As thousands of original thinkers have repeated, life is always a puzzling mixture of choices and chances. Other thousands, with equal originality, have said that all the choices are really determined—they're not really choices at all. In this view, choice and chance get collapsed—usually to a combination of determining genes and determining culture; only half-educated extremists ever claim that it is only one or the other.

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”

Eduardo Mendoza's City of Marvels recuperates the historical novel while subjecting it to the conventions of romance. These generic strategies relate to the manifest self-made man's rise to economic might between the two Barcelona World's Fairs and Barcelona's development as a modern metropolis—and to a later celebration: the 1992 Olympic Games. The depiction of the adventures of capital and the production of marvels responds to the bourgeoisie's role in Spain's modernization and to money's mediating function as a symbol of desire. The accomplishment of marvels involves the conquest of time and the substitution of illusory timelessness for historical contingencies. Timelessness mediated by money negates history through the production of ersatz historical images, which reinscribe an idealized past as the object of desire. A restoration—the figurative replication of historical events—is the response to nostalgia for a missed historical opportunity by a subject seeking myth's illusory power.

In recent years critics have contested the traditional understanding of Celestina's “enchantment” of Melibea as diabolically assisted. Yet rhetorical, feminist, and poststructuralist readings have not explained Celestina's discursive practice in the wider context of other Spanish sorceresses of language. I argue that Celestina's protracted appeal to Melibea and allusion to a prayer or charm of Saint Apollonia correspond to the language and methods of other Spanish and New World sorceresses investigated by ecclesiastical courts and the Inquisition. I draw from unedited conquest-era documents to compare Celestina's “linguistic sorcery” with that of women who transformed Catholic prayers and narratives of saints' tortures into erotically charged love philters for subduing men. Like the women examined by inquisitors and inspectors (visitadores), Celestina, far from requiring diabolical intervention in her discursive practice, draws on the culture's language of submission as she explores the continuity between suffering and ecstasy.

In 1909 the lord lieutenant of Ireland attempted to prevent the Abbey Theatre from producing Bernard Shaw's Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet because the English lord chamberlain had denied the play a license. Shaw and the Abbey directors Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats seized the opportunity to contest the extension of English censorship to Ireland. With their genius for hype, they produced the spectacle of their resistance, winning nationalist support for the Abbey. The triumphant first performance was a multivalent occasion, the season's most stylish and seditious event. Gregory filled the theater with Dublin Castle society, members of the very state apparatus that had tried to stop the production; but in meetings with Castle officials and in Abbey press releases, she adopted the idiom of the Irish rebel tradition. Like those other Irish happenings the speech from the dock and the graveside oration, this event was staged not only for its immediate audience but for the Irish people of the future.

When did the Berlin Wall come down? However much this event took us by surprise in the autumn of 1989—indeed, no one foresaw either its rapidity or its consequences—I believe that the fissures in the wall began to be clearly felt in the early 1960s. A few unknown scholars—thinkers expressing disturbing ideas in hermetic idioms—were regrouping, like a colony of ants, to carry out subversive labors. Too complex for the already nascent media culture, their work was, of course, invisible from Paris or New York; but the masters of the Kremlin were not unaware of its undermining effects.

Renaissance symbolic representations of gender identity and sexual difference appear firmly grounded in the medieval and Neoplatonic misogynist tradition, no matter how unacceptable the terms of that tradition may be to modern sensibility. In Rabelais's works the exemplarity of Christian humanist discourse often coincides with what today is considered profoundly disturbing behavior. The recurrence of trickery, obscenity, and violence against women does not seem to bother the Rabelaisian narrator, who gleefully presents his writings as “beaux textes d'évangilles en françoys” ‘fine gospel texts in French.’ I concentrate on a single episode of Pantagruel, the one devoted to Panurge's and Pantagruel's twin amatory adventures with a lady of Paris. Although the episode has been the object of some probing critical scrutiny, little attention has been paid to the biblical intertext, which Rabelais's humanist entourage must easily have recognized and which can be read in the context of what modern critics have come to recognize as the Renaissance crisis of exemplarity.

This essay accounts for the recent prominence of women's writing in Greece by examining how women writers applied writing strategies developed under the dictatorship (1967–74) to their critique of fixed gender roles. Margarita Karapanou's novel Kassandra and the Wolf deconstructs the victor-victim opposition and poses the process of inversion itself as a position from which to write. Jenny Mastoraki's collection of poems Tales of the Deep works out a similar perspective formally, suggesting that such a position requires that the order of language also be disturbed. By analyzing these texts in the historical context of the dictatorship and in the theoretical contexts of feminist works such as Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, I show how Karapanou's and Mastoraki's responses to censorship are not individual exceptions but key components of recent Greek women's writing.

Translators' note. The first few pages of this essay are not printed here. In this omitted portion Yury Lotman distinguishes between two major functions of texts. The first function is the adequate transmission of information, and the second is the generation of new meanings. The most desirable condition for the first function is the complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages. Since this situation is virtually impossible, an intermediary is developed, which Lotman terms the “text-code.” The text-code, of which the Bible is the most obvious example, serves an interpretive and prescriptive role in the transmission of texts. The traditional linguistic, structural approach to analyzing texts, exemplified by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, often results in the construction of a text-code. The linguistic, structural approach presupposes a closed set or system whose elements can produce an infinite series of texts. In contrast, the second function of texts suggests an immanent, literary approach that attempts to situate texts within the confluence of their contexts, antecedents, and descendants. A text analyzed in its second function will be noted for the heterogeneity of its constituent elements, some of which form “texts within texts.” In the remainder of this essay, presented here in its entirety except for one elision, Lotman develops this approach, which he associates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

“El celoso extremeño” is one of the most widely read tales in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares. The story—a variation on the tale of the old man with a young bride—has been analyzed in the contexts of the Hispano-Arabic tradition (e.g., Américo Castro) and of the European humanist tradition (e.g., Alban Forcione). This essay attempts to develop a reading that identifies, and comes to terms with, the novella's numerous allusions to the Americas. Three neglected circumstances motivated this reading: “El celoso extremeño” takes place in Seville (the city that enjoyed an official monopoly on traffic between Spain and the New World in Cervantes's time), centers on the government of an isolated community of racially diverse women, and begins and ends with a character's departure for the Indies. The essay speculates that Spain's early colonial experience may have influenced and informed the debates concerning domestic social relations on the peninsula.

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

Based on a close examination of a 1941 article by the Soviet scholar Leonid Grossman, this essay studies the moral questions faced by the reader of a work written under censorship.

In Felicia Hemans's reception, if nowhere else, Victorian culture, and particularly Victorian patriotism, may still seem stable, enviably simple, and almost threateningly immediate. Hemans was no Victorian, however, and as her notorious “Casabianca” suggests, even the Victorians' favorites among her verses could be deeply disturbing. Through a wide, complex, and self-contradictory range of patriotic poetry, Hemans consistently sought both to reconcile militarism with “the domestic affections” and to mediate between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of patriotism. Relying on the symbolic power of soldiers' graves and using a Hegelian dialectic in which mournful femininity is the constitutive “internal enemy” of the state, her verses attained powerful resonance within Victorian attempts to domesticate imperialism. Nonetheless, her visions of feminine patriotism remain revealingly self-divided, often presenting relations between familial and state power as both unstable and potentially terrifying.