Once Were People Without Writing. This is the Dominant Narrative of Pacific Literature. Such a View Rarely Takes the Lack of a recognizable alphabet or script in most of the inhabited islands of the Pacific at the time of contact with Europeans as a neutral difference. Lack is deficiency. Curiously, both detractors from and celebrants of Pacific literature agree that Pacific societies and cultures were introduced to writing by Europeans. The detractors see this originary lack as a permanent impediment to the development of worthy literature. (Few ever say, They lacked a written script, and they haven't produced any literature of note—it must be because they have a superior civilization.) The celebrants see the lack as a difference to be treasured along with the eventual acquisition of writing. So how can we better understand Pacific literature: where it came from and where it could take its readers?

It was early morning on Sunday, 9 September 1739. While most South Carolina settlers were preparing for church, nearly Two dozen slaves gathered near the Stono River less than twenty miles from Charlestown. After attacking a local store to secure firearms, the group moved south toward Saint Augustine, Florida, swelling in number and spreading terror along the way. The rebels killed more than twenty settlers and set numerous buildings on fire before being defeated by a colonial militia at the Edisto River the following day (Wood 306-26). This unprecedented insurrection rocked the colony to its core and brought about legislation with important implications for literacy in the colonies that became the United States.

“I Can't Go on, I'll Go On.” Both Parts of This Bleak Acknowledgment By Samuel Beckett's Unnamable (407) seem to me appropriate (if not particularly gracious) responses to the honor of the preceding essays, which grow out of a distinguished 2008 MLA panel on what the program called my “career in writing.” First, there is, inevitably, a finalizing or conclusive connotation inherent in both the event and the reference to a “career,” a career that, at least for the purposes of the event meant to celebrate it, can only be located behind me. So the only way to avoid the entombment, the modest monumentalizing, unintentionally (I assume) accomplished in these essays is to insist, as Beckett does, that I must go on. If, to continue on another Beckettian note, there has been a career in writing, it has perhaps been because, somehow, I have not succeeded in failing, or I have at least (or at most) insufficiently failed. The Beckettian voice's exasperation at never having failed enough has always seemed to me to have something to do with the experience of the energizing effect of failures in language, an energy that prevents a voice from entering, and being locked into, the presumed history of a presumed culture.

Performance is an idea that became a field. For ideas to matter to the field of performance studies, however, they must take the form of action—a play, a rite, a dance, a game, a parade, an utterance. The action of performance may be practical or symbolic, but it is “always a doing or a thing done” (Diamond, Performance 1). In this essay, I assess the idea of performance, the field of performance studies, and their common relation to action by reopening the question of mimesis, the venerable doctrine that art imitates life. I also provide a preliminary sketch of a practical poetics of performance, defining it as Orphic (of or pertaining to the mythic figure of Orpheus). The action that the Orphic plot imitates—moving forward while glancing back—recapitulates the risky act of performance itself, for the performer typically feels the urge to look back, despite the prohibitions and costs, because performance always seems to be authorized by something prior, even when it isn't. Not restricted to dead Europeans or any other limited constituency, popular Orphism embraces all the lively arts, but it is most intensely concentrated in poetry meant to be spoken aloud, from Homer to hip-hop, and in lyric drama. “The story of Orpheus underlies every poem,” Susan Stewart writes in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, and she might have added, “every performance”: bereft of Eurydice from the moment of his fatally forbidden turn, when he dooms her to be his inspiration, “he must attempt to fill her absence with compensatory song” (256). So Eurydice stands in for Orpheus, punished for his transgression, and he for her, making art out of her fate. Across the gulf of time and the river Styx, she prompts him, as he keeps looking back to her.

As Members of the Penn State English Department, We Share Our Institution's Commitment to Bridging the Gap Between town and gown. As writers and teachers, we believe that reading is a powerful vehicle for community building, for democratic deliberation, and for imaginative reinvention of seeming inevitabilities. As friends who enjoy discussing ideas with one another, we believe that collaboration can allow for both individual voice and shared vision, can offer mutual instruction and delight. In our various ways, we have committed ourselves to reading and writing beyond the boundaries of the university. In this brief essay, we hope to share our experiences of community building, creativity, and democratic negotiation with readers of PMLA.

Paul Celan Breaks Into “Tears, His Body Shaken by Sobbing, the Whole Affair Again Present, Accusings, Denouncings, as Stunned and distressed as on day 1.” It's June 1966 in Paris, and he has gone with Yves Bonnefoy to visit a “most generous, most welcoming” friend who has “deep instincts for a poet's quality and for how infamous these attacks on Celan were.” But “[t]hat trustful welcome had only deepened the open wound.”

Nothing in the life of Paul Celan (1920-70), short of his parents' murder in the Holocaust, racked him more than the vicious, specious plagiarism charges a German French writer, Claire Goll, launched against him on behalf of her deceased husband. As Bonnefoy saw all too well, Celan never recovered from them.

To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

The Recent Death of AIMÉ Césaire has Been an Occasion for Extolling his Virtues As Venerable Patriarch, Founding Father, and sovereign artist. Even his fiercest critics have considered him a unique poet-politician worthy of being interred in the Pantheon by the French state. Members of the créolité movement, such as Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, hailed him as the “nègre fondamental” ‘foundational black man,’ who was also like the father of the Martinican people. Confiant reiterated his filial devotion as Césaire's “fils à jamais” ‘son forevermore,’ and Chamoiseau identified him as the “maître-marronneur” ‘master Maroon.’ This wave of adulation tends to emphasize the militant poet-politician that Césaire never quite was. He was arguably the founder neither of a nation nor of a people nor, for that matter, of a movement. While he coined the word négritude, he was less the founder of the negritude movement than was his contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, who set about creating a totalizing, biologically based ideology around the concept of negritude. Perhaps even more telling is his view of the Haitian leader Henry Christophe as tragically flawed because of Christophe's obsession with founding a people. The protagonist of the play La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) is a heedless builder, so obsessed by the need to construct and to found that he destroys himself, leaving behind the massive stone ship of the Citadelle as his legacy.

To Anne Curzan in “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar” (124.3 [2009]: 870-79), the important thing is not that students learn, for instance, to use apostrophes correctly but that they question where the rules for apostrophes came from. This skewed priority is part and parcel of Curzan's commitment to “the kind of critical pedagogy that most of us espouse” (871).

For Several Decades, Scholars have Believed, for Lack of Evidence to the Contrary, That Négritude—One of the Key Terms of identity formation in the twentieth century—appeared in print for the first time in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), in 1939. This consensus reflects a revision of what the cofounders (with Césaire) of the negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, had remembered and stated. Senghor said in 1959 that “the word [négritude] was invented by Césaire in an article in the newspaper that bore the title L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 347). In an interview published in 1980, Damas said, “Césaire coined this word in L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 348). But L‘étudiant noir was a phantom. Lilyan Kesteloot, in her groundbreaking study Black Writers in French, attempted to summarize the content of L‘étudiant noir without seeing a single issue of it; none was available to her (84n2).

In the Summer of 2001, on The Heels of a Four-Year Recession, a Number of Ostensible Want Ads Appeared on Large Billboards in downtown Zurich. “Sought for our sales department: team member with an alcohol problem,” read one of them (fig.1); “Wanted: coworker with a drug career,” read another. Each billboard also featured the slogan “Everyone deserves a second chance.” The billboards were one of the first public campaigns mounted by the editors of Surprise, the Swiss street magazine that has supported the homeless and poor by employing them as vendors since 1998. The magazine's declared aim was to attract salespeople from the community, but the billboards did much more than recruit vendors: they intervened in Zurich's upscale business district and challenged the divide separating the haves from the have-nots.

Before Undertaking This Essay, I was Afraid That I had Nothing New to Say About Aimé Césaire's Work. I WAS RIGHT AND WRONG. What can I tell you that you have not heard a thousand times? That Césaire was born in Martinique in 1913? That he studied in Paris with Léopold Sédar Senghor? That his return to his island, just before World War II, is celebrated in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land)? That he is one of the founders of negritude? Either you already know all this and much more about Césaire's work, or such facts and figures (i.e., stories that have produced an effect of truth) are so readily available to trained scholars that my intervention is pointless. Since the poet's death, in 2008, all the facets of his life and work are being reread and reexamined. The flow of information about them ranges from illuminating presentations (Scharfman; Irele; Smith) to the most sophisticated analyses of his literary and political work (Arnold, “Forty Years”; Eshleman; Brent; Wilder).