The publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments in 1995 and the subsequent controversy over its authenticity can be seen as an object lesson in the vexed relation of history and memory. The book's status as an authentic memoir of the Holocaust has been impeached, yet Fragments may nonetheless be a useful vehicle for memory Cathy Caruth's and Shoshana Felman's work on trauma and on its relation to testimony indicates that testimony bears at best a tenuous relation to the events that form its core, particularly when the events are traumatic. An examination of Wilkomirski's language, read alongside (other) survivor testimony, suggests that Fragments may testify to a disaster other than the Holocaust. This conclusion, however, has controversial implications: that we need to reevaluate seriously how we treat testimony as historical evidence, including testimony of the Holocaust, and that the injunctions attached to Holocaust memory—never forget, never again—may be difficult if not impossible to heed.

This reevaluation of Cervantes's novella “The Two Damsels” argues that the generic hallmarks of romance disguise a minute engagement with pressing social and political concerns. The cross-dressed damsels' search for their truant love, significantly named Marco Antonio, evinces the fraught connection between the vagaries of masculinity in Spain and the potency of Spain's empire. Transformed from romance pageboys to epic Amazons, the damsels champion domestic commitments over imperial concerns, even as they impersonate masculinity. Yet their profound disruption of the gendered social order and the text's insistent references to the literal bankruptcy of Spain's Old World empire cannot be contained by a successful romance resolution, even if Marco Antonio is successfully diverted from his imperial excursion.

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

The focus of this paper is on The American Scene, which is found to display a deep sensitivity to the spatiality of desire and to be motivated by a complex dynamic of erotic mastery and surrender: subjects assert their self-possession in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—a force that may be human, non-human, or indeterminate. The desire for literal, physical mastery over the other is here rechanneled into an identification with the scene of desire that can dispense with the erotic object. This complex psychosexual mechanism, which I call oblique possession, thrives on a disruption of the dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has questioned. In tracing the circuits of oblique possession, the paper articulates a queer perspective on Henry James's work outside any necessary relationship between two individuals.

Economic and cultural globalization threatens the nation-state's ability to control institutions like the university, where a general emphasis on national subjectivities and ideologies is giving way to a focus on diasporic and postnational formations. Globalization challenges our tendency in literary studies to organize programs and curricula along national lines. This is particularly true for English literature, the contemporary production and consumption of which no longer take place within discrete national borders but unfold in a complex system of transnational economic and cultural exchanges. As we reorganize our approach to English in this context, we need to develop a thorough understanding of the key terms, issues, and debates that have marked the rise of globalization studies. Most important, we need to resituate English in a global framework without subjecting postnational literatures to the colonizing effects of some of our traditional hierarchies and practices.

This article identifies a major contradiction in Jürgen Habermas's theory of the emergent public sphere. In his account, Habermas gives pride of place to Swift and his fellow Tory satirists. Their assault on the Whig oligarchy, he suggests, is emblematic of public-sphere debate—even though Swift and Company are also the public sphere's fiercest critics. This contradiction is not simply Habermas's; it is the Tories' own. The defining challenge facing the Tory satirists is to conduct a critique of the public sphere—that is, a critique of critique itself—from within that sphere's institutions. We might best understand such satire, then, as a kind of publishing that is not public, a genre that circulates freely in the print marketplace while renouncing the standards of public rationality. Tory satire will bestow this project on the category of literature that emerges later in the century—the project of a public textuality that operates outside the public sphere.

The national model of literary history—with its developmental, teleological narrative of emergence and its vision of ineffable belonging and uniqueness—has lost much of its traditional pedagogical centrality, but it has not vanished. Rather, it has migrated from the center to what was once the periphery, where it now flourishes as a way of affirming the identity claims of hitherto marginalized groups. Literary historians speaking for such groups may openly acknowledge that the terms associated with the old historical narrative—evolutionary, continuous, organic, and the like—are largely fictive, yet these writers self-consciously embrace the fiction in order to appropriate its power. But this embrace entails serious risks: cynicism, enforced performativity, and repetition compulsion. A more powerful alternative lies in the emerging practice of mobility studies.

Enlightenment intellectuals viewed the moral cultivation of the individual through aesthetic pleasure to be a crucial means for regulating social relations in bourgeois civil society. G. E. Lessing's drama criticism and plays reveal how important reshaping women's social identity was to the definition of morally productive aesthetic pleasure in the Enlightenment. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, this essay explores how and why the tension between aesthetic pleasure and morality that runs through Lessing's work centers on developing bourgeois norms of femininity and on their violation in French classical and epic dramas. The essay reveals how the gender-specific moral demands placed on cultural pleasure in Lessing's drama criticism helped lay the foundation for a cultural crisis in the late eighteenth century, as well as for a divided public sphere. Lessing's plays, however, offer a more complex vision of the audience's interests and needs and a more open vision of women's possible social roles.

Critics of Sandra Cisneros have not paid much attention to her career-long advocacy of private enjoyment, possibly because it seems incompatible with the political commitment that is an equally prominent feature of her work. This essay argues that we cannot name Cisneros's politics without first coming to terms with her representation of the pleasures of withdrawing from face-to-face sociality. In the central chapters of her most famous work, The House on Mango Street, Cisneros maps the political salience of private enjoyment by means of a complex evocation and transformation of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Private enjoyment becomes in Cisneros's hands democratically accessible—the technologies of privacy range from writing to self-talk to masturbation—and constitutively insecure. Because privacy signifies not a space into which one might retreat but a point from which one must depart, it is for Cisneros the precondition of new collective formations.