An understanding of it puts The Franklin's Tale into clear perspective, identifies its true theme, answers its critics, accounts for its apparent absurdities, inconsistencies, and contradictions, and reveals its suitability to its teller.

When i was invited to participate in this special issue, it was suggested that I meditate on a long-term research project I did in collaboration with the public-health scholar María Gudelia Rangel Gómez and the demographer Armando Rosas Solís, on people working in prostitution in Tijuana, a city on the United States–Mexico border. That work began in the 1990s and continued through the middle of the last decade, producing three articles on women and two on transvestite sex workers.1 Looking over the raw survey data and interview transcripts in preparation for this article impressed on me once again how these people are engaged in what Saskia Sassen calls “survival circuits” between the global South and global cities like Los Angeles and Tijuana, some of them located in the North, some not. These sex workers come from all over the Mexican Republic, migrating to Tijuana—a city both Third World and global—for reasons of economic necessity, and often their stories include low-wage labor in the United States as well as participation in the informal economy in the northern border area to supplement (or mask) their primary income. Regardless of other factors, the people we surveyed and interviewed express an understanding that to live means to work and that the work they are doing is precisely work: not organized labor, not a career path. They know that their bodies are made marginal or invisible and their voices go unheard. At the same time, while their lives may seem unimaginably harsh to many of us, in their stories they often present themselves as rational actors, making the best choices they can from among limited options for themselves and their families.