For most readers of Milton's late prose and mature verse, his positive depictions of the human body deeply inform his monism and antimonarchical politics. This essay argues that Milton's perspectives on mind and body are more ambivalent than the critical consensus allows: that the poet equally needs and does not need the body. I demonstrate that Milton's shifting perspectives on mind and body, spirit and flesh, emanate from his opposition to dynastic kingship. They also shape his emerging modern nationalism, which is marked by contradictions and liminality. By focusing on the fallen Adam's soliloquy, I show how Milton's equivocal body politics appropriates and disembodies Hebraic traditions and the concreteness of the Hebraic past (and other histories of others), as well as the very matter of cultural memory. (RJT)

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis has been embraced by critics and popular audiences alike as an accessible intercultural memoir-in-comics that challenges predominant Western stereotypes about Iran through the universality of its first-person narrator. But the text's global legibility goes beyond the familiarity of Satrapi's graphic avatar. In examining the surprising factors on which the text's globalism depends, I look closely at one of Persepolis's diverse inter-texts—the Persian miniature painting—and situate Satrapi in both Parisian bandes dessinées and Iranian diasporic artistic contexts to argue that the work's concurrent production of local, national, and global scales is inseparable from its connection to several genres and across several media, engaging its readers through multiple modes of perception. Persepolis draws on a global history of graphics as dissent by challenging preconceived notions about comics as a mass culture form, memoirs as limited confessionals, and Iranian women as silenced victims of an oppressive fundamentalist state. The global accessibility of this graphic novel exists not despite but because of porous categories of genre and culture, which are at once integral to its narrative structure and secondary to the aesthetic of protest that it ultimately embraces.

For feminist criticism today it is, as perhaps it has always been, the best of times and the worst of times. When a critical school becomes the topic of a PMLA roundtable, it is safe to say that scholars currently consider it both solidly entrenched and dangerously diminished. Indeed, many would say that feminist criticism's success is the very sign of its failure, an indication that it has lost the renegade dynamism of its early days as an upstart outsider in the academy and declined into yet another stale paradigm on the verge of obsolescence, fit only to be recycled in anthologies or assessed in essays such as this one.

In two contemporary Samoan works, Albert Wendt's short story “The Cross of Soot” (1974) and Sia Figiel's novel They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), tattooing produces and proclaims the psychological and social place of the tattoo bearer. The tattoo signals the splitting or doubling of subjectivity, a mechanism by which the individual human subject is produced continually and repeatedly. The Samoan tatau creates not only Samoan subjects but also the English word tattoo and the French tatouage. Wendt and Figiel treat the production and movement of the tattoo in the Pacific and the world; they thus invite a cross-cultural critique of Lacan's theories of subjectivity, which present the tattoo as constitutive of the subject. Whereas Lacan's tattoo is disembodied and nonlocalized, Wendt and Figiel account for the tattoo's material and corporeal effects, its origins in Oceania, and its function in inaugurating a collective Samoan subject. (JE)

The terse comment that Swift's “style was well suited to his thoughts” has been explored and substantiated in various studies. These have dealt with Swift's knowledge of classical rhetoric, his conciseness, his skillful use of maxims, parody, illustrative parallels, sophistry, exaggeration, and similar topics. His puns and metaphors have also received attention. No one, however, seems to have discussed in detail his use of what may be called literalization of metaphor—a distinctive feature of his rhetoric and one that, in some instances, consists of a combination of pun and metaphor, I propose therefore to examine various aspects of the device of literalization as it appears in his prose works.

The accepted periodization of English literary history, a linear alternation of convention and revolt, has made Blake the ancestral and archetypal romantic. But an examination of the language of his texts, using Michel Foucault's archaeological method, demonstrates the classical structure of his oeuvre, which is a variant of classical discourse as defined and described by Foucault. The deep structure of Blake's discourse is logical, but the logic is not that of general grammar; it is the logic of identity, not the logic of difference. The assimilation of Blake's oeuvre into Foucault's classical episteme enriches and expands Foucault's model of the period; it also offers a model of the transformation from classical to modern that may clarify some of the difficulties of Foucault's scheme of historical change.

Numerous writings (especially by Morris W. Croll and George Williamson) have propounded the theory that a late sixteenth-century revival of Stoicism marked English thought and prose styles, replacing Cicero in popularity, that such Stoicism came to a climax in the period from about 1580 to 1630, and that Stoicism waned thereafter in the seventeenth century. The theory is disproved by the pattern of English publication of Stoic and neo-Stoic writers, and Cicero between 1530 and 1700. The important Stoic writers were more popular in the Restoration than before and little popular in the period from 1580 to 1630. Scholars of English literature have been misled by possible continental developments behind which England lagged and by insufficient exactness in understanding classical writers and thought. Seneca's style is said to be Asiatic rather than Attic, and Cicero is Stoic in such works as De Officiis. This one Ciceronian work was more popular in England than the total canon of Seneca. The evidence shows that an altogether new account is required for the history of neo-Stoicism in English thought and prose style, as well as of the development of English prose styles.

Most literary historians have found that the romantic shift from mimetic to expressive theories of art was “fatal to the audience”—leaving the poet a soliloquist, the audience an unnecessary appendage. Blake's idea of the audience helps show that, while artistic withdrawal certainly defines a polar phase of the theory, the logic of the theory does provide a complementary phase of fulfillment characterized by union between artist and audience. Since theories of art are often latent social theories, we can extend the logic of romantic aesthetics to outline a society of imagination.

Depuis plusieurs années on s'intéresse beaucoup à la question de l'influence de l'entourage anglo-saxon sur le français tel qu'on le parle au Canada. Les Canadiens-Français eux-mêmes ont senti toute la gravité de cette influence menaçante et, soucieux de garder leur langue française aussi pure que possible, ils ont fait de l'anglicisme le plus grand des péchés linguistiques. On voit paraître dans les journaux et les revues de longues listes d'anglicismes que le Canadien-Français ne doit pas employer. Tout cela, à notre avis, est peine perdue: le peuple continuera à trouver plus commode de dire la shed que la remise, le wrench que la clé anglaise, le spare que le pneu de rechange, et ainsi de suite.

Wieland's first mention of the plan of the Merkur is in a letter to Riedel dated Sept. 17, 1772:

Ich bin entschlossen, eine Art von Journal zu entrepreniren, welches quo ad formam einige Ähnlichkeit mit dem Mercure de france haben soll. Prosaische Original-Aufsätze, Litterarische Nachrichten, Recensionen und Revisionen unrichtiger Urtheile über interessante Schriften, sollen die Haupt-Artikel davon ausmachen.

Though Shakespeare's liking for Stoic commonplaces of the sort that one finds in the prose works of Seneca, Plutarch, Cardano, and Justus Lipsius no longer needs to be pointed out and though interesting evidence has recently been assembled1 of Shakespeare's utilizing the forms and principles of traditional Renaissance rhetoric, there is one rhetorical pattern used by Shakespeare, itself a development from Stoic prose models, which seems not to have caught the eye of modern students. This is the consolatio or “Paramythia … a forme of speech which the Orator vseth to take away, or diminish a sorrow conceiued in the minde of his hearer”, as Henry Peacham defined it in 1593.

Critics have traditionally viewed the individual poems of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) primarily as exercises in innovative versification and exotic local color. But if the poems are read sequentially, a significant pattern emerges. The apocalyptic cataclysm of “Le Feu du ciel” introduces the theme of sudden death and destruction that emerges as central to the entire volume. Hugo’s preoccupation with sudden violence needs to be understood in the light of his attitude toward the French Revolution. Attracted by the freedom that it brought but repelled by its excesses, Hugo could not decide during this period whether the Revolution was morally good or evil, with the result that at the end of Les Orientales he avoided taking a political stance and found refuge in art for art’s sake. It was only many years later that he was able to resolve his political doubts and complete his vision of human destiny.

Following Moria's metamorphoses, Erasmus' Praise falls into three sections whose interrelationships generate the total meaning of the work. Moving from section to section, Folly leads her auditors through a dialectic of conversion. At first ironic, Folly is the goddess of metamorphosis, a variant of Circe, offering men her gift of pleasurable illusion. She wants them to accept life as a comic play and attacks the “Stoic” for attempting self-divinization while rejecting the play of life. She argues that her power can make men happy in Plato's cave. But in the satirical middle section, Folly betrays them by showing them the real tragedy of their lot. While revealing that one cannot separate lifepreserving, pleasurable folly from destructive madness, by her transformation into a “Stoic” truth-teller, Folly prevents men from placing their faith in her benevolence. Thus, in the final section, she turns with them to Christian folly, the faith that leads men out of Plato's cave to God's unchanging, benevolent reality. Folly's final, ecstatic vision gives her followers a transcendent perspective redefining and including the comitragic visions of the first two sections.

This article is merely a contribution toward a record of popular New-Mexican Spanish. It is incomplete and fragmentary; and, doubtless, it has many errors, since most of the words and expressions it contains were received through the ear. By New-Mexican Spanish is here meant the popular Spanish speech of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. This region is only a small part of the southwestern States and Territories where Spanish is spoken, and yet it is as large as Italy. Its population may be roughly estimated at 125,000 Spanish-speaking persons, of whom some 40,000 or 50,000 are in Colorado and the remainder in northern New Mexico.

Abounding in visual metaphors and situations, Tolstoy's works are permeated with the conviction that it is the nature of truth to be seen. This attitude exemplifies the ocularcentrism that has characterized European thought since the Greeks, though the Tolstoyan corpus also displays some of the tension between ocularcentrism's eastern and western European recensions that obtains in the Russian context. The quintessential visual situation in Tolstoy is emphatically perspectival—despite the attractions of more “Russian” ways of seeing. The scenes constituting that situation work, in a way reminiscent of the camera obscura, to present life in an intellectually and morally apprehensible form by turning it into a planar visual surface. Ultimately Tolstoy's impulse can be linked with the material nature of books, which foster this very kind of experience when the eye is trained on the page, and this linkage has implications for Russian culture as well as for the relation between the verbal and the visual in general.

I recall two things about my exchange with the friendly soul who rang me several years ago with the offer to stand for the second vice presidency of the MLA. First is the vivid recollection of my serious and mostly incapacitating illness at the time: as it turned out this was to disable me almost completely for the first year's Executive Council meetings. The second is my somewhat ungracious response to the (mostly undeserved) compliment contained in the suggestion that I should accept the nomination: “Do I have to do anything if I get elected?” I asked with almost ridiculous impertinence. I think the answer was no, and I think I should say in my own defense that I formulated my question very specifically to mean only “do I have to do anything very much as second vice president?,” a position I had frivolously assumed was not usually thought of as bearing a great responsibility. In any case, I was elected, and I did nothing the first year except, as I said, miss most of the meetings because of illness, unending treatment, and pain. Never having had much to do with administration during the many, too many, decades of my teaching life, I have to report to you that in my year as first vice president I had the opportunity at the outset to see how a major professional organization is run by really competent people and, second, to witness its humane and rational responses to the various demands of our time and those of our by now somewhat anxious guild, especially its younger members, for whom the job crisis has been so disabling and discouraging a symptom of this fin de siècle. Because of this genuine learning experience throughout my presidency, I am really grateful to, and happy to mention in particular, the extraordinary talents of our superb executive director, Phyllis Franklin, whose sensitive intelligence and marvelous skills not only guided us as a very large professional organization through a series of new challenges but, to speak personally, rescued your faltering president on numerous occasions when his temper and peculiar sense of humor got the better of him. May I also mention Phyllis Franklin's senior colleagues in the association, to whom I and all the other elected officers and members owe so much: Martha Evans, director of MLA book publications; Terence Ford, director of Bibliographic Information Services and editor of the MLA International Bibliography; Judy Goulding, managing editor of MLA publications; Amilde Hadden, director of financial operations; Maribeth Kraus, director of convention programs; David Laurence, director of English programs and ADE; Regina Vorbeck, associate executive director and head of the Division of MLA Operations; Elizabeth Welles, director of foreign language programs and ADFL; and Carol Zuses, coordinator of governance and assistant to the executive director?

Margaret Fuller, despite her personal association with transcendentalism, has increasingly come to be seen apart from that movement, as a rebel whose rejection of Romantic Boston was essential to her development. Yet Fuller is best understood as an embodiment of the value most central to transcendentalism, “self-culture.” The doctrine of the cultivation of the self preached by Channing and others profoundly influenced all the transcendentalists, including Fuller. But her concentration on its implications for feminist concerns led to her important work on women's culture, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. This long essay—which evolved through an intense study of Goethean criticism and a series of discussions, or “Conversations,” that Fuller organized for women—is best seen as the application of transcendental philosophy to the concerns of women and as an instructive example of the connections between idealist philosophy and social reform.

In his Preface to The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque Poe, while discussing the character and style of these tales, says: “I am led to think it is this prevalence of the ‘Arabesque’ in my serious tales, which has induced one or two critics to tax me, in all friendliness, with what they have been pleased to term ‘Germanism’ and gloom. The charge is in bad taste, and the grounds of accusation have not been sufficiently considered. Let us admit for a moment that the ‘phantasy-pieces’ now given are ‘Germanic’ or what not…. But the truth is that, with a single exception, there is no one of these stories in which the scholar should recognize the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call Germanic, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German literature have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” In this passage, though himself possessed with almost a monomania for discovering ‘plagiarism’ in other writers, (nowadays we should rather speak of 'influences'), Poe practically denies similar charges brought against him. And, in this denial, he takes occasion to lunge a side thrust at Hoffmann in his reference to 'phantasypieces' and ‘some secondary names of German literature‘—as will be seen later.

Lyric poetry's investment in structural delimitation has been read as a commitment to the exclusion of otherness and more specifically of other people. But delimitation need not be synonymous with exclusivity. Giorgio Agamben suggests that lyric closure and the satisfaction it affords may be a model for achieving peace with the other—a model of how we might find, in or with another, not merely alterity but contentment. Wallace Stevens offers examples of how such contentment might be realized between text and reader, as an effect of the bounded aural intensity of lyric language. Agamben's poetics and Stevens's poems complicate our assumptions about the sociality of lyric structure. In addition, they offer a provocative alternative to the Levinasian models that influence much of our current thinking about ethics.