In the middle 1870's a polemic concern in the daily and periodical press over idealism and realism anticipates Spain's later reception of naturalism, and reveals the general affiliations of Valera's art for art's sake and of Alarcón's moralism. Earlier hostility to French influence now permeates neo-Kantian concern for the relative merits of the good (idealism), the true (realism), and the beautiful (art for art's sake). Philosophical and literary debate is twisted by the quarrel of liberals and neo-Catholics. Much writing was stimulated by the debates in the Ateneo in 1875 and 1876 over the effects of realism in the theater. Many intellectuals took part, including Revilla and Valera. The summary position is one of essential idealism ready to compromise to meet the scientific age. The polemic of Navarrete and Vidart over Pepita Jiménez (1874) is an early manifestation of this debate, and the quarrel of the liberals and neo-Catholics over Alarcón s reception to the Academy (1877) reduces the polemic to bitter argumentum ad hominem. One of the early reports of Zola's naturalistic writings (also in 1877) shows that the “cuestión palpitante” was an immediate and intensified continuation of the debate.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, has not one, but four different narrative forms. The symbolic stories, “The Book of the Grotesque,” “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” “Tandy,” and “Drink,” emphasize the symbols suggested by their titles, lead readers toward crucial thematic epiphanies, and develop several of Anderson's affirmative values. In contrast, the stories of incident, “Nobody Knows,” “Adventure,” “An Awakening,” “The Untold Lie,” and “Departure,” are virtually without symbolism, but have nearly mythically simple narratives in which characters come to some momentary understanding of self, society, or life in general. The thematic stories, “Godliness,” “Respectability,” “The Strength of God,” “Loneliness,” “Death,” and “Sophistication,” subordinate character, event, and symbol to the exposition of the “truth,” quality, or state of being signaled in the titles. The emblematic stories, “Mother,” “The Philosopher,” “A Man of Ideas,” “The Thinker,” “The Teacher,” and “ 'Queer',” focus narrowly on character types, as events, actions, and attitudes, past and present, explain them and emphasize their typical behavior patterns; they usually end with these characters seeking release from their frustrations through violence or flight. The uniformity of each narrative form, focusing as it does on one dominant element, probably lies in the lyrical impressionism of Anderson's method of composition.

Beckett's novel Watt portrays the titular protagonist in the midst of a world which has crumbled. Watt attempts to solace and comfort himself by constructing logically complete and correct mental systems. These systems are the famous lists, series, combinations, and permutations which constitute a third of the novel. Little attention has been paid to this major feature of Watt. A close examination, however, uncovers enough unobtrusive but real flaws (omissions, incorrect items) in these series and combinations to support the conclusion that these mistakes are deliberate. Thus, Watt's attempts at an internal personal system, and the personal systems themselves, are as unreliable as the external world.

The second antistrophe of The Progress of Poesy opens, it will be recalled, with a rather striking allusion to the beneficent visitations of the Muse in the far North:

In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To chear the shiv'ring Native's dull abode.

Studies of the New Negro Renaissance have long emphasized the emergence in black poetry of the vernacular and of folk-oriented rhythms in particular. Sterling Brown's critical work and poetry show, however, that traditional English meters had a central role in the discourse and poetics of New Negro poetry. Reading his 1931 Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes together with James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) suggests that these meters counteracted dominant racialized ideas about black bodies, rhythms, and song. The polymetrical surface of Brown's own early poem “When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home” (1927) reveals that Brown treated iambic pentameter as a vernacular form, destabilizing entrenched divisions between conventional and innovative, white and black, past and present. Future studies of black poetry might therefore look to prosodic hybridity as a powerful critique of audience ideology.

Among the playwrights of the Elizabethan age, Thomas Heywood stands in a peculiar position. He is not as interesting as Webster or Chapman; he is far below Jonson or Marlowe or Lyly in artistic power; he has proved less attractive to scholars than Massinger or Beaumont and Fletcher or Marston. He wrote too much, it is said, and he was too eager to flatter the 'prentices to care about the quality of his work, either as poetry or as drama. Charles Lamb, to be sure, called him a prose Shakespeare, but Lamb could find something kind to say about any Elizabethan, and men like Heywood and Dekker were of that gentle and friendly disposition which would particularly endear them to Elia. And yet one play of Heywood's, A Woman Killed With Kindness, is reprinted in every anthology of plays of the period, always as a masterpiece of its kind. If literary immortality consists in having written a work which is always in print, of being known by name and by at least the title of that work to all historians of literature, Heywood has achieved immortality with A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Mimic (1982) is an early and much discussed picture by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, with the discussion centering largely on two topics: its subject matter and its setting (fig. 1). The subject is racism, and in this regard Mimic is “characteristic,” as Wall's best critic, Michael Fried, has observed, “of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues” (Why 235). Subsequently, as Fried also notes, “Wall has tended to distance himself from the overtly political concerns that are front and center in works like Mimic” (64). Indeed, in recent interviews Wall has insisted on this distance, remarking, for example, that “[t]wenty-five years ago I thought subject matter had some significance in itself” and going on to say that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races, but I'm glad the picture itself is good and it doesn't need that to be successful. Now I try to eliminate any additional subject matter—those things are for other people, they're not my problem” (Denes). His point here is not exactly that Mimic isn't antiracist—actually, its antiracism is so obvious and uncontroversial that a recent critic, Régis Michel, has complained that it “verges on political correctness” (63). The idea is rather that the success of the picture—the fact that it's a “good” picture—has nothing to do with those politics. Which leaves open the question of whether the picture's success has nothing to do with any politics or nothing to do with the particular politics of antiracism. In other words, is the picture's success independent of politics as such? Or is there a politics of the good picture?

Forty years ago i realized dimly that in American schoolrooms it was quite respectable to study and try to learn a foreign language, but that the child who already knew one before he entered school was somehow at a disadvantage. This realization didn't come in that Louisiana town I later knew, where for many years the only person who couldn't speak French was the French teacher. It was in a New Mexico town where the teacher couldn't communicate with those Mexican people because she spoke “Castilian.” Today the situation hasn't changed much. In some ways it may be worse, simply because now we know better.

Although Albert Camus furnished us with only one rather vague acknowledgement of influence by Alfred de Vigny, I believe that their affinity goes beyond a recognized common distress in the face of certain aspects of the human predicament. I think further that superficial differences in the situation of the two authors mask attitudes which are fundamentally similar. In order to give this kinship the attention it deserves, I should like first to examine the relationship between the moral, social, and intellectual forces which formed the two men, and with this background to discuss two bases for affinity of metaphysical, social, and artistic points of view.

Camus's humble origins had much the same significance as the romantic's aristocratic attachment to the past had for him. Each writer tended to insist on his alienation from the dominant middle class, but both noted a relationship between the popular and aristocratic milieux. The 1957 Nobel Prize winner stated that in the nineteenth century official social values were attacked by revolutionaries and by aristocrats like Vigny. “Dans les deux cas, peuple et aristocratie, qui sont les deux sources de toute civilisation, s'inscrivent contre la société factice de leur temps.” And in recounting the realization that his classmates hated him for his aristocracy, Vigny added, “J'étais pareil à un jeune ouvrier qui part avant l'aube pour faire sa journée . . . ”

In his legendary lecture “The Babes in the Wood” (1863–64), Artemus Ward wanted to “go in for fun,” and he artfully structured the talk to exemplify his credo: “We better stay in the sunshine while we may, inasmuch as we know the shadows will come all too soon.” Mark Twain heard Ward speak in Virginia City and later wrote that “The Babes” was “the funniest thing I ever listened to.” This article reproduces a reasonably accurate speaking text of “The Babes” and considers it in relation to Mark Twain’s theory and practice of lecturing and to his early written humor. Its comedy offered Mark Twain, among other things, a demonstration of (1) complex rhetorical strategies and (2) a sophisticated burlesque of the serious lyceum lecture. To clarify its burlesque dimension, “The Babes” is then compared to Emerson’s lecture “The Law of Success” (which Ward had heard and reported).

If history does not truly repeat itself, knowledge of it may, sometimes, give current problems a familiar, less formidable look. That is one reason for looking backward to our origins while we, as an Association, consider anew the status of modern language study in America and seek means to amend it. Another reason is that next December we celebrate our seventieth birthday.

Adding-Phone to the name of a National Language Entails an Expansion of Geographic and Historical Perspective. This expansion of perspective in the national-literature departments of the West was initially made possible by decolonization and the collapse of the European empires, when scholars in francophone studies and anglophone studies rethought the relation between language and culture in the postcolonial moment. While the move to -phone studies brings with it some potential to reinstate the national-literature paradigm in a different form, it can just as easily mean a departure into questions of transnationalism, transcoloniality, translation, and old and new creolizations. To study literature in terms of -phone is to assume no longer that language and literature follow the tidy dictates of national sovereignty, national identity, and realpolitik, as these were articulated during the age of high imperialism.

There are three categories of myth in Paradise Lost, each of which is essential to the epic's proleptic structure: first, those myths identifying the pagan gods with the fallen angels; second, those myths used in comparisons with Eden, Adam, and Eve; finally, in Book xi, those myths that are types of the Old and New Testament revelation that Adam will receive. The first and third categories are evidences of God working in history, and these myths are consequently “fabled”, set in story form by the pagans; the second group have no historical reality and are only “feigned”, or fabricated. Milton uses these two words carefully. From another perspective, the first and second uses lead from the timelessness of prelapsarian existence to history. The third moves in reverse, from history to eternity, not of the world before the Fall but of the Christian glory to come.

Among the manifold etymologies which have been proposed for the verb aller there is only one that is satisfactory phonetically, semantically, and historically: that is its derivation from aliare based on allatus. This simple and direct etymology seems to have occurred independently to various persons, but was first formally proposed in 1878 by J. Baur (Zs. für Rom. Phil., ii, 592). None of the other champions of the idea have ventured to publish anything on the subject. Baur's presentation was brief and unpretentious, for he apparently felt that the merits of the derivation required no elaborate argument.

Fifty years after the modern study of sentimentalism was inaugurated by Ernest Bernbaum, the problem remains whether the term has ever been satisfactorily defined or described. Two recent developments reveal some of the difficulties: Arthur Sherbo in The English Sentimental Drama takes five basic criteria considered by most authorities as typical, and shows that they may all apply to plays demonstrably not sentimental. John Harrington Smith, in the preface to The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (1948), announces that he has completely avoided the term “sentimental” as too vague to be of much value. Yet Ronald Crane, writing fourteen years before, assumed the essential traits of sentimentalism to be fairly clear, and Norman Holland has implied that two criteria borrowed from Bernbaum and Krutch still supply an adequate definition. There is not even agreement whether sentimentality is a positive or negative quality. Krutch and Sherbo feel that it is false and dishonest, therefore bad. Crane concedes that it is somewhat limited intellectually, but emphasizes its humanitarianism and emotional warmth, especially the “self-approving joy” that makes virtue satisfying. Bernbaum vacillates between sympathy and contempt.

In the preceding article my friend Mr. Lawrence has shown clearly that all indications point to an Old Norse source for the Anglo-Saxon poem usually termed The First Riddle of Cynewulf. After he had come to a conviction on this point, he communicated his theory to me in private conference, in the hope that I might perhaps be able to supply confirmatory evidence by showing what that source was. It was my fortune to make what I believe scholars will agree to be the correct identification of the material, and, with the new light thus thrown on its meaning, to interpret the poem more satisfactorily, I think, than has hitherto been done.

When, at the end of 1664, the second list of donations to authors and wits appeared—awarded by Colbert upon the recommendation of Chapelain,—it presented again, like the one of the preceding year, a mixture of feeble and profuse poetasters and of writers of outstanding value. Corneille, Racine and Molière contrasted oddly with Benserade, Cassagne, or Cotin. As in 1663, some of the most quarrelsome watchdogs of contemporary literature—La Serre, Furetière, and the brothers Boileau,—had been forgotten, intentionally or not. Chapelain, always over-anxious to please everybody and the minister, had committed a tactical mistake in excluding these satiric wits. That they would attack him at once was quite consistent with the literary customs of the time and with the habits of the Genus irritabile of all centuries. Moreover, his name was a symbol of a passing generation in literature, against which the New School was arrayed in battle. The first epigrams against Pucelain were coined, no doubt, during the gay after-dinner hours in one of the renowned Cabarets, or during an animated discussion in one of the literary drawing-rooms. When their authors or the listeners took the pains of noting them down, they were circulated in more or less reliable manuscripts and generally attributed to several among the literati. There can be no doubt that the greater number of these ephemeral satires, parodies, vaudevilles, and the like, have perished; others have remained unpublished. The best known among these satires is the celebrated Cid parody, Chapelain décoiffé, which, composed glass in hand at a riotous feast, was soon recited everywhere and handed around in numerous copies—to the lasting dishonor of Chapelain's venerable wig and of the mediocrities he steadfastly protected.