A troubling feature of the common core state standards initiative (CCSSI) for english language arts (ELA) is its failure to recognize literature as a catalyst of complex thinking in students. According to the CCSSI, to “prepare all students for success in college, career, and life,” children must read texts “more complex” than “stories and literature” (“English Language Arts Standards”). The assumption that “stories” are inferior to nonfiction has a long tradition in Western culture; tapping into that prejudice is easy, and no proof seems to be required.

The trouble started with an ultimatum. emily casaubon, an english professor, was in line for a new office. but first, the kindly departmental administrator told her, she needed to purge some books. The administrator was right: Professor Casaubon's books were cresting and flooding like the spawn of the Philistine god Dagon—“sea monster, upward man and downward fish,” as John Milton pithily put it—in full run. She got right to work.

This PMLA cluster invites us to rethink questions of language, script, and literary traditions in a long-historical framework. Several other essays here address the inter-imperial dynamics accompanying the rise of Arabic from a localized dialect to a transregional language with a religious valence. My contribution considers the legacy of the Arabic language in the twentieth-century sub-Saharan West African context, in its contact with Senegalese vernaculars and with French as an imperial challenger. It further explores the broader implications of retracing the longue durée history of Arabic-script vernaculars for comparative work in postcolonial studies.

A new kind of world studies is emerging. This is a world studies 2.0, since some forms of world studies, such as world literature, world music, and world cinema, have existed for some years in the humanities. These categories have been more narrowly defined and refer to literature, music, and cinema from places other than the West—that is, “the rest,” as seen from the West. In this vein, world literature has sometimes been euphemistically called “literature of the world at large,” conjuring a chase, if only halfhearted, after a world that somehow slipped away: at large.

Learning to read is inseparable from teaching to read. The foundational assumption of the common core state standards initiative (CCSSI) master plan in the English language arts is that its method for teaching reading will eventuate in students' learning to read (as well as speak and write) better. Teachers and students come at their shared task from different perspectives, but both are presumed to be working in the same project of engaging something unproblematically called “language,” the program's middle name (as it is of the MLA). The Common Core's framers assume a correspondence between the phenomenon they call language in their methodological recommendations and language as it is used by them and their students—and everyone else who speaks English—in the world outside the classroom. The standards are based on a theory of language.

Emotions, and truths, are in crisis. in 2005, halfway through the stunning legacy of the bush-cheney-rumsfeld trifecta, stephen colbert kicked off the debut of The Colbert Report and his parodic critique of mendacious politicians and news outlets like Fox by popularizing the notion of “truthiness.” Welcome to the brave new world where felt truths replace facts! The concept of truthiness spread like wildfire, capturing the global zeitgeist. The public crisis of faith in traditionally trusted sources of authority reflects a profound skepticism experienced by many around the world besides discerning dissidents: all we are certain of is that truths proffered by governments, the media, and corporations are constructions (Boler, “Daily Show”; Boler with Turpin). But when we add to this mix the interests of corporate capitalism and science in designing citizens, can we even trust truthiness, what “I feel… to be true”? Or, as Samantha asks in the film Her, “Am I feeling these feelings? Are they mine? Or are they programmed?”

I am interested in questions of reading and interpretation. I am also drawn to actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour. Can these attractions be brought into alignment? To what extent can a style of thought that describes itself as empiricist and rejects critique speak to the dominant concerns of literary studies? Can actor-network theory help us think more adequately about interpretation? Might it inspire us to become more generous readers? How do literary studies and Latourian thought engage, enlist, seduce, or speak past each other? What duels, rivalries, intrigues, appropriations, or love affairs will ensue?

In the last few years there has been a tremendous surge in research projects focusing on the history of emotions. Historians all over the world, from Australia to London, from Princeton to Madrid, from Canada to Paris, have started to examine emotions from a historical perspective. Among the many individual and collective projects, the Berlin Center for the History of Emotions holds a special place. Since its founding in 2008, a group of twenty to thirty historians have devoted their research efforts to the single but complex goal of historicizing emotions. As an integral part of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the center is sufficiently funded to carry out such basic research and will continue to do so for years. It offers superb working conditions, providing offices and excellent library resources to its pre- and postdoctoral fellows and organizing weekly seminars and a great number of international conferences with the participation of distinguished scholars. Furthermore, the center welcomes visiting researchers (who mostly bring their own funding) and invites them to actively participate in and contribute to ongoing debates and events. Together with three major Berlin universities (Free University, Humboldt University, Technical University), the center launched an International Max Planck Research School for graduate training. Every year, six graduate students are accepted to the program, which focuses on moral economies of modern societies, with an emphasis on moral emotions.

If the survival of human and nonhuman animals depends on challenging beliefs about our species' exploitation of nature, it also depends on posthumanist perspectives that question more widely the ways in which humans perceive and inhabit the environment emotionally. I argue here that drama can make a valuable contribution not only to the process of interpreting emotions but also to raising awareness that emotional feelings have material efects. he capacity of drama and its performance to grapple with emotional responses to climate change and with broader scientiic knowledge seems particularly prescient.

I have become fond of starting sentences with I am so old that … as in, I am so old that I remember when Michelob was considered a premium beer. And, I am so old that I remember when GLBTQ was just G and L; Q was considered a threat, B apostasy, and T pathological. And, finally, I am so old that it has been more than twenty years since I wrote an MLA paper declaring, “Profession, revise thyself,” partly as a response to Stanley Fish's arguments about professional antiprofessionalism in “Profession Despise Thyself.” I delivered it at the 1992 MLA convention, in New York, and it eventually became the essay “Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism,” published in Social Text in 1993 and reprinted in my second book, Public Access, in 1994. Long, long ago.

Reading is still often perceived as the decoding of a message, as if the text were meant to be merely received, as if it had been composed in a known and invariable code, and as if the meaning were determined solely by the author. Since at least the 1960s, however, theories of interpretation have constructed (literary) reading in a more elaborate and inventive fashion: while each author was supposed to invent a singular language against the background of the common language, each interpreter had to create something new, even interpreters reading the same text, because each interpreter understood the text and its singular language within an ever-changing context of actualization. The model of interpretation nevertheless remained indebted to the activity of deciphering: the ever-changing meaning was to be found in the text itself.

There is a hint of Minerva's owl in medieval philosophy's relation to the apparently mundane formal question of analogy. The problem is everywhere in scholastic thought, inherited from Aristotle and Averroës, then adapted as one of the basic formal mechanisms through which Thomistic logic both transposes its own theological categories onto an older classical framework and apprehends metaphysical relations of being, of identity and difference. Classically, it is by analogy that one conceives the likeness of the unlike, extracting a concept from the individual instances and scattered genera in which it otherwise resides: the quality of wisdom that characterizes God, say, but might differently characterize humans; the property of animation that attaches to humans but differently qualifies beasts. Hegel notes this problem of scholastic analogy in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, when he comments of Aquinas that the category of “substance (forma substantialis) is, for instance, analogous to” Aristotle's notion of entelechy (3: 71) or when he dismisses medieval Latin more generally as “a quite unsuitable instrument” for the consideration of older philosophical forms—in effect, an imprecise exercise in analogy (38).

One day in 2012, while a presidential election campaign was in full swing, i wrote a blog post and hit “publish.” the post was pretty niche, I thought—the ninth in a series of posts that I had been tagging “puerility,” all incipient ideas for a future project that would draw on childhood studies, the history of statistics, and poetics. With “puerility,” I sought to describe a ludic epistemological mode that draws its power from its very willingness to disclaim power and embrace provisionality—an ambivalence often figured through, and associated with, boyhood. My previous blogging on puerility had mused over the Google N-gram Viewer and the widespread propensity to describe it as a “fun” “toy,” the foulmouthed parody Twitter account @MayorEmanuel, and Wes Anderson's 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom. The new post was about election predictions and a recent media flap around the statistician Nate Silver.