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.

Sturm und Drang's self-critique of its rebellious impulses resembles Kant's virtually contemporaneous struggle to formulate the principle of autonomy, for both involve the reconciliation of individual freedom with rules that can make such freedom accountable. Dramas of Goethe, Klinger, and Schiller acknowledge the need for principles of accountability by presenting the violent Kraftmensch within plots designed to justify the figure's actions. The frequent repetition of words and phrases in the drama of Sturm und Drang is part of the tradition's search for repeatable rules within the scope of its own impulsiveness. Among major writers of Sturm und Drang, only J. M. R. Lenz avoids depicting the Kraftmensch. Because Lenz will not mitigate the culpability of his characters, his drama can deal more honestly with problems of freedom and individuality.

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.

In 1828 Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem “Ančar,” usually rendered in English as “The Upas Tree.” Because of the obviously derivative theme of the lyric, scholars have been searching for the exact place where the poet learned of this tree and its terrible powers. At first the searchings were random. Professor Sumcov, writing around the turn of the century, claimed that Pushkin had read of the tree in some of the popular “travels to the east.” Not convinced by Sumcov's argument, P. O. Morozov proposed a stanza (iv, 126) from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Valerij Brjusov, the scholarly Symbolist poet who edited a collection of Pushkin's works (1919), thought that a poem by Millevoye, apparently “Le Mancenillier,” was the real source. In the collection of essays entitled Pushkin in World Literature (1926), N. Jakovlev showed that a proposed epigraph for the poem was from Coleridge; ten years later the Academy edition of Pushkin's works had this note: “the poem is thematically related to Coleridge's work Remorse.” In an interesting short study Professor Jakubovič has shown a certain parallel with Pushkin in a passage from Colman's play The Law of Java; the passage, however, could hardly be the only direct source.

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.

James Buchanan was an eighteenth-century schoolmaster, grammarian, and maker of pronouncing dictionaries who played an important part in the contemporary movement to “fix” the English language. The significance of this movement is recognized in several recent books. The latter half of the century was more prolific than the earlier half. The third quarter in particular, the period of Buchanan's activity, produced many significant works, among which are Harris's Hermes, Johnson's Dictionary, Priestley's Rudiments, Lowth's Grammar, Karnes's Elements, Sheridan's Elocution, A. Campbell's anonymous Lexiphanes, Baker's Reflections, Kenrick's Dictionary, Buchanan's Essay, to name but a few of the books which illustrate pioneer tendencies.

The Mill on the Floss, like Sophocles' Antigone, illustrates George Eliot's belief in the recurring conflict between the individual moral vision and social convention. The central problem in Antigone, she wrote, lay between “reverence for the gods” and “the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each.” Whenever man's moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed. Her words seem applicable to the dominant conflict in The Mill. An honorable but unimaginative person, Tom Tulliver clashes with his sister Maggie when she refuses to abide by conventions which seem inhumane or hurtful to those she loves. As Antigone espouses a higher law by burying Polynices in defiance of Creon, so Maggie espouses a higher law in opposing the vengeance against Wakem. Although Tom and Maggie are both partly right in their quarrel over Maggie's secretly seeing Philip Wakem, Tom, like Creon, is foolishly overconfident in crediting his conventional honor, which is simply no measure of the case. The conflict between Maggie and her brother is further aggravated by the tendency of the practical-minded Tom to domineer over his imaginative and (to him) inconsistent sister.

The Mexican literary periodicals of the nineteenth century may be roughly divided into two main classes: the purely literary and the semi-literary. To the second and more numerous group belong such periodicals as those intended primarily for women or certain social classes, and those which had for their purpose the vulgarization of useful knowledge or the dissemination of political propaganda. Of the political, the writer has disposed as follows: those of little or no literary value have been disregarded; those presenting only a few poems of intrinsic worth are mentioned cursorily in the text but not included in the ensuing bibliography; while those in which satiric and political verse is predominant are listed with details at the end of the main bibliography. Much valuable literary material is buried in the daily newspapers, only the most important of which can be considered here, even briefly. The weekly literary editions or supplements of the larger dailies, generally issued separately with volume and issue numbers of their own, are included, for their contribution is of distinct value.

Thomas Middleton's Game at Chesse (1624), expressing the national hatred of Spaniard and Jesuit alike, was played nine days straight before houses packed to suffocation for the first consecutive long run in English theatrical history. With England aroused over the religious wars of the Continent and the return of Prince Charles from his unsuccessful visit to Madrid in quest of the Spanish Princess, the play appeared as a satirical allegory in the form of a game of chess, in which the English have the White and the Spaniards and Jesuits the Black men. Black secures the treacherous Fat Bishop and the White King's Pawn. Overthrow of the English Church and State seems imminent. The White Knight and the White Duke visit the Black House (Madrid), where their capture is attempted; but they checkmate the Black King and overthrow the Black forces. Its most recent editor has said that “more is known about A Game at Chesse than about any other pre-Restoration play.” Even so, some promising approaches to a fuller understanding have been overlooked.

While James Macpherson's epic translation Fingal has usually been marshaled as evidence or impugned for its lack thereof, it actually bears a reflexive and critical relation to the issue of evidence in eighteenth-century British culture. On the one hand, the text elicits the ubiquitous logic of probability that was coming to shape the epistemology of legal evidence as well as parallel formations in commercial society and even in theories of the novel; on the other hand, however, the text counteracts this logic by highlighting its own affiliation with the improbability of witness testimony. Such testimony—improbable because widely differentiated from the deliberations of jurors, for example—increasingly came to reflect the relation of literature to the legal, scientific, and philosophical discourses of knowledge. Fingal shows how the improbability of the Scottish Highlands began symbolically to enable configurations of literary form as a vehicle of social critique.

Science fiction, ranging from films to industrial design to world's fairs, is a cultural system no more confined to literature than love is to love letters. From its self-recognition in 1926, science fiction has involved commercial and social realities most obviously visible in fandom and the hundreds of annual science fiction conventions. This system includes many types of consumers and producers, even collaboratively self-correcting volunteer bibliographers. Collectively, science fiction fandom, the first organized fandom, has created vast informational resources that allow not only reference but also statistical inquiry. The Genre Evolution Project (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/) shows that these social structures and resources potentiate, in an age of widespread computer networking, the transformation of criticism from acts of isolated scholars working with narrowly defined subjects to collaborative projects drawing on human and informational resources across disciplinary boundaries. Science fiction points to a future in which criticism will be more systematic, collaborative, and quantitative.

Of Franco Moretti's masterworks of literary history and theory, why is it the loosely assembled collection of occasional pieces Distant Reading that has captured the literary critical spotlight? Why now, just when enrollments in the humanities are plummeting, new technologies for storing and distributing information are revolutionizing interpersonal communication and scientific methods, and global is well on its way to replacing interdisciplinary as the descriptor favored by university administrators? Moretti is not alone in attempting to reconfigure a discipline that tends to favor the singular text and national literary traditions for a generation of students who apparently could not care less about either. In his effort to adapt literary history and form to the conditions of globalization that make them seem irrelevant, he asks us to abandon our obsessive focus on canonical texts—to start instead considering how certain forms of literature made the quantum leap from nation to world and what formal changes they underwent in doing so. This project he warns, will require us to “unlearn” how to read a literary text and to question the assumption that “world literature” is an object to be known: “We must think of it as a problem that asks for a new critical method” (46). He famously exposes this problem by staging various encounters between literary form and quantitative analysis.

Purely Literary rather than historical evidence should not be excluded if it helps to solve a problem, or even if it merely sharpens the sense of such a problem as the meaning of the dragon in Beowulf.

Some difficulty has probably been caused by thinking of the dragon as a symbol rather than as some other kind of image although, to be sure, a hard-and-fast distinction may not always be possible. To me the meaning of a symbol is more or less arbitrary, especially because the symbol represents something, or means something, usually quite unlike itself–as the eagle is physically unlike the United States. This meaning is imposed outside the work of art rather than within it. Such meaning has to be agreed upon, either by authors like Blake or Yeats in contracts with themselves which must sooner or later be registered with the people, or else by the folk in some other manner, as when they agree in a ‘religious’ community that, say, Ceres shall represent corn and harvesting. Once agreed upon, the meaning of the symbol must remain fixed, at least in the community; otherwise, communication will be confused. Of course, the determination of a symbol's meaning can only be by external evidence. Such meaning probably depends upon remote associations which are certainly not immediately available to the reader and which are, possibly, not always exactly available even to the writer, as in surrealism. These associations can often be recovered, no doubt, and the reason for the meaning can then be understood. But at least until one examines the creative processes behind the evolution of the symbol, its meaning must seem artificial.

The Center for Scholarly Editions (CSE), administered by a Committee on Scholarly Editions, was suggested by an ad hoc committee of the Modern Language Association in the spring of 1975 and officially established, by action of the Executive Council, as an entity within the MLA on 1 September 1976. The occasion for that ad hoc committee's deliberations was the impending expiration of the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities under which the MLA Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA) had been operating; the termination of that grant on 31 August 1976 offered an appropriate moment for the MLA to rethink its role in promoting editorial scholarship. The CEAA not only had fostered the production of a large number of editions of American authors but had increased the awareness of editorial problems among members of the profession generally. It seemed natural, therefore, that the next step should be a broadening of the scope of the MLA's committee on editions to encompass more than American literature. Accordingly, no restrictions were placed on the content of the editions with which the CSE could concern itself: editors of any kind of work or document—whether literary or not—from any country can feel free to seek the services of the CSE.

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.

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.

In the familiar oration of Prince Hal over the body of the slain Percy occur the lines:

“Favours” in this passage is usually glossed as a scarf or riband, perhaps a glove. The lines are taken to imply a stage direction of some sort. It would seem, however, that Shakespeare here intended more than a conventional chivalric gesture on the part of the regenerate Prince. From a chain of textual evidence it is demonstrable that the playwright had in mind for his climax a far more dramatic, more tacitly ironic move—Hal's disengaging his royal plumes (the “budding honours” of his own helmet) to shroud the face of his dead rival. In three earlier passages the quarto text supports this interpretation.

This essay uses Shakespeare's sonnets to test the implications of the fantasy that poems, although not living things, preserve human life. The most valuable object in the community of the sonnets is the face of a beautiful young man. The speaker in the poems argues that the young man should entrust his most valuable quality to some technology of preservation, such as sexual reproduction or poetry. In every scenario, his beauty is preserved in a form that will not allow him to enjoy it: he inevitably has to die while his beauty lives on. Preservation thus turns out to be an unattractive plan against the fact of mortality and the possibility of holocaust. The fantasy of preservation is compatible with and even encourages a holocaust fantasy: everyone else has to die to prove that the young man's beautiful face is indestructible.