Because we conventionally think of marriage in social and moral terms, we tend to regard it as a subject practically indigenous to the novel. Hence a work like Wuthering Heights poses problems for the traditional genre critic, since while this work is concerned with marriage its conventions are not those of the novel. The usual tactic is to call Brontë's work a “romance,” but marriage is not compatible with the “romance” as the term is usually defined. It is thus important to recognize that there are two types of marriage plots in prose fiction: one indigenous to the novel, that might be called “wedlock”; another, indigenous to works like Wuthering Heights, that may be called “hierogamy.” Thus, works like Wuthering Heights should not be classified as “displaced novels” but as examples of an autonomous genre which for the present might be designated “mythic narrative.”

An analysis of Emily Dickinson's metrics suggests that her meters—even in individual lines of poetry—can be read as signs for the connotations they have acquired and for the cultural contexts that have empowered them. Iambic pentameter, the dominant meter in Dickinson's poetic lineage and culture, although rare in her work, plays a significant role in some of her most famous poems. Dickinson's iambic pentameters usually occur in a dynamic with her ordinary meter, the hymn stanza, a relation that reflects her ambivalence toward the male-identified poetic authority represented by iambic pentameter. Reading key poems for their semantic-metrical connections—the ways in which the semantic and metrical levels comment on each other—illuminates Dickinson's association of canonical poetic strength with patriarchal structures such as Christianity, with social conventions of fame and power, and with both triumph and failure.

The document that follows is the fruit of an experiment. To broaden the scope of this issue of PMLA, Heather Dubrow, coordinator of the special topic, suggested that the journal invite a group of academics to meet during the 1994 MLA convention to discuss the status of evidence. The participants, who were chosen to represent a range of specialities and interests, wrote preliminary statements that were circulated in the group before the meeting. Some of the questions raised during the discussion arose from these statements.

In “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,” a letter to a former confessor, Petrarch famously admits to having ascended a peak for no other reason than to admire the view. As a failed conversion narrative, the letter is ultimately as gratuitous as the climb it recounts. Noting a number of similarities between climbing the mountain and composing the letter, I argue that the literal ascent he describes is a figure for his literary ascent, through this letter and other texts, to fame and notoriety. In condemning the climb, Petrarch figuratively condemns the letter, censuring what he does even as he does it.

Until very recently the Merchant's Tale has been the least controversial of all the Canterbury Tales. Several generations of critics have been united in scandalized astonishment over the un-Chaucerian qualities of the tale. Tatlock expressed the prevailing view in these often quoted words: “For unrelieved acidity the Merchant's Tale is approached nowhere in Chaucer's works. … Without a trace of warm-hearted tolerance or genial humor, expansive realism or even broadly smiling animalism, it is ruled by concentrated intelligence and unpitying analysis.” A generation earlier Kittredge had called the tale a “frenzy of contempt and hatred,” and a generation later Hugh Holman brought together all the old terms, “savagely obscene, angrily embittered, pessimistic, and unsmiling,” and contributed his own “dark cynicism.”

This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevailing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Glück practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional immediacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocutionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Glück's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.

Miller Reads So the Chinese (and Young, Western Computer Gamers) Don't Have To

In August 2010, I Attended a Lecture that J. Hillis Miller Gave at the Shanghai jiao Tong University on the Challenge of Reading world literature. The lecture argued that in a globalizing world, traveling literature grows distant from its linguistic milieu, local readership, and aesthetic context, making it our challenge to find a reading method that could safeguard these endangered aspects of the text's specificity. To do this, he proposed to imagine himself as a Chinese anthologist who, wishing to include a translation of William Butler Yeats's poem “The Cold Heaven” in a Chinese anthology of world literature, must ask himself, “Just what would I need to tell Chinese readers to make them the best possible readers of this poem?” Miller concluded that, as that anthologist, he would need to give them the facts about Yeats's life and works, an account of the generic rules of the poem's verse form, a note on the broad recurrence of “sudden” and “suddenly” in Yeats's oeuvre, information about “[w]hat sort of bird the rook is and why they are delighted by cold weather,” a clarification of the differing connotations of “heaven” and “skies” for Christian readers familiar with “The Lord's Prayer,” an explanation of what the oxymoron “burning ice” has meant in the Western poetic tradition, a pointer to the allusion in the word “crossed” to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and some sense of the embedded subtext of Yeats's failure to woo Maud Gonne (256). For, according to Miller (citing David Damrosch), when culturally distant readers are not made aware of the “vast substratum beneath” a poem, they are “likely to impose domestic literary values on the foreign work” (254). In short, a respectful reading method must ensure that such readers are guided through the text, in the light of its original context.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

I was introduced to the term public intellectual almost twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in a literary course on African American music taught by the cultural critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The class conversations began with readings of jazz and hip-hop artists as “organic intellectuals” in the sense developed by Antonio Gramsci. We quickly moved to the debates sparked by Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual (1993) and to the rise of the black public intellectual as demonstrated by the formation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of an academic “dream team” in African American studies at Harvard, Cornel West's publication of Race Matters (1994), and Robert Boynton's March 1995 article in the Atlantic entitled “The New Intellectuals,” which added Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, June Jordan, and many others to that category. By the time I arrived at Harvard in 1999, for graduate study in African American literature, the idea of the black public intellectual served as a backdrop and a blueprint for how my generation of scholars could live inside and beyond the campus walls. As beneficiaries of that era, my peers and I did not necessarily have to prove that our work belonged in the public; instead, we had to wrestle with newer questions of format and forum in the digital age.

Woven through the threads of the poetry, performance, and visual art of Cecilia Vicuña are the image and metaphor of weaving itself, a visual and cultural reminder of an other—indigenous and feminine—form of forging cultural memory. Ever committed to using the aesthetic both to remember the violent exclusions of history and to explore the perpetuation and transformation of the marginalizing structures of power in the present, Vicuña's multigenre work spans over thirty years of Chile's turbulent history of struggle with dictatorship and toward democracy. This essay analyzes the interlacing of textile and text in quipoem, a collection of the poetry and visual art of this author-artist that re-presents a constantly evolving theorization of the complex relation between aesthetics and politics, writing and difference, and memory and power in the postcolonial, postdictatorship context of the Americas in the age of neoliberal globalization.

The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom's “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading's original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century.

This article compares and contrasts how the texts of Greek tragedy thematize ending and how German idealism, especially Hegel and Schelling, constructed a theory of ending in relation to Greek tragedy. In particular, through Hegel's and Schelling's paradigmatic readings of Oedipus, the article demonstrates a deep-seated commitment to a Protestant Christian teleology that continues, unrecognized, to influence modern readings of Greek tragedy.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in discourses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testimony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide.

Despite its newness, disability-theater studies is an incredibly rich area of inquiry that is exploding in artistic practice and scholarship. The university is a particularly suitable site for a meeting of disability and the theater; after all, we theater scholars think of our classrooms and productions as laboratories not only for showcasing knowledge but for producing, rehearsing, and revising it. As the theater scholar Jill Dolan points out, live performance, especially in the liberal arts setting, has the unique power to test, on bodies willing to try them, academic theories that are otherwise purely theoretical. The feedback loop that oscillates between theory and practice in theater studies is necessarily changed by the inclusion of disability perspectives in the classroom, research programs, and performance offerings. Interestingly, an underlying theme of disability perspectives is that the lived experience of disability is always already performative; indeed, many of us with disabilities understand our disabilities as performance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of living in the world. Consider what the playwright and wheelchair user John Belluso told me in a recent interview: “Any time I get on a public bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I'm lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and people are along the lines, and they're turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It's theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage and we're constantly performing.” The perspective of disability as performance undergirds and permeates disability art and scholarship. Thus, my own development as a disability-theater scholar and artist frames my perception of how disability challenges both the practical and the theoretical aspects of theater studies and points to the role universities play in fostering further development of the field.

Literary practice may be more deeply shaped by basic literacy training than we have noticed. This is particularly true for English writers of the late fourteenth century, when the constant movement out of Latin into English in schoolrooms both ensured that translation exercises became a method for making vernacular poetry and demonstrated that English had a grammar of its own. As the most basic grammatical concepts and the simplest exercises of literacy training evolved into resources for literary technique, the style of writers such as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower became “grammaticalized.” For this reason, a more detailed understanding of the forms of pedagogy employed in grammar schools can be equivalent to a genealogy of the important elements of a style.

This essay questions the relation between national affiliation and other elements of identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality. Citing British newspaper stories and editorials of the 1920s that sexualized and pathologized the black man, I connect the fear these articles reflect to the fear of the white flapper. Joan Riviere's 1929 psychoanalytic study of femininity and masquerade, which explores the psychic parameters of gendered national belonging, frames my reading of Woolf's use of racial tropes in Orlando (1928), where they function within strategies for granting national belonging to the queerly gendered white Englishwoman. These strategies, which are part of the masquerade, include the narrator's satiric stance and the deployment of secret codes. Despite the text's ambivalences and ambiguities, Orlando's sexuality is finally domesticated by the racial and sexual terms of national belonging.

“Dichten heisst, hinter Worten das Urwort erklingen lassen.”

These words of Gerhardt Hauptmann are quoted by C. G. Jung in his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art,” as illustration of the poet's sense of tapping a deeper level of the psyche than that which is called into play in everyday thought and action. This lower level of psychic activity (Jung explains), that of the collective or racial unconscious, contains the inherited potentiality of mental images that are the psychic counterpart of the instincts. “In itself the collective unconscious cannot be said to exist at all; that is to say, it is nothing but a possibility, that possibility in fact which from primordial time has been handed down to us in the definite form of mnemic images, or expressed in anatomical formations in the very structure of the brain. It does not yield innate ideas, but inborn possibilities of ideas, which also set definite bounds to the most daring phantasy. It provides categories of phantasy-activity, ideas a priori as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except by experience.” This theory is not peculiar to Jung, being in fact rather prevalent in our time. “I began certain studies and experiences,” says Yeats, describing his activities in the year 1887, “that were to convince me that images well up before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.” Jung, however, has given the idea its scientific formulation. For these ideas a priori of the collective unconscious, Jung employs the term “primordial image,” borrowed from Jacob Burckhardt, or “archetype” as used by St. Augustine. The peculiar gift of the poet, or of the artist in any field, is his ability to make contact with the deeper level of the psyche and to present in his work one of these primordial images. The particular image that is chosen will depend on the unconscious need of the poet and of the society for which he writes. “Therein lies the social importance of art; it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, since it brings to birth those forms in which the age is most lacking. Recoiling from the unsatisfying present the yearning of the artist reaches out to that primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the insufficiency and onesidedness of the spirit of the age. The artist seizes this image, and in the work of raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming its shape, until it can be accepted by his contemporaries according to their powers.” In this view the artist is the cultural leader indispensable to any social change. “What was the significance of realism and naturalism to their age? What was the meaning of romanticism, or Hellenism? They were tendencies of art which brought to the surface that unconscious element of which the contemporary mental atmosphere had most need. The artist as educator of his time—much could be said about that today.”

Most dryden scholars believe that Religio Laici (1682) is not a statement of the Anglican position, though the poet asserts that it is. In fact, the widely accepted view is that it is a Catholic poem in spirit. This interpretation was established by Louis I. Bredvold in a very influential book, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934), in which he stated, “Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther are so closely allied in their philosophy that the earlier poem might be regarded as a sort of prelude or introduction to the later.” Prior to Bredvold's pronouncement, some critics had questioned the orthodoxy of Religio Laici as an Anglican poem, and had suggested that Dryden was troubled by religious doubts and that he was halfway on the road to Catholicism in 1682. It was Bredvold, however, who crystallized these views by asserting unequivocally that the poem was fideistic, and hence Catholic in thought and temper.