The document that follows is the fruit of an experiment. To broaden the scope of this issue of PMLA, Heather Dubrow, coordinator of the special topic, suggested that the journal invite a group of academics to meet during the 1994 MLA convention to discuss the status of evidence. The participants, who were chosen to represent a range of specialities and interests, wrote preliminary statements that were circulated in the group before the meeting. Some of the questions raised during the discussion arose from these statements.

Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians (1988) uses the historical relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the contemporary struggles between Britain and the nationalist community in the North of Ireland. The play, an elegy for thirteen Irish civilians murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday (30 Jan. 1972) in Derry, draws subversive power from a trope that since the eighteenth century has focused imaginative Irish resistance to British colonial rule. I first explore the history and the gendering of the trope, from early English myths of Trojan descent and medieval Irish genealogies through eighteenth-century antiquarians and philologists, nineteenth-century novelists, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. I then examine poems from Seamus Heaney's North, Brian Friel's play Translations, and McGuinness's Carthaginians to show how the pressure of history has revitalized the Rome-Carthage trope, which functions as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality.

Throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, Ethan Allen Greenwood, a rather pedantic young diarist, each day recorded the weather and the title of the book he was reading. He sometimes observed that a particular work was “instructive” or “entertaining” and occasionally noted the library from which the volume was borrowed–the Adelphi Fraternity Library, the Social Friends Library, or the unnamed circulating library he joined in 1806. His meticulous account of his activities and expenses–whether he was living at home in Worcester County, Massachusetts, or at Dartmouth College or later in Boston or traveling around the countryside as an itinerant painter–provides posterity with an unusually comprehensive portrait of “Ethan Allen Greenwood, his life and times.” Looking over the record that he left, we can well imagine that we know this serious and sober, parsimonious and abstemious young man Franklinesquely working his way toward fame and fortune. But then we encounter a curious diary entry: “Rode out with the ladies. Returned and spent the evening agreeably. What I do not write here will not be forgotten.”

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

Because textual scholarship, having no definable Fach, or subject matter, is an exemplary postmodernist antidiscipline, it can serve as a site for testing the epistemological assumptions and protocols of the current debate over the status of evidence and the nature of proof. Since text is “authority” and “original” and yet also “network” and “tissue” and since forensics encompasses both hard physical “facts” and the rhetorical formulation that gives such data interpretive meaning, a textual forensics will codify and test the interaction of the phenomenological world and the hermeneutic analysis of its evidence. With procedural and conceptual links both to scientific empiricism and to rhetorical strategies for persuasion, textual scholarship becomes a vehicle for anatomizing the postmodernist breakdown of the master narratives, including that of evidence and proof.

As I was preparing this paper, I kept thinking that the topic 1 was treating was not The Place of the Personal but The Uses of the Personal. This tenacious false memory is symptomatic, of course; it means that I do not question the place of the personal in scholarship: as far as 1 am concerned, it has always been there, whether stated, overstated (as some think it is), or (as it has generally been) understated, concealed behind the “impersonal” doxa of the day. I do not, then, question the place of the personal (except to suggest that it has more than one place) but instead consider its uses and its function in scholarship, its diverse uses and its diverse functions in different cultural and scholarly traditions that intersect in my practice as a scholar in this country. Indeed, as I tackled this paper, those intersecting traditions made my thinking about the place of the personal in my work immensely difficult. I kept asking myself not only where and when and how I resort to the personal but also, and pressingly, for whom I am personal when I am personal.

Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cocking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.

In focusing the novel Beloved on Sethe's forced infanticide, Toni Morrison places social and familial trauma at the center of American discourses on race. This emphasis opposes two forms of the denial of trauma that have characterized American politics since the late 1960s—neoconservative denial of the continuing effects of institutional racism and the New Left and black-nationalist denial of violence within African American communities. Beloved invokes an essentially liberal position of the sort that culminated and largely ended in the Moynihan report of 1965. But Morrison corrects the errors of this form of liberalism by insisting on the agency and autonomy of African American culture and on the positive roles of women.

Kafka's letters and notebooks reveal a surprising link between his Schriftstellersein ‘literary being’ and what he regarded as his fundamentally bureaucratic nature. Katka used the term Beamtengeist ‘bureaucratic mind’ to refer both to a mode of critical consciousness driven by a neurotic obsession with order and security and to a longing for social solidarity based on duty. His understanding of Beamtengeist can be placed in a historical context of social-scientific concern regarding the effects of increasing bureaucratization. The dialectical ambivalence inherent in the concept is apparent throughout Kafka's work but is most clearly represented in “Der Bau,” a story often read as a meditation on his self-conception as a writer. “Der Bau” traces the demise of a molelike creature whose Berechnungskunst ‘art of calculation’ condemns him to unbearable isolation. This reading suggests a need to reexamine the proverbial separation of art and life as it has been applied to this quintessentially modernist writer.

I want to discuss the value and function of the personal as it has been called into service in the academy. Specifically, I want to examine the institutional function of racial identification: the place(s) of the racialized personal in scholarship. How have individuals marked by racial difference been asked, in order to enter the assumed universal mode of academic subjectivity, at certain historical points to forget the personal as it resides in them as racialized beings experiencing race and at other times not only to recognize the personal as racial but to foreground it particularly in their scholarly duties?

When feminist critics of the 1970s rediscovered “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they constructed an interpretation of the story and the history of its publication and reception. Subsequent critics lent authority to an emerging set of accepted “facts”: nineteenth-century audiences read the tale as a ghost story rather than as a critique of the sexual politics of marriage; Gilman fought valiantly against hostility from the entrenched hierarchy of male editors who refused to publish her work; and irate male physicians censured the story once it appeared. By reexamining the documentary evidence on which those “facts” are based, we examine the role that ideology plays in gathering and interpreting evidence. Gilman's story serves as a fine but certainly not a unique example of how scholarship is as grounded in historical biases as the literature it seeks to illuminate.

In the field of medical imaging, theory, technique, and rhetoric converge to produce knowledge. Historical taboo and cultural belief in the fragility of life have protected the interior of the human body from the scientist's prying eyes; nevertheless, in the modern period (since about 1540), the production of medical knowledge has depended on the unveiling of physical detail. Recent work in the sociology of science—notably Bruno Latour's concept of the theater of proof—has questioned this epistemology. Latour argues that scientific knowledge can be produced by superimposing data that create an effect of reality. To illuminate traditional strategies for constructing convincing accounts of hidden biological processes, I examine texts by Andreas Vesalius, William Beaumont, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. I then discuss an advertisement for a contemporary medical-imaging device that, by foregrounding the superimposition of diagnostic data, provides a useful counterexample to the constructed objectivity of the earlier texts.

A Funeral Elegy was written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies, A Funeral Elegy received scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”