In an article published nearly two de-cades ago, Joan Scott discussed the difficulty of persuading historians to take gender seriously. A common response to women's history was that “women had a history separate from men's, therefore let feminists do women's history, which need not concern us,” or “my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by knowing that women participated in it.” Despite the substantial number of works on women's history, the topic remained marginal in the discipline. Simply adding women to history, Scott argued, while necessary and important, would not be sufficient to change the paradigms of the profession. To accomplish that, feminists had to demonstrate that gender was “a constitutive element of social relationships” and “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (1055, 1067).

I became a feminist critic of the renaissance in 1989, when a professor, in answer to my question about why there were no women on the syllabus, replied that there were no women writers in the seventeenth century. This comment took me to the library, where I discovered what he should have known but did not have to: not only were there women writers in the period, but feminist literary critics were retrieving them from the archives and rewriting literary history in the light of their contributions. One of these women writers was Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), the author of a singularly massive amount of genealogical, historical, and personal writings and a subject of interest, long before the 1980s, for Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. In 1985, the Marxist feminist critic Katharine Hodgkin wrote an essay about Clifford's conflicted status as a woman (victim of patriarchy) and as a landlord (oppressor). Clifford has received different treatment in recent years, considered primarily as a diarist (with the attendant and often ahistorical assumptions the genre solicits [see Kunin]) and as a heroic resister of patriarchal forces. My goal here is to use Clifford as a case study for the role of feminist criticism today, not only because she has raised such complex issues for feminist critics of the Renaissance and early modern period but also because the issues her life and work raise about kinship and the household, property and political agency, and the intersectionality of determining forces of identity and power are of continuing relevance to feminist methodologies and politics. I am particularly concerned with feminist claims that have become axiomatic—for the early modern period as well as others—both at the level of historical progression (the march toward modernity) and in more synchronic analyses of social and cultural practices and relationships (including our assumptions that we know what patriarchy, kinship, and household mean). By unsettling these axioms and reconsidering the stories Clifford tells, I hope to illustrate the truth that feminist criticism is by its nature a reconsideration, a form of doing rather than being.

I want to begin with some anecdotal facts:

Item: a first-year seminar on multiethnicity in New York is taught at Barnard College only by the English faculty.

Item: a senior seminar on epic and romance in the Middle Ages, announced in the fall 2002 offerings of the University of Michigan's English department, will include works by Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France, but the only texts to be read in the original language are in Middle English.

Item: a comparative literature course on modernism, magical realism, and postmodernism at the University of Michigan for fall 2002 will read texts by Proust, Kafka, Mann, Borges, García Márquez, Tekin, Calvino, and Pamuk in English only

The rise of an interethnic imagination in recent american literature has been remaking what we think of as ethnic fiction into interethnic fiction. While memory, history, and tradition continue as shaping forces in American letters, an urge toward encounter with others is vividly reworking fictional structures, plots, casts of characters, and uses of language, as well as social visions, literary ambitions, and currents of intertextual influence. In some cases, the mind of a protagonist or narrator, indeed the very mind of a text, comes to seem the site of a momentous encounter of peoples, a living human nexus (Rody). Such is the case in the fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which the interethnic impulse generates a remarkable pronominal drama, a performance that oscillates between a narratorial “I” and a “we” to negotiate—across the pain and struggle of war, dislocation, and immigrant Americanization and across disparate political and literary allegiances—a Vietnamese American voice.

“Mon Dieu! quel succès!” such was the response of the Moroccan novelist, poet, and sociologist AbdelkéBir Khatibi (1938–2009) when he learned that his 1974 study of the “intersemiotics” of the Islamic body, La blessure du nom propre (“The Wound of the Proper Name”), which dealt, in part, with the monotheistic interdiction against tattoos, had inspired a reader to get a tattoo (Langue 15). While one might be tempted to interpret this remark merely as Khatibi's vindication of the affective powers of his writing, it in fact reveals an important element of his critical-literary practice: his way of bringing deconstruction to bear on the tasks of decolonization. The curious case of the tattooed reader illustrates how, by deconstructing holy writ's apparent desire “to erase in a single palimpsestic gesture all later writing, especially that which is traced on the body” (Blessure 66), Khatibi helped create the conditions for somebody else to perform an act of auto-bio-graphy, understood as a form of mental and corporeal decolonization.

Commentators on Felix Holt, the Radical have generally assumed that George Eliot started with a political novel in mind. What has never been sufficiently considered is that the genesis of Felix Holt was rather in the adulterous intrigue of Mrs. Transome with Lawyer Jermyn and the bitter consequences of this transgression to herself and their son Harold. The politics, and even the role of Felix himself, were probably afterthoughts.

One of the most compelling criticisms to emerge during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings called attention to the fact that those who benefited from the everyday policies and practices of the apartheid regime were neither identified as complicit in perpetuating systemic violence nor called to account. Nor was their implicated position in the apartheid state extensively analyzed in the commission's report. Commenting at the time on the inadequacy of the TRC process to identify beneficiaries of the apartheid regime and expose its structural violence, Mahmood Mamdani wrote that the TRC “has been interested only in violations outside the law, in benefits which are corruptions, but not in the systematic benefit which was conferred on beneficiaries at the expense of the vast majority of people in this country” (“Reconciliation” 3; also qtd. in Young 149). Mamdani here asserts that the ethical concept of the beneficiary is central to truth telling, reconciliation, and transitional nation building. His trenchant critique implicitly questions whether the truth-and-reconciliation project, relying as it does on the management of justice through the juridical statuses of “victim” and “perpetrator,” can deliver on its promise of addressing injustice and the aftereffects of radical injury and harm. Those positioned neither as victims nor as perpetrators are not called to recognize the benefits to them of structural violence, through which power, privilege, and “corporeal vulnerability” are unevenly distributed (Butler, Precarious Life 30). Nor are they asked to “bear moral responsibility to redress” the consequences of injustice (Mamdani, “Diminished Truth” 183). In response to Mamdani's critique, we want to consider how the ethical stance of the beneficiary can become visible in relation to victim and perpetrator positions and to what effect.

The censored media coverage of the Persian Gulf War obscured the region's geography and erased the suffering of combatants and civilians. In contrast, the literature and film on the war emphasize the human rather than the technological dimension of the fighting. The words and images used to represent the foot soldiers' deeply personal experiences are bound to the landscape. This essay sets forth a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives, which entails the study of an array of geographically oriented codes for making meaning out of wartime experience. The study of geographic signs in these narratives revolves around images and descriptions of the desert, which permeate such literary and filmic accounts of the ground fighting as Anthony Swofford's memoir Jarhead (2003), Sam Mendes's film adaptation Jarhead (2005), and David Russell's Three Kings (1999). Practicing a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives allows us to rethink the war, to reimagine what its stories might signify—morally as well as politically.

This paper examines the ways in which the idea of renaissance was understood and appropriated by Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century. My discussion foregrounds Hu Shi, one of the most important intellectual leaders in modern China and the main architect of the Chinese vernacular movement. I analyze his rewriting and reinvention of the European Renaissance as well as his declaration and presentation of the Chinese Renaissance in various contexts. Hu's creative uses of the Italian Renaissance and passionate claims for a Chinese Renaissance reveal the performative magic of the word renaissance and prompt us to ask what a renaissance is. The Chinese Renaissance and the fact that various non-European countries have declared and promoted their own renaissances invite a scholarly reconsideration of “renaissance” as a trans-cultural phenomenon rather than as a critical category originated and therefore owned by a certain culture.

Although Poe is now all but universally acknowledged to be one of the three or four literary geniuses that America has produced, there was a period immediately following his death when few writers in America were willing to concede to him any extraordinary merit beyond that of an exceptionally gifted artist. It has sometimes been held that Poe was similarly neglected even before his death. Thus, so distinguished a scholar as Professor Sir Walter Raleigh, of Oxford, in a letter addressed to the celebrators of the Poe centenary at the University of Virginia (1909), makes the statement that Poe was “barely recognized while he lived.” Baudelaire, who did more than any other to light the flame of Poe's reputation abroad, believed that Poe was cruelly neglected by his fellow-countrymen, and most other Frenchmen have, I believe, adopted much the same view. In America, too, there has long existed a tradition that Poe was but little appreciated during his lifetime,—a tradition that has flourished especially at the South, though it has not been confined to the South. On the other hand, some of the ablest of those who have made a special study of Poe have held that this tradition is without any substantial basis in fact. The lamented Professor Charles F. Richardson, for instance, in one of the most sympathetic and discriminating essays that we have on the Southern poet, asserts that it is “a serious mistake” to assume that Poe was unpopular in his own day. And Professor W. P. Trent, a no less eminent authority on our literary history, has recorded the belief that “Poe is no exception to the rule that the writers who really count began by counting with their contemporaries.”

When the author of Beowulf undertook to create in English a secular narrative poem of epic amplitude, he set himself to a task for which there was no precedent in the native tradition. In the Germanic past, narrative poetry had been confined to the heroic lay. This was a short poem, not exceeding some two hundred long-lines. It held to a single action, the sequence of which it presented with abrupt economy. Preoccupied with the scenic and the climactic, it had little leisure for any element which might retard the pace or attenuate the impact. To this tradition, the digressive, the repetitious, and the dilatory were alien. Only in style was the static indulged, in variation, in the ornamental and the vicarious epithet, and here only with restraint.

In Blake's Notebook drafts of The Tyger we have a valuable record of the growth of a great poem, a record which not only brings the poem itself into clearer focus but gives us as well another glimpse of the poet during a crucial but scantily documented period of his life. Yet, curiously enough, critics have largely neglected them. The fact that Blake revised this poem more than any other has been noticed, to be sure, and some critics have shown how a line or a stanza in the final poem is an improvement over earlier versions. But only one extended study of the drafts has been made, Joseph Wicksteed's attempt to reconstruct Blake's composition by association of ideas. And that is incomplete: of the three full drafts of the poem (counting the final version as the third), and the additional drafts of two stanzas, Wicksteed studies thoroughly only the first draft and an additional draft of one stanza.

The fact that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely read poets in the British Isles during the middle of the nineteenth century cannot be explained entirely by the popular nature of a large portion of his writings. Equally important are the circumstances connected with the publishing business, which, prior to the passage of the American international copyright act in 1891, made possible the purchase of pirated editions of his various works at a price within the range of the lower levels of the reading classes. Tennyson was indeed popular, but in the 1850's a copy of one of his books cost a good round sum. Longfellow likewise was popular, but a copy of his latest work could often be bought for a shilling. The result was inevitable. When an English woman wrote to Longfellow in 1876 protesting against American publishers, who had reprinted her works without permission, the poet replied:

About halfway through the 1998 film shakespeare in love, a group of players and hired extras, under the critical eye of the theater owner Philip Henslowe, begins rehearsing a new play at the Rose. While Henslowe observes the process with a simultaneously proprietary and befuddled air, his financial backer, the apothecary Fennyman, comes to ask him about the play's progress. Suddenly Fennyman notices a tall, handsome figure bustling about, shouting both instructions and thanks. “Who is that?” the skeptical Fennyman asks. The movie audience knows that it is Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's version of Will Shakespeare, assembling the cast for his play. “Nobody,” replies Henslowe. “The author” (Norman and Stoppard 49-50).

Johann Caspar Lavater is one of the three writers personally known to Goethe whose names are mentioned most often in Dichtung und Wahrheit. The other two are Herder and Merck: Herder, whose stimulating influence on Goethe may be easily discerned in countless passages of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and whose Vont Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele has been suggested “as a more probable (and more systematic) source of psychological information for Goethe than the vague ‘Sturm-und-Drang-Psychologie’ sometimes indicated as the framework of the novel”; Merck—“dieser eigne Mann, der auf mein Leben den größten Einfluß gehabt”, Goethe declares in Dichtung und Wahrheit—who in 1772 played a rôle in Goethe's life very like that of the far blinder and less effectual Wilhelm in the story of Werther, and who in 1774 insisted that Goethe submit Die Leiden des jungen Werthers for publication without making any revisions in the manuscript.

Professor G. R. Owst has called attention to the fact that the fable of the rat parliament, which forms a striking addition to the B-version of Piers Plowman, was also employed with reference to contemporary political conditions in a sermon preached at just this time by Thomas Brunton, Bishop of Rochester. Bishop Brunton, in an unsparing denunciation of corruption in the English government, praised Parliament for its action in bringing the conditions to light, but warned that vigorous steps must be taken to punish the guilty. Otherwise, he continued, Parliament would be like the assembly of rats and mice in the fable which decreed that a bell be hung about the cat's neck yet provided no one to carry the plan into execution. Father F. A. Gasquet, who was the first to point out this passage in Brunton's sermons, conjectured that the parliament in question was the “Good” Parliament and consequently suggested that the sermon was preached sometime in 1376. The interest which the document holds for both the historian and the student of Piers Plowman gives the question of its origin a peculiar importance. Detailed study of the manuscript arrangement of Brunton's collected sermons makes it possible, I believe, to arrive at a clearer understanding of the circumstances which inspired the sermon and even to determine the very day on which it was delivered.

The Discours sur les Arts et les Sciences, composed in 1749–50, in an age whose leading thinkers were prone to overlook the limitations of reason and the drawbacks of progress, could hardly fail to attract notice, by its enthusiasm and paradoxical nature, if not by any logical organization or historical soundness. The essay was written in a prize contest proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the discussion of the question, “Si le rétablissement des Sciences et des Arts a contribué à épurer les mœurs,” and was awarded the medal. It maintains that the arts and sciences have contributed to the corruption of humanity. To support this thesis, the author cites numerous historical instances in which nations have lost their virtue and their supremacy as learning developed among them. Contrariwise, nations which did not permit learning to advance have been better able to remain great. The arts and sciences undermine patriotism and religion, breed luxury and vice, and are in general a serious degrading influence.