René Char acknowledges that his major poetic precursor is Arthur Rimbaud. Char is esthetically indebted to Rimbaud for his creative vision, teleology, and practice. The numerous thematic affinities between these two poets include a humanized harmonious universe, the attitude of revolt, the obligation of anguish, the poet as the initiator of action, and the concepts of poetic activity, love, experience, risk, man, nature. The poetic matter of their creative worlds is identical, but Char brings the necessary corrective of faith in human expression to Rimbaud's immature reliance on verbal expression. Where Rimbaud fails to synthesize the fragments, Char succeeds. It is Char's understanding of Rimbaud's work that enables him to evolve a poetic based first on life and second on theory. Char does not merely humanize the cosmos; he goes on to poeticize man. Technical similarities are equally numerous, but Char is disciplined; he rejects the equation of the act and expression in favor of an evocation of the activity through the effect of spontaneity, his theories of pulverization and crispation. Char overcomes Rimbaud's limits and frustrations and succeeds in fulfilling his vision.

Thoreau's puns reflect the widespread philosophic interest in language that flourished in midcentury America. Some of his wordplay is covertly scatological. Though he explicitly defends excrement as natural, philological speculation encourages him to view it as poison. Excremental symbolism bolsters vegetarian ideals and subserves a philosophy where body contaminates spirit. Thoreau's ambivalent anality, evident in his fastidious cleanliness, helps explain his distaste for women, since female biology makes birth unclean and sex dirty. Excremental symbology also colors his view of emotion as a function of the bowels. Unctuous affection seems an oily exudation secreted in social contact, while sympathetic tears are a rendering of the fat accumulated in digestion. His contempt for sympathy as self-indulgent weakness is part of the heroic ethos forced upon him by the consciousness that death tainted his lungs. Dietary scruples are his ascetic strategy for avoiding consumption. Influenced by Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connection with Man (1851), Thoreau's covert scatological puns embody in style his philosophy of play, blending estheticism and stoicism in the concept of life as a heroic game. Many nineteenth-century punsters including Carlyle and Nietzsche exemplify similar compensatory attitudes; so do other modern hero-worshipers.

In his celebrated quasi-bucolic episode of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes mocks and parodies the old school of the Frauendienst, even as he levels his irony against a chivalric ideal that had come under increasing scorn since at least the end of the fifteenth century. Various elements are blended to achieve his story. Grisóstomo's suicide turns out to be incontrovertible as well as illustrative of the essentially Petrarchan though parodical character of the famous poem “La cancion desesperada,” while the generally bucolic although mixed and burlesque quality of the entire episode issues straight from a central theme of the Renaissance pastoral, the whole matter of man's freedom. The very term “canción desesperada,” and probably other features of the long poem in Ch. xiv, derive directly from a sixteenth-century bucolic poet and fervent Petrarchist, Gutierre de Cetina.

Circumscription of space is a fundamental and necessary feature of Poe's fictional universe of negative possibility. That his characters are almost always narrowly circumscribed suggests their severely limited prospects and interests. Diminished space also represents withdrawal into self, and Poe's centers of diminished space often contain symbols of that destructive core of the inner self which continually threatens the moral and rational being of the Poe protagonist. In undertaking The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe was committing himself uncharacteristically not only to the representation of movement in space but also to an objective mode of development, outward and ongoing testing and discovery of self in the infinite possibilities of space. The curious form of Arthur Gordon Pym is the result not so much of careless incompetence (as recent scholarship has suggested) as of a fundamental conflict between psychological inclination and the formal requirements of an unfamiliar genre. But this work is of special interest, since Arthur Gordon Pym is a first effort in an important line of experimentation in American fiction, the transformation of an undistinguished form, the sea narrative, into a vehicle of major literature.

The method used by some recent critics to prove that certain Shakespearean characters are “figures” of Christ (or of other biblical or Renaissance personages) was parodied by Shakespeare himself in Fluellen's comparison of Henry v to Alexander the Great. Its success is guaranteed in advance, since it allows the critic to select only the similarities between the two persons being compared without considering whether these are unique or whether they are more significant than the differences between them. The evidence is thus subjected to a double screening: the critic determines which events in the character's career can be compared to the historical personage, and then which aspects of those events are relevant to the comparison. Even the differences between them can be converted into positive evidence. It is therefore possible by this method to prove that almost any character is a figure of Christ or of King James or of almost anyone else, which is the great strength of “Fluellenism” and also its great weakness, since a method that can prove anything proves nothing.

In contrast to the commonly held view that Keller is portraying the high points of Zurich's cultural history in his Züricher Noeellen, the historical phenomenon of periods in transition, particularly the individual response to the fact and realization of transition, appear as the main theme of this cycle of novellas. A detailed analysis of the five stories leads to the observation that the Active present in each novella is a period removed from the actual high point of a given era. Hadfoub, for example, takes place at the very end of the Minnesang period, representing a latecomer among the minnesingers, one who plays an anachronistic role, and Ursula treats events surrounding religious change, in this case the clash between the Zwingli forces and the Anabaptists after the introduction of the Reformation in Zurich. To underscore the idea of transition, Keller makes use of the ironic narrator who frequently voices his discriminating opinion about the characters, and who in the frame novella clearly relates the issue of “transitional time” to Keller's own age, also a period of transition, and in so doing censures those writers who are oblivious to the needs of the present and seek refuge in a glorious portrayal of the past.

In the late 1920's, when T. S. Eliot was haunted by Dante's Vita nuova and by the Earthly Paradise cantos of the “Purgatorio,” he was also very much under the influence of Charles Maurras, the French monarchist and anti-Romantic. He found in Maurras the “criterion” he was searching for—a sense of “order” that would save the poetic sensibility from mere emotional self-indulgence. In 1928, Eliot himself translated an old essay on criticism by Maurras which argued that readiness for impression must be matched by a capacity for selection. Eliot had Maurras very much in mind when he sat down to write his own essay on Dante, and, by a special dedication, he tied the essay very tightly to Maurras, whose treatise on Dante he knew. “Ash Wednesday,” too, with its interplay between the yearning, regretting sensibility, and the expiatory frame that controls it, is a mirror of both Eliot's Dante essay and the esthetics of Maurras. In the long run, however, the tutelage of Dante began to move Eliot away from Maurras.

Both Max's courtroom speech in Richard Wright's Native Son and his final scene with Bigger have been grievously misunderstood. The numerous critics of the novel have regarded Max's speech as a Communist “party-line oration” whose propaganda is poorly related to the rest of the book. Rather, Max seeks desperately to avert the cataclysmic end toward which he sees American society heading by striving to have wrongs redressed. Bigger, however, finds a meaning in his life by accepting his feelings of hate. This is not a defeat for him, as critics have asserted. Hatred of the oppressor is a natural, human emotion which, used as the motor power of an idea driving toward a goal, can transform both the individual and society. As Max says, “The job in getting people to fight and have faith is in making them believe in what life has made them feel. . . .” This is the belief Bigger finally acquires. With this belief comes a sense of comradeship with those whites such as Jan who have earned such comradeship in action.

A number of critics have commented upon Holden Caulfield's “neurosis,” but none has accepted Salinger's apparent invitation to a psychoanalytical reading of the novel. As a step in that direction, this paper examines a structural pattern of aggression and withdrawal, largely sexual, in Holden's thoughts and actions. The pattern is reinforced by such characters as Stradlater and Ackley, the former mirroring Holden's mostly fanciful exploitativeness and the latter his more natural tendencies toward retrogression. The episodic middle chapters show Holden vacillating desperately between those tendencies; and the conflict is brought to a curious resolution in the concluding Phoebe section when Holden verges, or rather unconsciously fears he may be verging, on sexual intimacy with his younger sister. The two tendencies converge at that point, and Holden becomes potentially both sexually exploitative and retrogressive. It is this revelation, realized most fully through the writing of his narrative, that points the way to health.

The language, action, setting, and characterization of The Prairie cohere around the idea of man as one species of animal among many. On one level, man is a hunter, dominating the other beasts upon whom he is dependent for food and clothing. On another level, man is a scientist, subjecting the beasts to study, classification, and control. On a third level, the novel observes man as an animal of ambiguous identity. The various groups of characters exemplify differing varieties of humanity. The barbaric Indians and the angelic Inez are opposing extremes in dehumanizing characterization. Ellen and Paul display the conflicting demands of feeling, reason, and conscience on the typical middle ground of human nature. In the most dramatic aspect of the romance, the Bush family is forced by pressure of extraordinary circumstance from a brutal, lawless existence into a troubled consciousness of human guilt, justice, and mortality. Finally, in the aged and dying Leather-Stocking is represented a rare example of a fully human life achieved at the most primitive remove from mere animality.

La Logique de Port-Royal is regarded by historians of this science as a treatise that does not fit into any of their categories; indeed, the art of Logic as an independent exercise of the mind seemed unacceptable to its authors. Writing at the end of the Aristotelian era and under the influence of Cartesian theories, but having their own convictions about man's nature and obligations, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole saw logical reasoning as justifiable only if it trains the mind to distinguish between Good and Bad. They believed in the existence of an immutable, eternal truth; man's reason is intended to make this Truth a perceivable reality. Logic, most importantly, therefore, trains our word-using and concept-making faculty to acknowledge that the needs of man's soul belong to a much higher order of values than the science of “things”: it should thus give reason the strength to be “true” to its own nature. (In French)

Translation is a synthetic approach to interpretation and a paradoxical awareness of the crisis of language. Some of the translator's problems, such as rhythms, grammar, lexical layers, syntax, are illustrated with critical reference to the five published English translations of Celan's “Todesfuge”; their resolution leads to creative apprehension. The provenience of the poem is biblical. The devices of oxymoron, surrealist metaphor, disparate rhythms and meter, inversion of time sequence, and the erotic countersubject all function as verbal correlatives to the paradox and absurdity which aie the poem's theme and represent a peculiar combination of esoteric artistry and commitment. The fugue is structured by four voices (statements with contrapuntal variations) and the echoed simultaneity of “poppy” (verbal narcotic) and “remembrance” (of unreal reality). The poem is placed in the frame of Celan's later development.

Whereas literary sources and theatrical conventions such as the unities are quite important for the appreciation of Beaumarchais's Barbier de Séville and La Mère coupable, they prove curiously unhelpful when trying to approach the unique qualities of Le Manage de Figaro. The special ambience of this play is related not to ordinary literary traditions, but to the separate category of children's games. From Cherubin's hide-and-seek in Act I to the grand game of blindman's buff in Act v, these are what give the action of the play its unity and also create the special quality of the fun in the play. Because of the time of life these games imply (i.e., childhood), there is also a special quality to the play's revolutionary overtones. Thus, in many senses, the end of the play represents the ushering in of a new age.