In dialogue with Roland Barthes, whose S/Z unfolds a multiplicity of “voices” in Balzac's “Sarrasine,” this essay focuses on literal voices in the story: those of the castrato and his historical successor, the tenor. It exposes the anachronism whereby a nineteenth-century tenor occupies the place of the baroque castrato hero in the central performance that seduces the title hero, and it analyzes the assumptions that made this anachronism essential to the functioning of the story-and invisible to Balzac, Barthes, and others. By emphasizing the thematics of rivalry and rage in the story and in the political and literary history surrounding it, the essay brings out the oedipal tensions in “Sarrasine” (and, briefly, its companion “L'élixir de longue vie”), tensions that both precipitated the castrato's demise and ensured his survival as a haunting presence in 1830, 1970, and beyond.

As a gift for his baptism in london, in february 1759, olaudah equiano records that he received a copy of Bishop Thomas Wilson's Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians (1740 [78]). The book's preface proclaimed the tract suitable for both “the Indians … a tractable People” and “[t]he very Hottentots, who are supposed to be the dullest of Mankind” (v, ix). At this point in his life story, Equiano has moved beyond the now famous “talking book” trope that marks the earlier sections of his autobiography to engage an emergent body of printed materials that were intended to speak to an interethnic cohort of potential Christian converts throughout the British Atlantic world.

I believe, as did one of the greatest Rhe-torical scholars of the twentieth century (or probably any century), Kenneth Burke, that “[t]he human animal, as we know it, emerges into personality by first mastering whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic environment” (1346). Applying Burke's idea, I am interested in mapping the emergent personality of deaf women writers as they master the tribal speech (and sign too) of their particular region, nation, or era as well as the tribal speech of gender overlaid with the tribal speech of deafness, disability, “normalcy,” and difference.

Observers of the recent political polarizations of western and Islamic culture might be forgiven for concluding that we are living in a new Middle Ages (Holsinger; Eco). Such narratives as “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington) and “the rise of the modern West” (McNeill; which beguiles with the dangerous fantasy of the fall of the atavistic East) have attained the status of cultural mythologies. Conversely, modern Arab cultures have never forgotten the shock of their first encounters with medieval Europeans in the Levant and al-Andalus: the legacies of crusade, countercrusade, occupation, and re-conquest. Extremists have politicized the orientalist divide described by Edward Said to create their own postcolonial mythologies. We are now in danger of projecting current impasses historically backward until Islam and the West seem always to have been enemies, inimical by nature and throughout history. Doing so would reify East and West and render them monolithic. Most troubling, such mythologies obscure the uneasy, strategic, and often stunningly productive interchanges that enrich what might better be considered as a complex intercultural evolution. The deep roots of the encounter between Islam and Christendom—the influence of Arabic science, literature, and philosophy and of Islamic forms of thought, historiography, economics, and cultural practice—deserve a richer, less politicized examination. It would be useful to try to see medieval Islamic cultures write back, from a time before European hegemony, decentering and defamiliarizing their Western neighbors. What would a medieval world look like if it constructed itself not as a tedious intermission between classical and Renaissance enlightenments, but rather as a heterogeneous fretwork of contact zones, aversions, and transmissions between sophisticated and acquisitive cultures? This medieval world could better serve our own twenty-first-century global culture, whose multiplex networks exceed simple polarization. To this outcome, the study of Arabic writing in the premodern and early modern world is key.

A set of major old-master paintings looted from Spanish Royal Collections, including important canvases by Velázquez (fig. 1), Correggio, and others, was discovered in Joseph Bonaparte's baggage, abandoned along with the rest of his property as he fled from the Battle of Vitoria, which ended his tumultuous five-year reign as king of Spain in 1813. Years later the duke of Wellington offered to return the collection to the restored monarch. But Ferdinand VII—who owed his throne to the duke's victories—refused to take it. What in its day would have been called the return to legitimacy, the restoration of the Bourbon line after the defeat of Napoléon, did not result in the restitution of Napoleonic loot. The works remain at Apsley House, the duke's home in London, where they have been on display in the Waterloo Gallery since 1819, a usurper's booty transformed by its history into an emblem of royal generosity, gratitude, and military prowess (fig. 2). The collection is now part of the museum officially established at the duke's residence in 1947, following another European military cataclysm in which Britain prevailed.

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for granted interstices, hybridity, slippage, and liminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general and The Location of Culture in particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.

This essay uses performance theory to intervene in a decades-long debate about a characteristic of children's literature: it is the only major category of literature written by one group (adults) for another (children). According to a contested but tenacious school of thought, this difference between writers and readers embeds top-down power, or adult domination of children, in children's literature. I identify a popular subcategory of children's literature, the “going-to-bed book” (exemplified by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon), which appears to epitomize and therefore shore up this top-down model. I then read going-to-bed books through function—that is, the ritualistic actions or performances that these books prompt, or script, among child and adult readers. This mode of analysis initially produces seemingly powerful evidence in support of the top-down model of children's literature; but that evidence, as I show by examining two recent best sellers, ultimately unravels.

This essay addresses the recent reception of Frank O’Hara's poem “Having a Coke with You” to examine the much-maligned concept of relatability as a potentially useful aesthetic category. If the reactions to it on Twitter and YouTube are any indication, O’Hara's Coke poem has become his most famous piece, immensely popular both online and, in a strikingly different way, in the work of contemporary queer theorists. Whatever the context—queer utopian criticism, an anarchist journal, a wedding ceremony, or even an official Coca-Cola public-relations campaign—readers tend to respond to the poem's general mood rather than to its specific content. This reception speaks to the fact that O’Hara pursues what I would label a poetics of relatability: “Having a Coke with You,” like many other O’Hara poems, models ways of valuing art by relating it to other things and people. O’Hara explores this relational aesthetic by constantly negotiating between modes of reception that are self-reflective and modes that are social and intersubjective.

Keats’s To Autumn is now generally accepted as a stable poem in praise of maturity, process, and the natural condition. Can new techniques of interpretation ever be objectively applied to such a poem, when its meaning is so well “known”? This question is germane to two recent attempts to apply syntactical analysis to To Autumn. Donald Freeman uses Chomskyan transformational procedures on the first stanza and endorses the conventional reading; Geoffrey Hartman discovers in the poem’s grammar signs of its status as a poem of the antisublime, or “Hesperian,” mood. Both readings are shown to depend on preunderstanding of the poem. Its grammar can equally be shown to support a quite opposite reading, one that undermines the traditional ideology of Autumn and presents the analogy between Autumn and human maturing as a cruel delusion.

There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry—too much of myself!” cries the painter Basil Hallward to Lord Henry Wotton early in Oscar Wilde's fantastic and tragic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. But, though Lord Henry remarks with his usual cynicism, “Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication,” Hallward continues to lament, “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.” Nor does the painter forget his self-accusations, for many years later in the story he repeats his charge to the beautiful young man who has been the subject of his painting: “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.”

Social scientists and political philosophers who assumed that modernity would become progressively secular may have got it wrong. Current history shows us that modern societies, including states, do not inevitably grow more secular. Nor are organized religions inevitably confined to narrower and narrower domains as modernity proceeds. In fact, the current period makes legible the variability of the spaces (institutional, ideational, tactical) of organized religions over time and their expansion into domains once off-limits to religion, domains as diverse as the liberal state, global finance, and cosmopolitanism. Indeed, new types of globality and cosmopolitanism are becoming visible in, and arising from, organized religions. They can coexist with regressive forces in those religions, signaling the complexity of the religions' organizational architecture.

Molière’s Dom Juan goes beyond surface travesty of the legend to develop its profound comic sense. The hero’s failures in action are farcical; his failures in consciousness are antitragic. Dom Juan limits himself to the sensual perceptions of the present moment, thus becoming incapable of remorse or dread. The obvious presence and the repeated warnings of Divine Providence he ignores or treats with contempt. His willful continuation of a life of error, carried to the point of offering God as a scapegoat for his crimes, cuts him off from his virtuous ancestry and from the possibility of conversion. A series of miracles confirms his rejection of anagnorisis. The catastrophe of Dom Juan’s damnation includes the entire comic vision of the work in a mixture of the burlesque and the grotesque.

THE ART of interpreting literary works written in German is not an accomplishment for which contemporary literary critics can claim a monopoly; it is an old field, older than formal German literary criticism itself. Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schiller in his letters about Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe in many reviews, Herder and Lessing in a number of articles produced interpretations of great sensitivity, often using methods that might now be excusably mistaken as modern. Dilthey, Scherer, Haym, and Hehn were also masters in this area, although they themselves might have had different notions about this characterization of their work. There is probably no literary historian of importance who did not address the problem that engages us. To be sure, as a scientific movement with all the usual polemics and the programmatic formulations, interpretation—that is, intrinsic text criticism, the criticism of style—began to assert itself only ten to fifteen years ago. Not until recently has it become clear that the investigator is to be concerned exclusively with the word of the poet and is to attend solely to what is present in language. Biography, for example, is outside the domain of his work. Life is not concerned with art, as Goethe believed and wanted others to believe. Under no circumstances is a poem to be interpreted by the use of biographical data. Similarly, the personality of the poet is also without interest for the philologist who takes his own role seriously; it is psychology that occupies itself with the puzzle of art's occurrence. No less does Geistesgeschichte miss the goal: it surrenders the literary work of art to the philosophers and then only sees what any thinker understands much better than any poet does. The positivist, who inquires about the difference between what is inherited and what is learned, misuses the scientific law of causality and appears to forget that creativity, precisely because it is creative, can never be deduced. Overall, then, the nature and distinctive value of the poetic world are slighted. Only the critic who interprets without looking to the right or to the left and especially not behind the poem does the problem full justice and maintains the integrity of the science of German literary studies.

During the last decade of the seventeenth century the rapidly increasing influence of female readers found public acknowledgment in many of the projects of John Dunton, London book-seller and publisher. To the Fair Sex he dedicated in 1691 and 1692, first monthly, then fortnightly, and finally weekly numbers of his Athenian Mercury; to them he made special appeal when sales were slow; and to them he presented, in 1693, a short-lived and most unedifying Ladies' Mercury, a publication that may fairly be called the first English periodical for women.

One of the most obscure and perplexing passages in the Estoire des Engleis is that in which its author, Gaimar, recounts confusedly some exploits of an otherwise unknown “Danish” king in East Anglia, whom he treats as a contemporary of Cynric and Ceawlin, of Wessex. The story, if such it can be called, shares with the Haveloc story, which precedes it, and with two other allusions, which follow it, a common political idea: that the Danes were settled in England, and held sway in that country, before the arrival of the Saxons. The passage also shares with the Haveloc episode in the Estoire the appearance of interpolation, for without it we have a reasonably smooth narrative based on the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (ASC).