Perhaps the most significant link between Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Saxo Grammaticus story about Amlethus is to be found in that part of the tale which describes the hero's feigned madness. Although the plot of the story follows a rather common pattern and even the characters, as presented by Saxo, are mostly well-known types that may be found in any number of legends, the picture of the suppressed youth who hides his superiority over his enemies behind double-talk and disguised meaning is certainly food for a poet's imagination. However, what gives the Danish story its strange attraction is precisely what makes it so difficult to understand its details. Puns and ambiguities in a foreign language are notoriously hard to understand, and even if we had the Danish original of Saxo's tale, we would probably find ourselves baffled by more than one of its word plays. Translated into flowery Latin by a man who can be shown to have misunderstood at least part of what his source offered, its real meaning has revealed itself to modern interpretation only gradually, and by no means completely.

The metrical romance Sir Launfal, with its six Middle English versions and two French sources, is rich in material for an investigation of one phase of practical literary criticism in Mediaeval England. Each redactor of the story made certain changes, which when compared with the changes made by the others, and when classified and analyzed with them will not only yield information about the editorial practice of the redactors but will also reveal something of their theory of literary criticism. Such an investigation of the English versions of Sir Launfal, however, must be postponed until the relationships of these to their sources can be made clear. The views so far advanced regarding the relationship of Lanval and Graelent show that there is little agreement on, and hence no satisfactory clarification of, the point.

Emotion, according to scientific writers of the Renaissance, is a physiological as well as a psychological phenomenon. A passion provokes muscular activity in the heart and movements of humors to or from the heart. It is accompanied, moreover, by intensification of two of the four primary physical qualities: heat, cold, moisture, and dryness. Heat and dryness, for instance, are concomitants of anger; an angry man is a hot, dry man. A sorrowful or fearful man is a cold, dry man. A desirous, hopeful, or joyful man is a hot, moist man. Since choler is a hot, dry humor, men of choleric complexion, or temperament, are physically predisposed to anger, and anger is the passion most characteristic of them. Since melancholy is a cold, dry humor, melancholy men are naturally prone to fear and sorrow. Since blood is hot and moist, sanguine persons are naturally inclined to desire, hope, and joy. Phlegmatic men are relatively passionless, for phlegm is cold and moist and there are no cold and moist passions.

Economic and cultural globalization threatens the nation-state's ability to control institutions like the university, where a general emphasis on national subjectivities and ideologies is giving way to a focus on diasporic and postnational formations. Globalization challenges our tendency in literary studies to organize programs and curricula along national lines. This is particularly true for English literature, the contemporary production and consumption of which no longer take place within discrete national borders but unfold in a complex system of transnational economic and cultural exchanges. As we reorganize our approach to English in this context, we need to develop a thorough understanding of the key terms, issues, and debates that have marked the rise of globalization studies. Most important, we need to resituate English in a global framework without subjecting postnational literatures to the colonizing effects of some of our traditional hierarchies and practices.

This essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:

“Las versiones homéricas” (“Some Versions of Homer”) was first published in 1932 in Discusión, a volume of essays reflecting Borges's principal preoccupations at the time: Argentine reality, Eastern philosophy, and literary and rhetorical issues. Doubtlessly belonging to the last category, “Some Versions of Homer” is the first of a series of pieces that question translation's marginal status and resituate the translator's activity at the center of literary discussion. These texts include “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939), which is one of Borges's first “ficciones” and which George Steiner, in After Babel, calls a summa of all translation theory (70). “The Translators of the 1001 Nights” (1935) and “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald” (1952) are among other noteworthy Borgesian discussions of the historical paradoxes and metaphysical mysteries of translation.

L'espion du Grand-Seigneur or Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, perhaps best known as the work which inspired Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, is usually considered the beginning of the “foreign spy” convention in English literature. Modern readers of the six French (or eight English) duodecimo volumes may be puzzled to discover its appeal. When the collection of letters first appeared, however, it was immediately termed “un tour d'esprit … & une fiction ingénieuse”; the eighteenth-century reading public welcomed it as written with “beaucoup d'agrément, & d'une variété fort amusante,” and “as instructive and delightful, as the Manner of finding it was strange and surprizing.”

Luis Martín Santos' Tiempo de silencio displays a peculiar vulnerability to commentary. The novel both invites interpretation and “thematizes” the invitation. In this essay I offer a reading of the novel that explores—and exploits—such vulnerability. More concretely, I offer a reading anchored in two related notions, repetition and excess, for in and through them the work discloses its hermeneutic complexity. Accordingly my discussion moves from substances to events; it moves, that is, from a consideration of how excess is embodied in certain emblematic substances (Secs. 1 and 2) to a consideration of the repetitiveness of the novel's events (Secs. 3 and 4). Such an exercise should not only shed new light on one of the most significant Spanish novels of this century but also, implicitly, raise important questions about the relationship between a commented text and its commentary.

Freud, der Philosoph, lebte von früh auf in Hader mit den Philoso-phen. Die Religionen behandelte er wie irgendein Aufklärer des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts—doch subtiler, mit den Waffen einer Psychologie, die sie noch nicht ahnten. Mit den Kunsten lebte er in Frieden ... man könnte fast sagen: in sehnsuchtiger Bewunderung.

Whitman's experimental poetic, a part of larger personal and national experiments, was severely tried by the assassination of President Lincoln. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” the poem occasioned by Lincoln's death, is not a traditional elegy but a crisis poem: in it, Whitman tests the efficacy of various poetic and linguistic forms and conventions in confronting the terrorism of history and the acute consciousness of time that the assassination triggered in him. While he acknowledges in “Lilacs” the attractions of elegiac conventions, narrative orders, symbolism, and transcendent lyricism, he learns in the course of the poem to do without them and the consolations they offer. “Lilacs” not only reaffirms Whitman's commitment to experimentalism but moves beyond his earlier major poems in its full consciousness and complete acceptance of the dangers and the necessity of forgoing the protection of conventions and traditional forms and orders.

In an article published in this periodical Professor James G. Southworth has reopened the question of the pronunciation or non-pronunciation of Chaucer's unstressed -e in rhyme, and has come to the conclusion that this -e was not sounded in Chaucer's time, and should not now be sounded by readers of his poetry. With Professor Southworth's conclusion many students of Chaucer will undoubtedly sympathize. The modern ear is trained to hear poetry read for the sense as dictated by the syntax, and without regard for any claims that the individual line may have to being treated as a vocal unit distinct from its neighbors. Such a reading is often made difficult by the sounding of the final -e, which tends to prolong the pause. Yet despite the attractiveness of Professor Southworth's argument there are several aspects of it that should, in view of the importance of the subject, be examined in detail before we altogether abandon the -e in rhyme. To make such an examination is the purpose of this paper.

In Florence, in the Uffizi Gallery, is the famous painting by Botticelli entitled La Calumnia d'Apelle. The picture shows several allegorical figures dramatically grouped and exquisitely colored against a background of classical arcades looking upon a distant sea. The exact date of this picture is not known, but Horne, the greatest authority on the life and works of Botticelli, places it about 1494. It is the object of this paper to trace the theme of the Calumny of Apelles from its origin in classical antiquity to the time of Botticelli, noting particularly the literary manifestations to which it gave rise in Florence in the Quattrocento.

In this essay I hope to restore to Washington Irving a small measure of his fame as the first significant author of American fiction. Irving has been acclaimed as our literary mediator with England, where he was the first American to win critical praise. He is valued, too, as a pioneer, introducing Continental romanticism and the Gothic mode into American writing. But I wish to praise him on other grounds: as the first important American author to put to literary use the comic mythology and popular traditions of American character which, by the early nineteenth century, bad proliferated widely in oral tradition. The case for Irving's achievement in this direction rests primarily upon the personalities of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” There he gave our literature its first important statement of the clash of regional characters—the Yankee vs. the backwoodsman— who had already emerged as the dominant types in our regional folk traditions. The conflict between them was soon to become a major theme in our literature, as well as a continuing motif in a century and a half of folktales, and in our national history.

Despite the well-established critical opinion that the Defence is a polite, straightforward manifesto of a literary theory with little apparent value as literature, Sidney's treatise is a complexly imaginative work, informed with the same dramatic conflicts between author, persona, and subject matter that characterize Astrophil and Stella. The persona exonerates poetry and energizes his oration by creating two “dramas” : he persuades his listeners to live up to certain expectations by playing the carefully defined role of his confidantes, and, at the same time, speaker-as-energetic-defender distances himself from the process of persuasion through irony and self-mockery. Thus, the speaker “beguiles” his listeners through audience psychology, rich imagery, and rhythmic prose while simultaneously warning sensitive auditors to beware of his fervor and seeming guilelessness.

During the movement to introduce French classical drama into Spain in the eighteenth century, we find that Racine's authority is cited less than Corneille's in support of theories, but that his tragedies met with greater acceptance. Racine did not loom large as a doctrinaire; his theories were revealed chiefly through the study of his tragedies and in his defenses of these in certain of his prefaces, but they did not force themselves upon the attention of Spanish neo-classicists in the form of connected discourses as did Corneille's.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
Hamlet

Discussions of Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy are almost as varied and divergent as interpretations of the play itself.1 Different understandings of the play and different formulations of Hamlet's character naturally affect interpretations of the soliloquy, but interpretations which fail to consider the dramatic context of the speech are surely faulty in critical procedure. Unfortunately, most discussions of the passage overlook or minimize the relevance of the surrounding action to it, an error that may then lead to problems of coherent or thorough analysis of meaning. The fault of ignoring the dramatic context, for example, may be seen in G. Wilson Knight's approach to the speech in “Hamlet Reconsidered”:

This essay explores the ruins trope in representations of the turn–of–the-millennium Latin American city. Like Sabina Berman in her dramatic evocation of Mexico City, Latin American artists represent urban ruins as volatile locales of cultural and historical presences that conflict and resist banishment. This analysis of Berman's Muerte súbita (“Sudden Death”), first staged in 1988, draws on recent theoretical inquiries that highlight the ruin's nonlinear juxtaposition of time frames and its association with the underbelly of Western modernity's rationalist narratives of progress and with a forward–looking critical consciousness. I examine the play's work with ruins and the ghostly presences they harbor to evoke contentious social, cultural, and artistic presences in a disintegrating Mexico City landscape. In stirring up the debris of vanishing urban utopias, works such as Berman's play constitute critical refusals of closure and conjure up unresolved cultural debates vying for a hearing. They also link the ruins trope to constructive, nonutopian imaginings of a less ruinous future and to creative engagements with the urban terrain, however devastated, in search of something of value.

Among the changes in the art of fiction between the eighteenth century, when that art began to assume its modern shape, and the present, when it has arrived at what may be the ultimate degree of sophistication, one of the most basic is, doubtless, the increasing degree of particularity in the characterization. The change is perhaps mainly a phenomenon of the novel, which by its conditions is extremely favorable to minute character-studies; nevertheless, the problem of particularity affects all kinds of writing in which character is portrayed at all. The theoretical treatment of the issue in the eighteenth century broadened out beyond the limits of any one art, and a modern treatment may justifiably do the same.

The distributional environment of the nasal phoneme /ŋ/, compared to those of /n/ /m/, is restricted in Modem German but reflects its origin from an allophone (variant) of /n/ before velar consonants. The phoneme developed first in medial position through the loss of /g/ in the cluster /ng/; in final position the frequent replacement of /g/ by its fortis counterpart /k/ largely prevented this loss. Late Old High German n-spellings (e.g., sinen), particularly in the 11th-century Physiologus, are the first evidence for the /ŋ/-phoneme, which generally continues, however, to be written ng (singeri). Middle High German assonances made medial/ŋŋ/ likely, which is still found in some Swiss dialects. Descriptive statements by Early New High German grammarians clearly reveal the phonemic status of /ŋ/.