Widsith is the only Old English poem concerned exclusively with a scop and Deor the only one specifically attributed to a scop. In both a scop is represented as speaking, and in each he tells something of what had befallen him—Widsith, the far-wandering and richly rewarded scop, and Deor, the court scop who had lost his long-held and lucrative post to a rival. These poems are therefore similar and also the only ones which give us a first-person account of a scop's career. It is usually for the sake of the information thus provided that the poems are discussed together. This information is precious little, however, and some of it is dubious.

The history of the pastoral is a long history; perhaps no other manner of writing has exerted so wide an influence or held so deep a fascination. The words pastoral, idyllic, Arcadian still move us; they surround us with an atmosphere of charm; they encourage those moments that are unstrenuous; they recall us to an early and almost outgrown freshness of feeling. Yet, oftentimes, the poets of the Golden Age are regarded as mere literary alchemists by critics who cannot yield themselves to genuine poetic illusion, failing to recognize in that distant world the embodiment of really existent beauty. Pastoral has, in many cases, justly been a word of reproach and ridicule, a synonym for insipid creations, unreal in feeling, affected in style; but whether good art or bad it has appeared, Proteus-like, in numerous forms. Music, sculpture, and painting have used the pastoral motif; the Good Shepherd has been for twenty centuries, in the Christian church, a tender symbol of Divine Care; and in literature the pastoral has never really faded away, but has come back again and again with persistent appeal. It seems, therefore, that there must be in it some inherent beauty, some elemental greatness which deserves investigation and acknowledgment.

Two questions posed by recent developments in literary theory are whether a tradition of American romance fiction exists and, if so, whether we want to continue to define it in the terms that have prevailed in literary criticism over the last thirty-five years. After briefly reviewing some features of the contemporary conversation concerning the theory of American romance, this essay puts into play two important figures in that conversation—Sacvan Bercovitch and Stanley Cavell—in an attempt to develop a new interpretive model for romance fiction. Finally, through certain of Cavell's ideas about Emerson, the essay reads a moment in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, which is crucial to Bercovitch's recent reinterpretation of the book, and attempts to clarify what, perhaps, constitutes the enduring power of the romance tradition.

Between 1893 and his death in 1898, Stéphane Mallarmé experimented with a poetics permeated by the emerging technology of cinema. Close to technicians and journalists of early film, Mallarmé developed what might be called a cinepoetics, especially in Un coup de dés (1897)—the ur-modernist visual poem whose preface recoups the single declaration he made on cinema—and in the unrealized project known as Le Livre (1893–98), a poetic performance involving electrical lighting and image projection. Close readings make explicit Mallarmé's cinepoetic aesthetics. Its epistemology of déroulement ‘unfolding’ is compared with that of other 1890s figures: Étienne-Jules Marey, Henri Bergson, and Loïe Fuller. Cinepoetry has not been recognized as the distinct practice it was, although Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida came close to theorizing Mallarmé's interest in cinema. Cinepoetic experimentation has shadowed the whole French vanguard. The study of its genealogy should reshape our understanding of the intersection of modernist lyricism and new media.

When Abraham Cowley died in 1667, he was mourned by practically the whole English literary world with such eulogies as the following:

Panopticism seeks to make the pysche visible to a top-down system of examination and classification. In the process, it drives out privacy, the right to privacy, and, with them, the right to free self-making. Against this driving out, Etheridge Knight poses a remarkable body of poetry and prose that becomes a kind of antipanopticon in its cultivation of unconstrained communication and communion. During the years he spent as a “guest” of the Indiana State Prison, for instance, Knight wrote for prison and, later, other publications. He sought, even in the prison columns that were his main early outlet, to cultivate a communicative feedback loop capable of providing a channel through which hospitality could reach those who could not recognize themselves in mainstream American discourse. Knight's feedback loop confirms Jacques Derrida's view that “language is hospitality.”

As Members of the Penn State English Department, We Share Our Institution's Commitment to Bridging the Gap Between town and gown. As writers and teachers, we believe that reading is a powerful vehicle for community building, for democratic deliberation, and for imaginative reinvention of seeming inevitabilities. As friends who enjoy discussing ideas with one another, we believe that collaboration can allow for both individual voice and shared vision, can offer mutual instruction and delight. In our various ways, we have committed ourselves to reading and writing beyond the boundaries of the university. In this brief essay, we hope to share our experiences of community building, creativity, and democratic negotiation with readers of PMLA.

The title character in Toni Morrison's Beloved embodies the history and memory of rape. In fact, her supernatural form is the shape-shifting witch, derived by African Americans from the succubus, a female rapist and nightmare figure of European myth. Beloved functions like a traumatic, repetitive nightmare: in addition to representing characters' repressed memories of rape, she attacks Sethe and Paul D. Morrison also uses the succubus figure to represent the effects of institutionalized rape during slavery. Beloved drains Sethe of vitality and Paul D of semen, and these violations represent dehumanization and commodified reproduction. Finally, by portraying a female rapist figure and a male rape victim, Morrison foregrounds race, rather than gender, as the crucial category determining the domination or rape of her African American characters.

Wai Chee Dimock's chapter on genre as world system, in her recently published book Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, performs a thoroughgoing interrogation of paradigms of periodization and planetary comparatism: “What would literary history look like,” Dimock asks, Her book answers these questions by applying fractal modeling to the scaling of literary chronotypes and geopolitical territories. Dimock uses Benoit Mandelbrot's concept of indeterminate lengths to imagine a literary field of serried shapes, lacy ground, pocked sponges, coiled twine, clumped shapes, cystlike protuberances, and warped intervals (84). “Such irregularities are not limited to just one scale,” Dimock specifies; “they are much more transitive, and much more robustly self-propagating. They carry over tenaciously from one metric to another, spewing out countless copies of themselves on countless dimensions” (77). Dimock's concept of fractals as a self-duplication of literary forms produced in manifold sizes and temporal dimensions and endowed with entropic powers of extension allows her to plot feedback loops between the “gnarled contours of the globe [and] the gnarled contours of every single node” (78). Despite her concern that theorizing genre as a world system delivers “the large literary canvas” at the expense of the text, Dimock insists that such “scalar recursiveness” can in fact “thicken comparative morphology,” diversifying the conceptual grounds of comparison (79).

In July 1927, Virginia Woolf participated in the first of three broadcasts she presented on the BBC. “Are too many Books Written and Published?” was a collaborative project, scripted jointly with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in the typical BBC format of the conversational debate. Virginia was not entirely comfortable in front of a radio microphone, feeling as she did the constrictions of prescribed time limits, the BBC's conventional respectability, and even the sound of her own voice. Yet she engaged in this program with a liveliness, a good humor, and an inventiveness that display her public persona at its best.

Barthes's principle of jouissance provides an erotics of reading that counters essentialist textuality. Yet much feminist inquiry has also found implicit phallocen-trism in the concept. I use the poetry and poetics of Frank O'Hara to reread Barthes's Pleasure of the Text. Gay male sexuality, I claim, offers a model that refuses to privilege the phallus. Moreover, O'Hara's poetics symbolically embraces the gay male body and demonstrates an absolute jouissance. I juxtapose O'Hara's poetry with an ironic myth of gay male sexuality, the “signifying clone.” The comparison shows that both this sexuality and O'Hara's poetry reconstruct “meaning” as an ex post facto decision—in contrast to traditional androcentric notions of meaning as an a priori truth. I suggest that the material experience of sexualities can provide a basis for a theorization that unwrites the homogenizing transcendence of the androcentric phallus. (GWB)

The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.

At a meeting of Natural Science Men, held a couple of years ago at Berlin, the question which I have proposed to ourselves was discussed. Much to the surprise of the adherents of Darwinism, Prof. Virchow maintained, that the doctrine of Darwin should not be taught in any institution lower than the University, that it should not enter the text-book of natural history used in a school of any grade from the volks schule up to the Gymnasium and Realschule. I am not able to judge whether Virchow's view is too conservative in the field of natural science. But it is possible in any branch of learning to set before students theories and generalizations when they ought to be fed upon the old, hard and dry facts and laws. This method is the more vicious; the newer these theories and the vaguer these generalizations. But when the latest results consist of new facts and new laws of language well established, conservatism in the adoption and in the teaching of them becomes a great fault and a great injustice. I admit, that there is danger in going too fast and too far in adopting and teaching the new results, but in the department of Modern Languages as in many other departments the danger lies in the other direction, not merely in ultra-conservatism in appropriating and digesting the new results, not merely in ignoring them, but in unpremeditated, unconscious, down right ignorance of them.

Eighteen department chairmen from seventeen universities met in five sessions at MLA headquarters on Saturday and Sunday, 26 and 27 March 1955, to discuss problems in the recruitment and preparation of college teachers of modern foreign languages. The universities represented had, during the past five years, awarded a total of more than 400 Ph.D. degrees in Germanic and Romance languages. Participants in the meeting are named on page 64 of this report.

The extent to which we in east-central europe ACquire proficiency in new languages and develop the capacity to communicate in the new international environment without translators or interpreters has significant consequences for our economic efficiency, living standards, and general welfare.

Rereading the canon in the light of recent theory and criticism can turn into a subversive project when one finds that a novel long considered easily accessible and safely categorized may be neither. Such is the outcome of this essay's reading of Theodor Fontane's popular Effi Briest (1894–95). Incomplete stories in the text lead to a reassessment of its ending, of the heroine's position, and of the text's political implications. What emerges is a modern, self-reflexive, incipiently feminist Effi Briest that resists the standard readings and instead moves closer to “shocking” texts of the time (such as Wedekind's first Lulu play and Freud's Studies on Hysteria) than to those texts with which it is traditionally compared.

To appreciate Dr. Faustus as cosmic tragedy, it is necessary to relate its particular view of man and God to other works of Marlowe and to the atheistic doctrines attributed to him by his contemporaries. It is also necessary to reexamine scholarly assumptions about Marlowe, whose mind was perhaps more medieval than modern, and whose view of experience was often more antihumanistic than humanistic. Obsessed with the thought of man's impotence before the power of time and death, Marlowe was attracted to the idea of man's transcendent will. But he intuited very early the inhumanity of absolute or superhuman power. Recognizing the horror of his own conception of the divine, he juxtaposed in Dr. Faustus Faustus and Christ, first as moral antitheses and then as complementary sacrifices to an implacable God. To attempt to read Dr. Faustus as an orthodox homily is to succeed only in stripping it of its tragic grandeur and metaphysical terror. To view it, however, as Marlowe's ultimate religious and cosmological statement—as his turning upon his ideal of transcendence—is to grasp the full meaning of Faustus' despair and to grasp also the final congruence of Marlowe's art and life.

There are as many defenses of poetry in the Renaissance as there are literary critics but the one name that comes most frequently to mind is that of Sidney. The reason is clear. Most critics embodied what they had to say in defense of poetry in formal, critical treatises. Sidney, with a better sense of drama, wrote his as a separate manifesto. It is known that Julius Caesar Scaliger devoted considerable energy in his Poetices Libri Septem to replying to the charges against poetry. What is less well known is that he, too, tried his hand at a separate defense of poetry which he called Contra Poetices Calumniatores Declamatio. This interesting composition is buried in the seldom read edition of his letters and orations first published in 1600, forty-two years after his death. This work deserves to be known because it puts into brief form, and in emotional language, several of the leading ideas of Poetices Libri Septem. Since it breathes defiance of the unpolished slanderers of literature who surrounded him in Agen and hints at the difficulties which he faced there, it is, also, of considerable biographical interest.

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

The question of how far the Middle English metrical romances and their continental prototypes went in portraying realistically the life and times in which they were written and how much of the detail in them is merely literary convention has long been a moot one. W. P. Ker wrote: “The longer romances are really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising,” but added in another place, “the romance writers of the twelfth century did much to make romance into a mechanic art, … reduced the game to a system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand. …” M. L. Clédat wrote: “Les peintures de mœurs chevaleresques, les descriptions de fêtes, de tournois et de combats, nous plaisent encore par elles mêmes lorsqu'elles sont vives et légères, mais elles valent surtout par les renseignements précieux qu'elles nous fournissent sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.” There is obviously some vagueness here, and it becomes desirable to separate the realistic from the conventional material in the Middle English metrical romances in order to determine where the art of the romance writers was merely “mechanic” and where they were actually attempting to give “renseignements précieux … sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.”