By examining twenty-first-century negative political advertisements alongside Shakespearean fools and Erasmian folly, we can read attack ads not as barren clichés but as parables about the slippages—between subject and object, villain and hero, insider and outsider—that make possible more-generous appraisals of folly and that offer glimpses of a humanist program based on folly's benevolence. When we read such ads as Erasmian gestures—more than that, when we recognize our entanglements in the foolish maneuverings of our political leaders—we confront the possibility that giving in to the incongruities of folly is more productive than insisting on a knowing, superior sufficiency. To recognize the incapacitating, unconventional properties of folly is to affirm what is alluring, even precious, about rhetorical philosophies that favor not orderly, intelligible communities but profoundly, dramatically—laughably—indistinct ones.

When Gloria Anzaldúa died in 2004, she gave birth to an enormous archive; indeed, she let far more unpublished writings than works published in her lifetime. What's more, Anzaldúa was a compulsive reviser, and her archive includes ten to twenty unique drats of some works, along with doodles, ticket stubs, and other ephemera. his collection of material decenters what we previously thought constituted her literary corpus, knocking the presumed author of Borderlands / La Frontera of her axis. he process of siting through these materials changed my thinking about authority, textuality, identity, and many other things. My obsession with this archive has led me to reexamine the ways in which we produce, reproduce, and coproduce knowledge in archival work. In this essay, I show how recognizing the multiple material actants at work in this archive transforms conventional thought about archives, in general, and Anzaldúan studies, in particular.

In the past two decades, scholars of world literature and transnational literary studies have called for an overhaul of the national literature model, in favor of a model based on literature's movement beyond national boundaries. Yet across the spectrum of approaches, scholarship on world literature has focused on the languages of the metropolitan center while largely overlooking the literary cultures of the so-called peripheries. We examine Jewish literature as a transnational and multilingual body of writing whose networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint to the center-periphery model of global literary circulation. Moreover, the essay offers one of the first comparative studies of Eastern European Jewish literature and Middle Eastern Jewish literature, furnishing new methodological tools for a comparative approach to Jewish literary culture.

Pity and gratitude are often classified among the moral emotions: pity responds to an undeserved ill that has befallen another, while gratitude affirms as good something given to us, as well as the agent who gave it. To some philosophers, however, pity and gratitude are never or rarely appropriate. For the Stoics, pity is unnecessary suffering for the person who pities, grounded in a mistaken view of what constitutes privation; Wollstonecraft and Godwin add that in a just society, there would be no pitiably needy people. Similarly, if assistance is reconceived as something due a person as a right, then the obligation to feel or express gratitude, or to render reciprocal service, is largely eliminated. Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice is indebted to the Stoical, pitiless, and gentle Houyhnhnms of Gulliver's Travels, and it prompts in turn Wordsworth's representations of interpersonal encounter in “Simon Lee,” The Ruined Cottage, and The Prelude.

The discourse of enthusiasm in the antebellum United States played a pivotal role in cultural debates surrounding the right of black people to participate in the “age of Revolution,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called the era in 1837. This argument is explored through the textual archive of Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831). During this period, enthusiasm could refer to either a democratic-sublime or a fanatical-delusional passion for freedom. The term was applied to Turner pejoratively, not so much because his rebellion represented an instance of wild fanaticism to white audiences but because it represented an instance of familiar democratic revolt inadmissibly claimed by black people. Turner makes his own rhetorical claims for the meaning of enthusiasm: the word signifies an ardent zeal that inspires both direct dissent against slavery and acts of communication that transmit to readers a fervor for occluded black freedoms.

Kenneth Goldsmith, a sculptor turned writer who now refers to himself as a “word processor,” makes mundane yet strangely enthralling poetry out of transcribed speech. Rather than stake claims to originality and value, Goldsmith extols “uncreativity” and “being boring” as new benchmarks of literary achievement. So far, critics have abjured these claims in favor of close readings of the texts. This essay aims to take the critical conversation in a new direction by arguing that what deserves critical examination is Goldsmith's attempt to conceptualize and practice poetry as information management. Information culture provides Goldsmith with a new understanding of language, a new view of the literary, and a new take on authorship, and the methods of text production that result from these resources travesty literary culture as we know it, which is exactly the point. Goldsmith's indifference to literary culture yields a method for generating texts that is as instructive as it is shocking because it requires us to face the strange prospect of a literature that chooses information culture over literary culture as its ground.

In 1940 Djuna Barnes, author of the notorious but weak-selling Nightwood (1936), received a commission from Harry A. Bull, editor of the New York-based society magazine Town & Country, to write a short reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. The Nazi occupation of the erstwhile world capital of the avant-garde gave Town & Country's well-heeled readership reason to be nostalgic for Paris's glamorous recent past. As for Barnes, despite her dwindling book sales, she still had some celebrity—especially among those American readers who remembered her risqué onetime best seller Ryder (1928)—as an artist, journalist, and character of the Paris scene. Struggling with alcoholism and illness, and fiercely private, but desperate for money, she accepted the commission (Herring 242-50). Drawing on material in a notebook she had carried while working as a journalist in the 1920s (Caselli 116), as well as an unpublished 1939 essay, “Farewell Paris,” Barnes took her miniature memoir through several drafts over the course of 1940 and 1941.

While the graphic novel has gained a measure of respectability in the United States, the medium of which it is a part has not. Even in the claim that comics are “not just for kids anymore,” adult comics readers are still stereotyped as immature. his paradoxical situation calls for a new assessment of the midcentury moment when comics were attacked and threatened with censorship and of the igure of Fredric Wertham, a famous anticomics crusader who is still hated in comics culture today. Far from being symptoms of immaturity, as they are sometimes described, attacks on Wertham are evidence of the longterm efects of illegitimacy on the experiences of comics readers and creators. Subject even now to regulatory discourses of maturity, contemporary comics are best understood not as a literature reaching adulthood but as the basis of a vital literacy still struggling with a long history of marginalization.

Despite their widespread attention to the conluence of queer sexualities and “decadence” in in- de- siècle writing, queer theorists have yet to overcome the two concepts' persistently destructive conlation. his essay explores the latent positive ainities of queerness and decadence in Walter Pater's Renaissance, which links them through what I call queer detachment. A balance of engagement with and withdrawal from history, this critical perspective anticipates queer theory's methodologies as well as other queer modernist productions. Examining Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood's chronicle of decadent Weimar Germany, I demonstrate how queer detachment becomes an increasingly politicized method of literary and social world making, a means of reengaging the politics and aesthetics of queer history. hese works, and others like them, encourage scholars to realize decadence's positivity, to conceptualize a queer theory that refuses to acquiesce to residual historical narratives and philosophical systems—without, for all that, refusing their value entirely.

In 1926 the new zealand artist, writer, and budding filmmaker len lye arrived in london by way of sydney, australia.

Only twenty-five years old, Lye was still a few years away from his first breakthrough in film: Tusalava (1929), a nine-minute animated film composed of over 4,400 drawings that took nearly two years to complete (Horrocks, Len Lye 91). The artist would spend the next two decades in London, years in which his association with the General Post Office Film Unit would provide him with the resources he needed to create some of his most famous films, such as A Colour Box (1935), Rainbow Dance (1936), and N or NW (1938).

In December 1925, a young American poet by the name of Laura Gottschalk—soon to change her name to Laura Riding—followed Robert Graves's advice and moved to London. While she had yet to publish a book of poems, her poetry had appeared in a number of literary journals, most notably the Fugitive (Jacobs xvii). Her first collection, The Close Chaplet, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in October 1926.

Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognomy in the nineteenth century and, after the trials of 1895, in depictions that link Wilde to a pathologically expressive personality type. Personality and modern vision converge in the subject of Wilde's face, and their relation is illuminated by recent debates about affects and the emotions as well as by the theories of visual modernity advanced by Charles Baudelaire, Max Beerbohm, and E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris . Whereas early caricatures of Wilde invest the image with a readable psychology or interior, later depictions maintain a fiction of readability linked to a purely physiological notion of abnormal personality.

A work of classical Indian theory and practice, Bharata's Nāṭyashāstra offers a comprehensive account of emotion and of the production, communication, and reception of representations of it in dance, music, poetry, and theater. This essay examines remarkable points of convergence and divergence between the third-century Sanskrit text and three influential modern Euro-American accounts: Charles Darwin's mapping of involuntary expressions of emotion in human beings and animals, William James's aggregation of emotions in the stream of consciousness, and Sylvan Tomkins's atlas of primary affects that links neurobiology and cybernetics. My comparative analysis highlights the Nāṭyashāstra's contributions to our understanding of the connections of emotion to cognition, consciousness, and causality; of the combinatorial constitution of emotions; and of treatments of emotion in contemporary affect theory and performance theory. The essay concludes with an exploration of Bharata's and Aristotle's models of mimesis and of their mutual differences regarding the representation of emotion in the verbal and performing arts.

What would it mean for literary and cultural scholars to incorporate the new historical scholarship on early world systems and states? In particular, what might we who study literature in the context of empire, capitalism, modernity, and globalization since 1500 make of the most recent historical and archival work on non-European parts of the world before 1500?

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935-2005) was one of the greatest and most prolific russian literary scholars of the twentieth century.

Though associated with the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Gasparov's writings were so diverse and multifaceted—and his scholarly personality so distinct—as to elude categorization.

Gasparov's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when measured against the rigid Marxist-Leninist paradigms that ruled humanities education and scholarship in the Soviet Union. A philologist with a special interest in verse form, he managed to sidestep the procrustean bed of Soviet ideology, building instead on the barely tolerated work of the Russian formalists and structuralists. He embraced and developed their goal of turning literary study into an exact science by applying statistical analysis and probability theory to poetics. Gasparov's scholarship was based on unprecedented amounts of data, which he painstakingly compiled in the precomputer era. However, he was never satisfied with the data as such; he used them to reach profound and unexpected conclusions.

Although the common core state standards initiative was adopted with little controversy in forty-eight states, it soon became the target of attacks both on the right, for the mistaken perception that public education was being taken over by the federal government, and on the left, in response to the institution of an all-too-real draconian testing regime that served the needs more of the testing companies and other corporate agents than of students or teachers. Despite these attacks, it seems likely that the initiative will prevail in most states, perhaps both for better and for worse. My position is that real national standards—not simply state standards— are a desirable goal for the United States today, and long overdue. The “local control” of public education by states and school districts has been, let us admit, the greatest flaw of the K-12 system and a powerful obstruction to the reform of that system. On the other hand, I agree with many (Bryant; Hacker and Dreifus; Ravitch) who see the Common Core as a misguided effort at reform, fatally undermined by the use of punitive, high-stakes testing as the driver of implementation (Loveless). Opting for this strategy, the promoters of the Common Core unfortunately imposed a top-down procedure just where it is least appropriate. Testing, by its very nature, ought to arise from the classroom, the scene of a unique relation between teacher and students. This is not to deny that universal testing is possible and even necessary but rather to acknowledge that the more distant tests are from the scene of teaching, the more limited their informational value.