The Tenth and final “anchor standard for reading” in the common core state standards defines as “college and career ready” a student who can “[r]ead and comprehend literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (35). I want to remark on just one aspect of this worthy if blandly unremarkable goal. The distinction between “literary” and “informational” texts has the sanction of common sense, but, like many commonsense notions, it cloaks some knotty issues. For the authors of the standards, “literacy” requires mastering two different if closely related sets of reading skills. One lays the groundwork for “understanding and enjoying complex works of literature,” while the other is needed “to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally” (3). Pedagogically, one is the job of the “English language arts teacher,” the other the responsibility of “teachers of history/social studies, science, and technical subjects” (8).

The axiom that literature cannot be read in the same way as other forms of writing is by no means universally held, but it has long governed the teaching of reading in high school and college classrooms. In ways that humanists can find heartening, the Common Core standards valorize the traits that reading literature both requires and strengthens: habits of attention and intellectual rigor; the refinement of sensibility and emotional response; the ability to analyze, to synthesize, to discriminate, to evaluate. Such virtues travel well, too. The authors of the standards recognize that students who have mastered literary reading skills are better equipped to meet the challenges posed by texts in other disciplines.

Reviving Thomas Hobbes's definition of the passions as interior motions that originate action, this essay considers the case of insensibility: an absence of feeling that results in immobility. Embodying this lack of feeling is the figure of the insensible, whose signature nonresponsiveness provokes the most vehement emotions in others. Through readings of Hobbes's theories of resistance and contempt, Adam Smith's condemnation of impassivity, and Herman Melville's tale of an “unmoving” scrivener, I examine how insensibility challenges the model of emotions as causes, as accounts of how a moved body moves. Insensibility confuses distinctions between bad feeling and no feeling, agents and patients, living and dead. Finally, I argue for narrative's surprising dependence on the nonnarrative presence of the insensible, a subject that reaches back through the history of philosophy to Aristotle's unmoved mover, the first cause of the universe that makes all motion possible by not being subject to motion itself.

As I sit down to write these words in late October 2014, my Latin American news digest has just informed me that archaeologists in Peru have confirmed that toolmaking human beings lived in settlements 14,700 feet above sea level in the Andes over twelve thousand years ago, a thousand years earlier than anyone was known to have lived at such altitudes (Ritter). The goalposts marking the longue durée in the Americas have been receding continuously in recent years. Until the 1990s, received wisdom had it that human beings arrived in the Americas no earlier than thirteen or fourteen thousand years ago, across the Bering Strait land bridge, which disappeared underwater a couple of thousand years later. But in the late twentieth century archaeologists began finding human remains over fourteen thousand years old, like those in the 14,800-year-old settlement at Monte Verde, far south on the coast of what is now Chile. There had to have been migrations well before the fourteen-thousand-year mark. Since the discovery in Chile, human remains more than twenty and even thirty thousand years old have repeatedly been found. Aggressively defended by archaeologists, the accepted story held up longer than it should have, but accumulating evidence has finally dislodged it. How and when the Americas were populated by human beings remains a terrain of lively controversy.

In a letter Franz Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer in January 1913, he describes himself as a “great laugher.” Although Kafka is conventionally associated with anxiety, gloom, even terror, his laughter is joyful.

In July 1099, after three years of levantine military adventure during which new latin christian colonies were fashioned at edessa and Antioch, the transnational forces from Europe later known as the First Crusade finally captured their principal target: Jerusalem. Three eyewitness chronicles attest to the bloodbath that followed. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to one of the foremost Crusade leaders, estimated that “ten thousand were beheaded” at the Temple of Solomon alone (Chronicle 77). The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks) averred, “No-one has ever seen or heard of such a slaughter of pagans” (92). Raymond d'Aguiliers, chaplain to another Crusade leader, was effusive:

Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet lay in the houses and streets, and indeed there was a running to and fro of men and knights over the corpses…. [T]hese are few and petty details…. Shall we relate what took place there? If we told you, you would not believe us. So it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses. In my opinion, this was poetic justice…. Jerusalem was now littered with bodies. (Historia 127-28)

Launched in 2010 and adopted by forty-three states and the District of Columbia, the Common Core State Standards read like a Well Wrought Urn for kids—a New Critical primer for a new generation. From kindergarten through grade 12, close reading is the backbone of literary curricula. With each passing year, students perform close readings of increasing complexity—and with what feels like increasing adherence to New Critical doctrine. According to the Common Core reading standards, fifth graders must be able to “determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.” They must also be able to explain “how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem” (12). By eighth grade, students must be able to “provide an objective summary of the text” and “compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style” (36). And by eleventh or twelfth grade, they must “cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain” (38). Students meeting these standards, we are told, can “readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex literature” (3). In their textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which popularized close reading across North American universities, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren announced a similar goal: “to present to the student, in proper context and after proper preparation, some of the basic critical problems—with the aim, not of making technical critics, but merely of making competent readers of poetry” (xiv).

How quickly and how often those who heard about the sudden death of helen tartar asked, did i let her know how much her support meant to me? Did I express adequately my gratitude for all the work she did for me and for others in literature, philosophy, critical theory, visual culture, poetry, and religion, to name but a few of her fields? I do not think it was a reflex of self-punishment as much as the upsurge of another kind of remorse, the wishing to have said more. At the American Comparative Literature Association's memorial for Helen Tartar, person after person testified to the extraordinary support she offered—soliciting a manuscript; reading it actively and critically; sometimes productively quarreling with its ideas or formulations; finding the right readers; collaborating on the material form, including cover and font; and sending the work forth into the world of readers, “worlding” it, if you will. Some at that event spoke about the race against tenure and the acute anxiety it produces, and how crucial Helen was in expediting a review and presenting the work before the board for approval. Others talked about her frank and sensitive evaluations, which let us know what had to change before the manuscript became a book—always delivered with an affirmation of the project. But because Helen was a committed intellectual with her own philosophical, literary, and religious archive, she also contested conclusions and queried moves. I remember how, when she copyedited The Psychic Life of Power (in the days when she handled every aspect of production at Stanford), she quarreled with my reading of Freud and sent me to new sources to correct my view. To Haun Saussy, with whom she worked on several projects, she wrote, “When I read this argument, I felt I needed to take hold of it like a twisted sock and pull it inside-out.” She was our first reader, and we were incredibly lucky because she paid attention.

Only in the last decade has the field of medieval french literature recognized the need for a critical gaze that looks outside France and beyond the persistent Eurocentric accounts of medieval French literary history. These accounts long viewed medieval French literary production primarily in relation to the Latin, Celtic, and Provençal traditions. My research over the last twenty years has called for a revisionist history of literature and of empires and has highlighted the fact that throughout the Middle Ages France entertained “inter-imperial” literary relations—not only with European traditions but also with extra-European cultures, specifically with the Islamicate world.

I'm struggling now, trying to write, to say anything, to follow the command “write it!” what i really need is an e-mail from Helen, telling me to sit down, to say what it is that I want to say and then to go about saying it. She would probably give me an ideogram, direct me to a page of Ernest Fennollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, then add how much she was looking forward to seeing the essay in print, on real paper, out there in the world. She would also, perhaps by way of closing, remind me that writing was a practice of making oneself vulnerable, and that wisdom wasn't going to come uninvited if you didn't let go of the need for some security.

The middle english pearl is one of the most moving and beautiful poems ever composed. occasioned, it seems, by the death of a two-year-old daughter, whose identity has never been determined, it casts the grieving narrator-father as one who has treasured the child as a jewel beyond compare. She was round and smooth, rare and radiant—a precious pearl fit for a prince. Yet this dear small thing just slipped away one day in the garden, tumbling down through the grass into the dark earth:

As this opening stanza reveals, Pearl relies on the polyvalence and sensuous power of poetic language for its affective effects, gathering associative resonance through shifting meanings, working through indirection and allusiveness, tapping into the sensory power of visual and tactile images and patterned sound, and leaving much unsaid, to be grasped and felt between the lines. But the poem's broad emotional arc is clear. It scripts a therapeutic narrative of affective experience, taking its reader, whom it enfolds within the textual “I” of the poem, from “woe” to “weal” (56, 1187).

According to what educational psychologists call the “simple view of reading,” learning to read requires two sets of skills: decoding (translating “graphic shapes into linguistic form”) and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough 128). The possession of these best predicts success in reading, even beyond such factors as students' gender and socioeconomic status (Kendeou, Savage, and van den Broek; Juel). For humanists who thrive on the complexity of reading, the simple view may look not just simple but crude. But it looks so only if it is supposed to account for every aspect of learning to read rather than for the skills that explain the most variance in students' performance. Understood in the latter sense, it helps teachers know where to focus their efforts in teaching reading. It provides three predictions about why students might have trouble: problems with decoding, problems with understanding, or both. In this light, the model's reductiveness is less a weakness than an achievement in clarifying preconditions for literacy.

London, June 2014. I'm queuing outside a downtown church behind a six-foot-tall man whose neck juts into my view every time the lights change at the corner. He's craning for a white van whose walls are lined with hardcovers and paperbacks. Its sponsor, the Quaker Homeless Action Committee, helps readers who are sleeping rough reclaim a right that many citizens take for granted: book borrowing.

We now recognize that renaissance manuals of conduct, in which thinkers such as castiglione and erasmus sought to encode canons of polite behavior, are a major source of evidence about early modern emotions. But scholarly understanding of the relation between conduct literature and Renaissance society's management of emotions had to wait for the publication of the sociologist Norbert Elias's two-volume work Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process [1939]), which only began to reach anglophone critics in 1978.

What are we mourning when we mourn helen tartar's loss? we are responding, first and foremost, to the loss of a friend, a collaborator, a companion in crime. Like so many, I owe my career to Helen. She plucked me out of a professional abyss at a crucial pre-promotion moment, got a stalled manuscript accepted, into production, and out into the world in an unheard-of nine months. Along the way she sent me countless messages of support testifying (I can now see) to her savvy and ingenuity but phrased in a way that made me think it was merely my due. Heady stuff for an oppressed-feeling assistant professor at an Ivy League school coming up for promotion to associate professor, and inspiring enough in all the right ways to catalyze not just that promotion but a continuing sense that someone—somewhere—would respond to my work and push me in the right directions. More than an editor, Helen was the reader I—we all—yearn for: responsive, generous, exacting.

Civilization is unthinkable without writing. This statement is a commonplace, and like all commonplaces its reiteration merits critical reflection, especially when we ponder why stakes become so high whenever writing is concerned. The shared modern Chinese and Japanese kanji rendering of the word for “civilization,” for instance, means “enlightening through writing/text” ( [wenming in Mandarin]), which puts emphasis literally on the value of writing. For centuries, writing has been invoked as a positive index to the hierarchy of human societies and their intellectual attributes, whereby orality is relegated to primitive and pretechnological cultures. The presumed dichotomy of writing and orality often relies on a flawed, representational view of writing that is phonocentric to the core, à la Derrida, and remains almost always blind to the presence of script or medium—including that of alphabetical writing—which requires a different kind of analytical approach.