The unevenness of periodization across different national traditions provides the perfect opportunity for a comparative and transnational inquiry. While the initial temptation is to deem literatures demarcated by national tradition incommensurate or simply to juxtapose them as disparate objects, the more compelling project, particularly for the early modern period, is to show how literary periodization itself becomes part of the project of national distinction. In this essay, which I want to place in dialogue with Margaret Greer's and Alison Weber's contributions to PMLA's January 2011 “Theories and Methodologies” forum on the Spanish Golden Age, I argue that periodization must be considered in a transnational framework, for our conception of significant literary epochs is closely tied to the relative value that literatures are assigned, especially when national traditions are coalescing.

A prevalent assumption about Cummings' poetry has been that it lacks a history—that it shows no growth, as if a man had been treading water for thirty years. This is a serious thing to say about a body of work which not only has become legendary in its time, but can also boast a respectable number of poems widely praised as first-rate. Early in Cummings' career it was brought home to many of his readers that he would use, to the borders of extravagance if he so liked, a profusion of technical devices sometimes difficult, sometimes eccentric, sometimes of no apparent usefulness at all. It was also made clear that he would take attitudes which, whether defensible or not, were not to be confined within the limits of what the world regards as either rational or decorous. One risk taken by any artist when he chooses at the beginning of his creative life to be perceptibly “different” from his traditions, is that, whether he actually adheres to it or not, he will ever after be read by the light of his divergence. And Cummings has not escaped this fate. He has too often been read as if he had stopped growing in the mid-1920's, and had turned into that most depressing of all literary freaks, the artist who parodies himself. The main end of this essay will be to demonstrate the injustice and the falsity of such a view.

Coleridge's mode of composition in the Biographia Literaria is best considered as marginal discourse, and here the chapters on Hartleian association are analyzed from this point of view. Coleridge's previous attempts to refute Hartley depended on a proof of the free will, a proof that he did not complete and that, for moral purposes, he does not hazard in the Biographia. Instead, Coleridge proffers a subsidiary criticism that he had formed years before, affixing his comments to borrowed arguments. Although Coleridge's marginal rhetoric persuades that Hartley's model is insufficient, it also illustrates that there is no coherent alternative principle. The text vanishes beneath the burden of its marginalia. Coleridge's criticism subverts a partial truth only to substitute a rhetoric partial to the demands of a desire too restless to abide in any principle or text.

In his tractate Of Education Milton gives astronomy as one of the subjects that the properly educated boy should study. He would first have his pupils “learn in any modern author the use of the globes,” and then having mastered the elements of the subject, proceed to the reading not only of poems abounding in astronomy, but also of those wholly astronomical, such as the Astronomicon of Manilius and the Phaenomena of Aratus.

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos' first important study of urbanindustrial life, owes much to the machine-oriented aesthetic of Italian futurism and other modernistic movements in the visual arts. Utilizing techniques and modes of perception indigenous to the machine age, Dos Passos' sought to express the spirit, rhythms, and structure of modern reality in such a way as to evoke in the reader a sense of involvement and participation in the problems of contemporary society. In its visual directness and sensory immediacy, Manhattan Transfer suggests the influence of photography and the “lively arts” of film and vaudeville. In its overall pattern of compositional contrasts and oppositions, the novel resembles abstract painting and the montage structure of the motion picture. Basic to Dos Passos' outlook is a synoptic or visual concept of reality as a network of dynamically interacting parts. Only by viewing his world as a “system” in which nothing is fully comprehensible in isolation can man realize himself as a responsible individual and direct the energies of the machine toward socially desirable ends.

First of all I should like to express my deepest appreciation for your invitation to participate in the discussions at this Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association. It is indeed a great honor you have extended to my country in inviting me to speak to such a distinguished gathering. It is, however, an honor which I have accepted with some hesitancy. As a layman in the field of linguistics I know that I am not the right person to address an association of scholars. Moreover, my desire to make a somewhat valuable contribution to these discussions has been greatly handicapped by the lack of source material and reference books which I wished to consult but which are not presently available in Washington.

Let Me Begin with a Decidedly Non-Jewish Reference, in Order to Both Place and Displace Jewish Studies. In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, an evocation of imaginary places that emerge and recede from memory, all eventually turning out to be the same place, Marco Polo says to Kubla Kahn, in response to the charge that he has not spoken of Venice: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice” (86). The notion of Venice as implicit in every city strikes me as an apt analogy for what I will be claiming as the possible relation between Jewish studies and literary studies. As a faculty member housed in a national literature department (German) at a public research university dominated by a biennial funding battle with the state legislature, I move between reading the minutes of the University Senate and reading Calvino's Invisible Cities in order to imagine the invisible universities or invisible studies beyond the prairie and, indeed, beyond the notion of the university (and the humanities) in ruin.

This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan's attempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin's Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dressing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for control over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator's attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan's production of John Vanbrugh's Aesop. Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article illuminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities.

Antiwar activists in the United States have often made recourse to satire in order to rebut claims that their dissent is sententious and effeminate. Federalist opponents of the War of 1812 used the genre to posit, moreover, that they alone could manage the military and economic crisis that resulted from a disastrous second war against Great Britain. But satire, in an era of incipient nationalism, was problematically associated with British snobbery. I argue that wartime periodicals show Federalist satire pulling in diverging directions. Projects like Alexander Hanson's Federal Republican are regressive, reviving the Augustan archetype of the satirist as intellectual martyr, even as they unwittingly lay the groundwork for a liberal model of civil disobedience. Projects like George and Henry Helmbold's Tickler are progressive, phrasing Federalist principles in the post-Federalist vocabulary of liberal competition through their experiments with populist dialect, which also anticipate the postwar transformation of British American “satire” into all-American “humor.”

It is curious, in view of the strange fascination which the seventeenth Earl of Oxford has exercised on a whole school of modern critics, that perhaps the most crucial episode in his life has been glossed over or ignored completely. Yet this episode, however discreditable to the Earl, is of some literary interest.

The purpose of this paper is to give an example of the manner in which aesthetic criticism may also serve the needs of historical and philological criticism. As an example of procedure, a specific Old French prose romance is to be studied from an aesthetic as well as from an historical point of view. One main question will be raised with regard to each episode of the romance: “What is the purpose of this episode in the context of the narrative?” While the episodes have meaning in themselves, many episodes will acquire additional meaning from their position among the others. Consideration will be given the structure of the romance as a source for the understanding of the entire plot. This method of approach, the derivation of meaning from structure, may be said to follow a principle of aesthetic criticism. If the results obtained by such an approach seem acceptable, the method can be justified on aesthetic grounds. More difficult to settle, however, and the main concern of this inquiry, is the problem of whether or not such a method can lead to the finding of data valuable not only to the aesthetic critic but also to the historian and the philologist.

Dickens progressively transforms the controlling conventions of Oliver Twist during the course of the novel to explore deeply rooted moral tensions involving innocence, evil, and the law. The opening satire degenerates into moralistic melodrama as Oliver changes from a typical parish boy to “the principle of Good.” But this sentimental Providentialism breaks down at the country funeral, and in the city the narrative form evolves to discover a more complex and humane morality. Although the plot remains occupied with the triumph of good, the symbolic pattern of the action suggests a hidden resemblance between Oliver and the thieves. The point of view moves toward closer identification with the harried, but increasingly humanized, criminals. The life of the novel resists repression even as the ending enforces the law. “The Parish Boy’s Progress” ends at the gallows, but Fagin takes Oliver’s place there.

My aim in this short essay is to make it possible to read these two passages together, but not in the way i think we'd typically do so in the literary humanities. The passage by Walter Benjamin is a canonical instance of left-literary writing that means to ground itself in Marx's account of capital by demonstrating that the struggle of oppressed peoples, even before the rise of capital, leaves traces in texts and in reading practices. Because of his use of the figure of “the Messiah,” it is possible to read the passage as evidence of Benjamin's messianism, though that is exactly what I intend to suggest we shouldn't do.

The date of the writing of the Secunda Pastorum and, ipso facto, of the flourishing of the “Wakefield Master,” has been variously given from “the fourteenth century or even earlier” to “the reign of Henry VI or Edward IV” the more usual dates centering about Wat Tyler's Rebellion, 1381, or the first decade of the fifteenth century. The basis of these widely differing datings has been found in the implications of various social allusions in the plays, and one of these allusions, that to horned head-dress, has been used very diversely. This fact, coupled with the fact that Professor Oscar Cargill has claimed that “there seem to be no allusions in the (Wakefield) cycle which may positively refer to any events after 1355,” led me to undertake the present study. As a result I am here proposing a date definitely later than the ones commonly chosen and advocated. Let us turn first to the evidence offered by the costume passages in the plays.

The central narrative in Bojardo's epic, the Orlando Innamorato, relates how the appearance of the beautiful Angelica at the court of Charlemagne completely turned the heads of all the noble paladins present, notably Orlando and Rinaldo. These two cousins and brothers-in-arms now become hated rivals, and set out in pursuit of the fair maiden when she returns to her native country. Much time passes before the two knights meet, and when this finally does occur, it is before Albracca, Angelica's castle, where she is besieged by another lover, Agricane, King of Tartary. The meeting is stormy, as was to be foreseen, and a duel is begun which lasts for two days, and which would have ended badly for Rinaldo had not Angelica, who just then is in love with him, held back the blow that would have wounded him mortally. She knows that Rinaldo is safe only if Orlando can be gotten out of the way, and to do this successfully she sends the latter on a perilous and distant expedition. Among the many adventures which he encounters on this journey is the destruction of an enchanted garden which had been fabricated by an enchantress named Falerina. Orlando's impulse is to slay her as well, but his mind is changed when he learns that her death would have as consequence the death of many knights and ladies who are kept prisoners in a tower. In exchange for her life she promises to lead him to that prison (ii–v, 1–24). When they arrive there Orlando sees hanging on a tree beyond the moat the armor of his cousin Rinaldo, and, believing him dead, remorse for his former quarrels with him seizes him, and he rushes over the bridge to engage battle with Aridano, the guardian of the tower. The two antagoniste clutch, and soon roll down the shore into the enchanted lake which surrounds the prison (ii–vii, 32–63). They descend through the water until they arrive on dry ground, a meadow, lighted up by the rays of the sun, that break through the water above them. Here the battle continues, until Orlando succeeds in slaying his enemy. Then he looks about him for a way of escape. He is surrounded on every side by mountainshore and rocks; but on one side he notices a door cut into the rock, and near that entrance he sees chiselled a picture of the labyrinth and its history with the minotaur, and not far from this another picture, showing a maiden wounded in the breast by a dart of love thrown by a youth. This should have taught him the manner of escape, but he passes on without heeding its meaning. Soon he arrives at a river and a narrow bridge, on either side of which stand two iron figures, armed. Beyond it in the plain is placed the treasure of the Fata Morgana. He attempts to cross this bridge, but at every trial the two iron figures demolish it, and a new bridge at once rises in the place of the old one. Finally, with a tremendous leap he clears the river, and now he finds himself near the coveted treasure. After many wonderful incidents, which it is not to the purpose to relate he arrives near the prison where Rinaldo is held with other knights. This latter, it should be stated, had also left Angelica after his duel with Orlando, and arrived here by a shorter way. As Orlando approaches this prison, he comes to a fissure in the rock, into which he enters, and which leads him to a door.

In responding to the title of this roundtable, i was determined to do two things. First, i did not want to revisit the metaphors of illness and death offered by Susan Gubar as indicative of the state of feminist criticism in 1998. It is clear to me that feminist criticism and what we mean by that term are changing, but I also want to acknowledge the continued significance of this methodology for my own work. Feminist criticism works for me as a mode of literary analysis and as a way of seeing the world, and I am reluctant to offer a doomsday scenario for its future.

As I was preparing to leave for Chicago, I read the latest PMLA special-topic issue, Remapping Genre, coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins. So, impressed once again by the power of the concept of genre, I begin by remarking the form of what I am doing here tonight. That genre is, of course, something called an MLA presidential address. There have been 116 such addresses since 1883, when forty professors met at Columbia to found the MLA. As the 117th president in this long line, I prepared for this evening by doing a small study of what my predecessors have written for the occasion over more than a century. Such a study, I might add, is very much part of the genre. Certain features of the canon are persistent enough to catch the eye of even the most casual student of the form. The dominant structure of an MLA presidential address is an arrangement that goes back at least to the Sophists: it is an argument arranged as a contest between two antitheses. Over the years, the dichotomies have changed, but the template of binary opposition has remained improbably constant.

The authors of eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies and of their fictional imitations demonstrate the complex functions of imagination as a component of the spiritual life and of its records. Robinson Crusoe and William Cowper’s Memoir (1816) both delineate detailed sequences of emotional and imaginative development as the foundation of religious experience. Crusoe progresses to self-understanding by recognizing and mastering his own fear and anger and developing his capacity for love and by enlarging the resources of his imagination. Cowper asserts that his conversion and the Christian fellowship that followed it dominate his experience, but his account, with dark imagistic undertones, may also be read as revealing the persistence of despair. The unconscious shaping which produces this counter-pattern enriches the memoir’s implication. In novel and autobiography alike, the divergence between what the author asserts and what he suggests, reflecting varying possibilities of the imagination, can generate fruitful literary effects.

There have been two different interpretations of Dryden's attitude toward church and state in his writings after the Revolution of 1688–89. Some have held that he would gladly have changed with the times but was unacceptable to the new regime because he was too notorious an offender; others, that he chose with silent dignity a relatively obscure place among the defeated minority.

The end of Le Rouge et le noir constitutes a chronic critical scandal, raising a host of problems concerning the novel's plot and its legitimating authority that may be approached through the question of paternity in the career of Julien Sorel. Paternity becomes a key issue in a novel structured by a conflict between legitimacy and usurpation, a conflict that has political, historical, and narratological implications. Politics versus manners, the hypothesis of Julien's illegitimate noble birth versus his career of monstrous usurpation, the role of the narrator as a father figure who subverts paternalistic control–these and related questions may provide a context for reading the end of the novel, for determining the relation of what Julien calls his novel to Stendhal's, and for understanding the uses of the guillotine.