The view that philosophers take of their art and craft changes when they remember that philosophy is not merely descriptive but is also performative. To use J. L. Austin's vocabulary, this change occurs when philosophers admit that their writings have illocutionary and perlocutionary, as well as locutionary, import. Any proposition is at once a judgment made by a thinking person and an expressive utterance presented to an audience; any argument is rational persuasion (even when it is quoted in a logic textbook). To speak with Stanley Cavell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, from their caravansaries along the trade route between Harvard and Cambridge, the change occurs when philosophers admit that their writings always take place in language games and forms of life, so that the search for criteria in framing concepts and for evidence in framing arguments is also a claim to community. Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, urged similar insights and questions on philosophers when he wrote about rhetoric as an extension of logic and ethics. Filtered through the editorial work of Richard McKeon, the Aristotelian tradition at the University of Chicago produced books about practical deliberation that to my mind deserve at least as much attention as those of Cavell and Austin, works by Wayne Booth, Edward Levi, David Luban, Paul Kahn, and Eugene Garver. Notably, their texts deal with works of literature and of law, discursive realms in which narratives of human action are central and irreducible, however much they may be subject to philosophical analysis.

Recent studies of The Blithedale Romance have demonstrated conclusively the importance of distinguishing the perspective of Miles Coverdale, the first person narrator, from that of Hawthorne. Coverdale thinks of himself as an observer of a drama, as “Chorus in a classic play.” He holds himself aloof so that he may the better act as an interpreter of the action of the Romance. As he interprets, he reveals himself, and through him we get Hawthorne's vision of the internal conflicts which the artist must suffer.

When asked to reflect on the role of feminist criticism today, i immediately recalled the recent deaths of Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin. Friedan and Dworkin join an unfortunately growing list of well-known feminist thinkers who have died over the last few years. The passing of Friedan and Dworkin makes us think about the feminism they represented and indeed about the history of feminist thought itself, its ebbs and flows, its metaphoric births and deaths. Ideas, after all, are as living as people, with periods of growth, maturity, and decline.

WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF READING? AND WHAT DO WE HOPE TO LEARN FROM THE Answers to that question? Confirmation of deeply held prejudices, or a better understanding of what reading means in digital cultures? We need to pose those questions right up front because the debate about the state of reading has been precipitated by the increasing ubiquity of the e-book, even though reading culture has been undergoing massive infrastructural changes for over a decade in the United States. The public discourse on the state of reading and on whether it has a viable future has focused on the future of the book and of literary reading now that e-books have apparently changed everything. The state of reading, as such, is not at stake because it doesn't seem likely that firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will be swinging by your place anytime soon to torch your books and replace them with a well-appointed wall screen, eliminating reading forever in favor of mindless viewing. People will keep reading, if only to take in the endless text that comes at them on their various screens, from the ones on the wall to the ones they carry around with them everywhere on their portable devices. Try looking at those screens without reading. No, it's clear from the assumptions that underpin the end-is-near pronouncements about the e-book that there's reading and then there's reading and that when people talk about the future of reading, they're worried about whether readers worthy of the name will continue reading literary fiction in the twenty-first century. But that isn't a very interesting question because it imagines the act of reading in such an ahistorical manner, curled up in a well-upholstered time warp, far from the unruliness of contemporary reading cultures.

Roger Fry's notions of the artist's unique vision and of the aesthetic design that captures that vision have long been acknowledged as primary influences on To the Lighthouse. Consequently, for most commentators, the novel's closing events signify the achievement of a transcendent “oneness” or a perceptual balance captured in art but rarely experienced in life. Examination of repeated patterns of style and narrative progression shows that the design of the artist Lily's vision—one of unresolved ambivalence and estrangement rather than unity—is no different from that of the other characters, and this vision is the one caught in Lily's painting and reflected in all aspects of the novel. Woolf exploits Fry's theories to probe the desire for unity or “oneness” in personal and aesthetic relations, but she finds refuge, finally, in the act, not the result, of invention, in perception itself “before anything is made of it.”

Le développement des théories de l'honnêteté en France au dix-septième siècle a fait l'objet d'une étude bien connue de Maurice Magendie. Cette excellente étude s'arrête aux environs de 1660. Or, l'expression “honnête homme” est restée d'un usage courant bien après cette date, et le concept de l'honnêteté n'a pas cessé d‘être analysé et discuté. Il nous semble done intéressant d'essayer de suivre l‘évolution des idées sur l'honnêteté, au moins pendant les quarante dernières années du siècle.

Many in the profession, though apparently comfortable, feel demoralized. The prospect of unalienating work impelled many of us to become teachers of language and literature. The humanities, we assumed, would make the world a better place. Yet the assumption by an intelligentsia that the life of intellect will improve humanity is a self-serving ideology. We teach our subjects in institutions that are part of a rationalized arrangement for the profitable use of knowledge. Our profession is part of that rationalization process. Thus there is a contradiction between the profession's humanist ideology and what we actually do. This knowledge has led many to be demoralized. We know that we do not control our conditions of work. Therefore our labor is alienated, and we are an intellectual proletariat. We should struggle against these conditions in an organized fashion. But the attempt to change the nature of our profession, our departments, and our schools can be effective only within the context of the larger struggle to change the role culture plays in a capitalist society. Ultimately such cultural transformations involve the struggle to transform the society as a whole. It is a struggle we cannot escape.

Joseph Addison's Cato is the most important English verse drama of the eighteenth century; Allardyce Nicoll calls it “a landmark in the history of tragedy.” In addition, it is of great political interest, for its production in the turbulent year before the death of Queen Anne made it the rallying piece for Whigs and Tories, both of whom enrolled its propaganda on their side. Hence any document which throws new light on its composition is significant for that reason alone. That Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote a critique of Cato before it was produced, and that Addison followed several of her suggestions for improving his tragedy add to the importance of such a discovery. As a letter-writer Lady Mary has a secure reputation, but her brilliant, aggressive intellect impelled her to take a far more active and varied part in the literary scene of her time than has previously been realized. In her serving as play-doctor for such an influential drama as Cato we have further evidence of her versatility.

For many generations symbolism has dominated the poetry of America and Europe. In time, of course, the critics found out what was happening and they began to investigate the movement. They have carried their investigations further and further afield over the literature of the last four centuries and in the process they have enormously widened our knowledge of poetry. Through their labors we read with clearer eyes and a deeper enjoyment than before.

In the two parallel stories that constitute Il castello, some suddenly mute travelers use tarot decks to communicate their horrific tales to one another. Ultimately, the ghostly kings, queens, knights, and other conventional or famous literary characters who inhabit these novellas delimit two “voices” that frequently overlap and even coincide: the narrator-author’s and the spectator-reader’s. The violent chivalric world of war, love, and magic that generates the narrative action also produces a metanarrative dimension that asserts the text’s subject as writing and reading, while simultaneously figuring Calvino’s own writerly persona. The Number One tarot, Il Bagatto (The Minstrel), often images Faust in the fiction but more importantly images the writer, a (Marlovian) Faustian conjurer destined to fail. The ever-changing sequences of the cards allegorize the making of a fiction, while the deck itself allegorizes the plenitude of the finished text, unattainable by its author.

In a communication to the Times Literary Supplement, J. J. Auchmuty has suggested that a study of Wordsworth as a practical politician might remedy certain traditional misconceptions about the poet's activities in his declining years. As a matter of fact, he worked assiduously at a period of his life “when, according to legend, he is supposed to have been desiccated and devoid of principle,” in attempting to influence the passage of the Copyright Act of 1842. His part in this legislation has been taken for granted by scholars on the basis of statements to several correspondents that he had written many letters in support of the measure. But there is evidence now, both published and unpublished, that for five years he labored continually in assisting Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, the originator of the bill, by letters both private and public, interviews, and an official petition. While it is true that the Act promised to benefit him directly, there is no doubt that his interest in its passage was more than selfish and had its roots in what was, in effect, a struggle for survival of literature of quality in an age demanding quantity.

It is Vitally important that teachers of modern foreign languages be adequately prepared for a task which more and more Americans are declaring essential to the national welfare. Though a majority of the language teachers in our schools are well trained, many have been poorly or inadequately prepared, often through no fault of their own. The undersigned therefore present this statement of what they consider the minimal, good, and superior qualifications of a secondary school teacher of a modern foreign language.

This essay examines the role of Rétif's writings in the development of the concept of erotic fetishism and in the formation of the French literary canon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rétif explored foot and shoe fetishisms more than a century before the phenomena were medically recognized, anticipating the modern psychosexual use of the term fetishism and making important contributions to the invention of the theoretical concept. Rétif's works were accorded a privileged place in early pathologies of fetishism, which provoked a series of polemics among German and French medical doctors and literary scholars centered on notions of national supremacy and literary value. Marked as bad literature, in both senses of the term, Rétif's writing was subsequently excluded from the French literary canon on moral grounds and became a kind of fetish object in the French literary corpus. (ASW)

This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor's marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers find alternative means of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the commodities in their environments. At the same time, they ennoble such actions by modeling them on the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Whether in literature or in the broader culture, American rugged consumers thus mediate between the mythic models of self-sufficiency celebrated by the country's older, frontier capitalism and the postindustrial realities of the present. The essay posits four provisional categories of rugged consumerism, ranging from the hypermasculine weaponization of unlikely objects to the (re)creation of environmentally sustainable interior designs.

Although the influence of such philosophers as Holbach, Condorcet, and Godwin on Shelley's theory of the perfectibility of man has been noted, that of Pierre Jean George Cabanis, the French materialistic physician of the eighteenth century, has been overlooked. Yet Cabanis's ideas as put forward in his most considerable work, Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, cited in the notes to “Queen Mab,” on the important relation between man's physical well-being and his intellectual and moral health appear to have contributed a striking feature to the poet's exposition of his views in “Queen Mab” and even in “Prometheus Unbound.” If it be remembered that Shelley already, by virtue of his vegetarianism, considered that man cannot become morally perfect unless he be physically perfect, it is not surprising that Cabanis's emphasis on the same idea from another angle, namely, the necessity of a mild and equable climate for the best development of intellect and morality, impressed the poet to such an extent that he incorporated the physician's belief in his theory of perfectibility. His ready acceptance of Cabanis's ideas is the less surprising when it is remarked that Cabanis was also a perfectibilian, believing that man “est indéfinement perfectible, et qu'il devient en quelque sort, capable de tout.”

Adorno's Minima Moralia was part of a publishing boom in the genre of advice literature in postwar West Germany. The combination of economic resurgence and attempted cultural restoration resulted in a widespread wish to master forming models of social intercourse; this craving for guidance accounts for the volume's commercial success. But while Adorno participates in the culture of counseling, he couples practical suggestions with repeated announcements of the demise of the self-determining subject, the projected recipient of advice. He addresses problems that appear in the individual's frame of attention but consistently disputes that this is a meaningful scene of action in the age of total administration. Minima Moralia both inhabits and violates the conventions of advice literature in order to dramatize the experience of the discrepancy between societal logic and the individual's resources.

IN Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell makes a significant distinction between two kinds of infinity. One kind is illustrated by the progression from zero to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on to infinity; Russell calls this an infinite progression, and it is unlimited. The other idea is illustrated by the division of an interval between, say, one and two; first divide it into halves, then divide each of those halves, and so on infinitely. This is a compact series or an infinite class, and it is limited. The infinite progression and the infinite class are quite different ideas, and they have different philosophical uses. I suggest that a similar distinction may be made concerning literary forms, and that this distinction helps us to understand what is new about Ben Jonson's dramatic method. The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.

The students of the present generation are the first in a long time who will not take their cultural identities from books. Statistics reveal that film, museum, concert, and sports attendances are up but that fewer and fewer people are reading books. Those strange moments in nineteenth-century novels when young heroes strike poses, dress, coif, and woo by the book are gone, perhaps forever. Our students are more likely to take their models from television, films, glossy magazines, video games, or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. My colleagues in the profession report that, thanks to the expansion of visual culture, students now possess an enviable talent for decoding images, often to the detriment of reading ability. To be frank, I am not so convinced: in my experience, the most literate students continue to be the best readers of images. But I agree that we are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of visuality. A new era has dawned, and we are not prepared for it. We need to change our teaching and scholarship to keep up with our students.

William Cliff Martin in his paper “The Date and Purpose of Spenser's Veue” interprets Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland as intended to be a subtle and timely compliment to that newest and most powerful of Elizabeth's favorites, the Earl of Essex.

Literary historians are practically agreed as to the origin of the two elements which comprise the main plot of Ben Jonson's Epicorne. The story of a man induced by false pretences to marry an almost insanely loquacious woman is a version of a declamation by the Greek Sophist Libanius on the surly man who has married a talkative wife. In regard to this relationship there can be no question. The second, and more important, element of the main plot is the practical joke played upon an eccentric which results in his ostensible marriage to a boy disguised as a girl. The source of this story, the most authoritative German critics and Dr. Henry agree, is to be found in Plautus's Casina, in which a somewhat similar trick is played upon Lysidamus. To this opinion Herford and Simpson, the editors of the definitive edition of Jonson's works, add their endorsement: