The Russian formalist and Tolstoy scholar Boris Eikhenbaum is best known for his work in developing an intrinsic poetics. After his formalist period, however, Eikhenbaum turned, in his work on Tolstoy, to extrinsic approaches, initially privileging author and reader and later focusing on social context. This essay argues that Eikhenbaum's choice of particular extrinsic approaches was suggested, indirectly and unexpectedly, by Soviet political culture in the Stalin years. An examination of the relation between Eikhenbaum's literary theories and Soviet political reality is followed by an evaluation of Eikhenbaum's postformalist Tolstoy scholarship.

To become all things, thereby resolving all contradictions, was a supreme aspiration of Renaissance humanists from Pico della Mirandola to Fray Luis de Leon. Prompted by the existential aporias of a search for truth and characterized by recourse to the chiastic paradox, Unamuno takes up this challenge and transforms it into an essential element of his modernist poetics. As an incipient but unconsummated form of dialectical argumentation, the chiasmus arrests progressive movement toward the resolution of the contradictions it generates. This master trope enables Unamuno to become all things yet rest in none, simultaneously to affirm and to deny momentous philosophical and moral positions, to offer multiple choices of being, and to avoid closure.

What little critical discussion exists on Harlem Gallery (1965) has focused on the question of whether high modernist verse is appropriate to African American art. But Tolson's work is itself “about” modernism—and modernism's relation to African American culture; it is thus better read for its idea of an African American avant-garde than for the question of whether its technique is recognizably “modernist.” The poem's ideological commitment to modernism eventually involves the delegitimation of separatist populism, and Harlem Gallery achieves its argumentative (ideological) “certainty” largely by refusing to specify the historical and cultural position of the avant-garde it invokes—an avant-garde that had, by 1965, become part of the cultural lingua franca. In critical retrospect, however, Tolson's charged advocacy of modernism places him close and yet opposed to Houston Baker, whose Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance can be read as a postmodern, revisionary redefinition of what Tolson took African American modernism to be.

Whereas Hardy's novels follow the conventions by which male mansions become domesticated by female occupants, his poetry depicts the far more precarious fate of female enclosures. Like Wordsworth, Hardy associates a female place of origin with death. His youthful poem “Domicilium,” in which a mediator helps her grandson retreat into a lost natural habitat, is soon subverted by “Heiress and Architect,” which gives an ironic twist to the yoking of houses, femininity, and death found in nineteenthcentury poetry. Desire becomes paramount again in Satires of Circumstance and Moments of Vision, where Hardy recalls his wife in various abodes to fill his home with remembered sound and movement. Built on a Bachelardian “dream-memory” of his earliest home and hence associated with a mother's body, Hardy's poetry dramatizes his sense of eviction from a primal refuge even when re-creating odd structures like the mother hull of the sunken Titanic.

Since late 1987 there has been an energetic, at times impassioned international debate about the relation between Heidegger's political activities and the substance of his works. Putting aside references to the fact or circumstances of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, I interpret his 1951 commentary on Heraclitus. This indirect approach sketches an avenue of reading the philosopher's works politically without recourse to historical documents, an avenue that seeks to demonstrate the inherent possibility of a nationalistic stance in Heidegger's text.

This form has been provided to assist attendees in planning their schedules for the 1990 MLA convention.

In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” Martin Luther King, Jr., attributes his intellectual development to his reading of Marx, Gandhi, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and other prestigious authors whose works he encountered during his graduate studies at seminary and at Boston University. To explain his responses to notable philosophers and theologians, King incorporates passages from seven writers whose names do not appear in the essay. While the network represented by these writers stimulated King's thought more profoundly than did the more respectable tradition that “Pilgrimage” invokes, the black church supplied him with the foundation of virtually all the ideas appearing in the essay. In addition, the black folk pulpit furnished the epistemology of voice merging that enabled King to compose an autobiographical essay and a self. Yoking black orality and print, King adapted the folk procedure of blending identities to create a magisterial public persona that could help reshape a nation.

Jonson's relations to the supper table mirror his relations to royal authority. Thus, while his work promotes gastronomic moderation, stoic restraint, temperance, and the plain style, he repeatedly seeks to assimilate those virtues to the social context of the Stuart court, where conspicuous consumption and intemperate behavior reign supreme. In this untenable situation, forced to reconcile contradictory values that typify discrete social circumstances, Jonson generally proceeds by renaming conspicuous consumption temperance and vice versa. This stratagem re-creates him in the image of a court whose abuses he theoretically rejects, and in poems like “Inviting a Friend to Supper” and “To Penshurst,” he emerges as an absolutist figure who sacrifices his stoicism for courtly success. Jonson becomes the embodiment of literary moderation, yet he weighs 280 pounds.

Detailed floor plans are provided on pages 1338-41.

Japanese modernity is often equated with Westernization, and the cross-cultural link is restricted to the Western influence on Japan. The translations of Western philosophy and poetry in the Meiji period (1868-1912), however, relate to native symbolist poetics, in a way that has earlier parallels: Japan's alchemical cultural interaction with China in the transformative cultivation of Zen in the medieval period and its complex responses to Neo-Confucianism in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). The consistent metatextual dynamics suggested by these parallels cannot be adequately described through influencebased comparative methods. This essay defines Japanese modernism as a creative conflict stimulated by the introduction of transcendence-based texts into fundamentally immanence-grounded aesthetic, epistemological, and semiotic systems.

Because the stated focus of transformational-generative grammar was on speakers' “knowledge of language,” early reader-oriented critics found this linguistic theory an attractive literary analogy. But as the generative model became a critical metaphor, both its internal, mental interests and its semantic aims were necessarily distorted to suit literary problems. The set-defining apparatus of generative grammar came to be read as a text-processing mechanism, its syntactic claims as a rudimentary theory of discourse. Yet recent critics have attacked, not the limitations of this model as revised for criticism, but the putative authoritarianism of linguistic study itself. This rhetorical strategy defines criticism against an outside field while masking the character of its own interdisciplinary efforts.

Lurid eighteenth-century accounts of sacrificial cannibalism in West Africa and other parts of the globe color Richardson's language and imagery in his delineation of Clarissa's highly ritualized persecution and death. Explaining cannibalism as a rudimentary cultural institution that symbolically expresses a collective psychic economy dominated by the preoedipal mother imago, modern anthropological theory shows that Richardson's novel represents this practice as the nexus between the personal (or intrapsychic) and the social (or cultural), between the text's twin obsessions with the preoedipal mother and orality and with social aggression directed mainly, but not exclusively, against women. As in actual cannibal cultures, where a preoccupation with nursing and weaning results in a pervasive oral metaphorization of thought and action, in Clarissa the ritual killing and eating of victims is the paradigmatic gesture underlying all major forms of social action, including the protracted “tearing in pieces” of the scapegoat heroine by relentless “blame.”

This essay takes Habermas's early work as a point of departure for considering the place of humanism in contemporary debates about ideology and interested critical judgment. I argue that from the Renaissance to the present the humanist tradition demonstrates a continuity of reflection on the relation between knowledge and human interests. Habermas can be seen as the inheritor of those Renaissance humanists who argue for the possibility of political consensus based on a shared faculty of critical judgment. Machiavelli's critique of this consensual strain of humanism can offer contemporary critics another model of judgment, in which conflict and dissent are of paramount importance.

While positive constructions of identity may be used in the service of historically oppressed groups, readings that isolate either “African” or “feminist” identity in the works of Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta highlight the problematics of both literary selfrepresentation and postmodern deconstruction of identity. An examination of Emecheta's autobiography Head above Water and her novel The Joys of Motherhood, however, suggests that Emecheta's works respond to a West African vernacular tradition of storytelling that resists the application of normative models of identity and instead demonstrates the importance of each individual to the community. This vernacular tradition, elaborated in Emecheta's work by a nonparadigmatic tension between “oral” and “literate subjectivity” (a tension potentially present to varying degrees in non-African subjectivity but “marked” in West Africa by multilingualism and the copresence of vernacular and literate languages), provides a critique of productivist, authoritarian discourse.

Comedy is the genre of collective experience; however, comic modes differ in the degree of inclusiveness that each implies. By examining the interactions of satiric, amiable, and liminal comedy, we can see how Woolfs final novel, Between the Acts, becomes a fully inclusive form. This form is radical and subversive, standing in antithetical relation to the epic genre. Woolf loosens the habitual dominance of the leader or spokesperson figure through a decentering of authority and creates a new choric voice that implies a fluid and noncoercive sense of community. This handling of genre is thoroughly political in substituting, for the definition of politics as the exercising of power, a model of community as the dynamic inhabiting of mutual space.