Recent research has shown how Francis Bacon drew on Renaissance practices of reading and writing to propose a new method for understanding nature. Yet Bacon was well aware that such techniques were vulnerable to error, miscommunication, and failure. Instances of misinterpretation in his utopian fantasy New Atlantis reveal that his dream of a legible world accounts for the possibility of misreading. Bacon's characters and his audience are invited to interpret the text's symbols, but they are denied the basis for adequate interpretation. The paradoxes that arise from this strange position affirm the utility of Bacon's method and expose some of its limits.

This essay provides a revisionary interpretation of one of the most important treatments of emotion (and its relation to reason) in the early period of modern European vernacular literature, Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”). According to the prevailing interpretation, the poem denigrates love as an animal power, a subhuman force that destroys our properly human rationality. Reading the poem's treatment of love in the light of Averroës's views, especially as presented in his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De anima, reveals that Cavalcanti celebrates love as paradigmatic of human reason, part and parcel of one's leading a rational and therefore human life. Love, the operation of a rational power that is mortal (not immortal) and natural (not supernatural), is for human beings the “perfect good,” the full extent of our flourishing and the best for which we can hope.

This text was written as a talk for a particular occasion, the Presidential Address on 9 January 2015 during the MLA Annual Convention in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have not removed the traces of this occasion from the text because they are integral to its argument about sites of memory. I hope my readers will imagine themselves as auditors gathered in a large room in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, built on the edge of a waterway called Burrard Inlet (fig. 1). That waterway, which is represented in several of the images that accompany this text, had—and still has—a different name in the languages of the indigenous peoples who have inhabited the Vancouver area since before it became part of an American hemisphere. Names, in languages that are ancient but also modern, are a key topic in the reflections that follow.

I'm grateful to you for the gift of your time. Though my talk explores a view of historical time as a multidirectional and multidimensional phenomenon, I'm aware that our shared time in this room goes in one direction in the simple sense that we'll all be older when this session ends, and probably even more hungry, thirsty, and tired than we are now. I've found that the MLA convention sometimes feels like a memory marathon, with special testings of the brain muscles that allow us to recognize faces and recall the first and last names of acquaintances, and even of good friends, whom we haven't seen for a while. Such experiences of remembering and forgetting contributed to my decision to focus on the MLA itself as one of the two sites of memory I want to explore with you this evening. The other site I want to think about is Vancouver, the place where we are now: a modern city built on a site where humans have been living for the last eight to ten millennia (Carlson 12-16).

Now that phonography is established as the cardinal regime of audio recording, storage, and playback in studies of sonic modernity, a coeval sound-reproduction technology merits attention—the pianola, or player piano. The instrument is a pneumatic reading machine: it scans binary machine code from perforated paper rolls and translates it into acoustic events while prompting song with its scrolling lyrics. Revisiting Derrida's “Ulysses Gramophone” (1984) thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida's piece has helped underwrite in sound studies. The essay then turns to an extended reading of Joyce's novel, one of several modernist works that feature the pianola in their self-conceptualization. Ulysses's pianola at once incarnates the novel's virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.

Questions of divine intercession and the human transmission of God's word were central to Enlightenment debates about what we would now call media. De foe's neglected Essay upon Literature begins as an argument for the divine origins of writing, but its focus on writing as God's git to humans gives way to a new kind of history, concerned with the development of human communications (oral tradition, writing systems, the invention of printing, and so on). By identifying histories of mediation, like Defoe's, as a distinct genre, we see new links between texts by such wildly diverse authors as Edward Stillingleet, William Temple, William Warburton, Adam Smith, and the Marquis de Con dorcet. Defoe's attempt to articulate an emergent area of intellectual inquiry and his understanding of literature as writing in general rather than as a subcategory of writing challenge us to think through our own generic classiications and hierarchies in the digital age.

As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation swept Europe in the sixteenth century, penance (or its rejection) became a cornerstone of individual and confessional identities. Extending a post-Tridentine view of sacramental penance as consolation, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata suggests that penance offers a means to recover and even to benefit from the experience of error—and to incorporate romance error into epic action and ethics. Through extensive intertextual dialogue, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene engages this view to explore the fears produced in some lay people by the English Reformers' rejection of penance. Book 2 interrogates the possibilities for epic heroism in a fictional environment lacking any visible means to recover from error and therefore profoundly skeptical of experience and the errors to which it might lead. Spenser's virtuoso act of cultural translation reforms Tasso's penance-based ethics, exposes the shortcomings of one approach to reformation, and affirms the educational value of human error.

Intellectual historians often credit S⊘ren Kierkegaard as existential anxiety's prime mover. Arguing against this popular sentiment, this essay reads Kierkegaard not as the ex nihilo inventor of existential anxiety but as a modern practitioner of a deep-historical, dread-based asceticism. Examining a wide range of Middle English devotional literature alongside some canonical works of modern existentialism, it argues that Kierkegaard and the existentialists who followed him participated in a Judeo-Christian tradition of dread-based asceticism, the popularity of which had dwindled since the Middle Ages but never vanished. Following medieval ascetics, modern philosophers like Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre cultivated and analyzed anxiety in an effort to embody authenticity. By considering premodern ascetics early existentialists and modern existentialists latter-day ascetics, the essay sees the long history of existential anxiety as an ascetic tradition built around the ethical goal of living better through dread.

The aim of the ill-fated 1922 Congress of Paris, an international conference organized by André Breton, was to diagnose the sources of the “modern spirit.” Although the congress had ambitious international goals, it was brought down by a remark with xenophobic connotations. Largely remembered today as the death knell of Paris Dada—the public fight between Tristan Tzara and Breton meant not only that the congress never took place but also that Paris Dada was dissolved—the congress's failure stemmed from the tensions involved in selfconsciously deining modernism. Arguing that ambivalence over the concept shaped the main participants' understanding of the congress, I read the congress as a concrete manifestation of the impulse to federate the arts in post-World War I France.

The nature of Joseph Conrad's critique of imperialism, given his novels' pervasive racism, persists as a source of debate. his essay argues that three of his imperial novels, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory, take aim at an emerging system of imperialism organized around the modern, investorowned corporation. his system, referred to here as “absentee capitalism,” was replacing the nineteenthcentury British system of relatively small, familybased irms. he novels idealize the familyowned irm as having a presence of material value, meaning, and afect that contrasts with the wasted value let in the wake of absentee capitalism's invisible and everchanging network of social relations. According to this interpretation, Victory, which has been marginalized in Conrad studies, takes on renewed import for its insight into the relation among imperialism, romance, and modernism in Conrad's oeuvre.

“The earth, for us, is flat and bare. / … Poetry // Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns… Such claims saturate Wallace Stevens's work: poetry, Stevens affirms and reaffirms, is a potential source of value in a secular world. This essay tracks his attempts to realize this potential—to write a poem that would satisfy his metaphysical need. His work is relentlessly self-critical and experimental, and over his career he develops extravagant (and ultimately hermetic) responses to a stubborn philosophical problem. My aim is to reframe critical approaches to a central topic in Stevens's poetry and to re-evaluate his relation to philosophy. In the process, I hope to suggest answers to more general questions: What is experimental poetry? How do poets think in verse? Why do poets write difficult poems? What makes a poem difficult in the first place?

Modern critical reception of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women has been unequivocal in its resistance to the pathos of the text, but, despite this resistance, the Legend makes us feel pity regardless of our rational intentions. To this end, the Legend and its prologue are thematically and structurally unified, and together they provoke an unsettling awareness that our emotions do not belong entirely to us. For Chaucer, the art of feeling pity maps onto the art of writing poetry in that both involve performed sincerity that is not insincere for being performed, a kind of authentic inauthenticity. The paradox of emotional experience is thus the paradox of poetic creation: what feels most uniquely yours is in fact learned, acquired, and imitative.

Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact at odds with the established norms of scholarship? Is such an intellectual, to use Marjorie Garber's terms, a professional or an amateur? his essay considers these questions in the light of the institutionalization of a humanist curriculum in late colonial Britain and its overseas empire in order to examine the controversial figure of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a Bengali intellectual whose popular and provocative appeal derives from his position as an amateur and an autodidact. Such an intellectual identity is at odds with colonial education's ideological enterprise: to create a certain kind of professional subject. Though Chaudhuri is popularly perceived to be an Anglophile, his amateur identity not only provides the secret of his appeal but also departs from the institutionalization of humanist education that characterized the British Empire.

Although many believe that “mass higher education” increased opportunity and egalitarianism in postwar American society, the reality has been quite different. While a greater proportion of students are enrolled in higher-educational institutions now than at any other point in history, economic inequality is at an all-time high. Postwar American campus novels largely misunderstand this historical development. While the genre represents the university as an institution that combats social inequality by expanding enrollment, these novels simultaneously obscure the social inequality that the university cannot combat and instead helps to legitimate. The symbolic work of American campus novels has thus been to imagine a system that stages social conflicts between the deserving and the elite when in fact the postwar meritocracy has made the two categories functionally indistinguishable.

To understand what it feels like to read, we might consider what it feels like to have difficulty reading. Those who find it hard to read reveal the demands posed by a modern world that requires literacy even as it raises obstacles to reading. In this situation, the attempt to read can become pathetic: a site of suffering and reflexivity. Beginning with moments in the works of Walter Benjamin and his follower W. G. Sebald, we learn about the pains of reading as they open onto the pains of history in the cities of twentieth-century Europe. But Benjamin's and Sebald's insights on vision, pain, and history are anticipated in a series of sonnets by John Keats, written in metropolitan London in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Sherman Alexie's widely taught short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistight in Heaven (1993) ofers a largely unrecognized critique of the apocalyptic temporalities of United States militarism. War planners in the United States have frequently looked to the unrealized, potential holocausts of the future for a justiication of violence in the present. Alexie's collection—like much contemporary literature by Indian writers—unsettles this military logic by revealing how First Nations in North America and peoples around the world live with the consequences of a militarism that continually envisages impending antiAmerican violence as a means of justifying violence by the state. Alexie's writing provides a way of replacing the violent, futureoriented temporality of United States militarism with a “slow” temporality that acknowledges the un folding consequences of the past. Ultimately, this essay suggests a method for rereading “ethnic studies” literature with a view toward the interventions these texts make in mainstream United States culture.

Though her publications were slight after she permanently moved to Greenwich Village, in New York City, in 1940, Djuna Barnes labored over scores of literary and nonliterary typescript drafts from the 1940s to the 1980s. This unpublished artwork constitutes a geriatric avant-garde that deepened her earlier investments in modernist aesthetics. Archived documents record the elderly writer performing the principles of high modernism—innovation, experimentalism, and novelty—across an unprecedented array of genres, such as the poem, the pharmacy order, the grocery list, the medicine regimen, the memo, and personal correspondence. This article reassesses gerontophobic depictions of Barnes as an aged recluse who lived a creatively fruitless late life. The underex-plored works of her senior years are a unique version of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “a senile sublime.”