Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, considered apolitical by some readers, is profoundly political in its repeated undermining of hierarchy as an unquestioned mode of perception. Three formal devices in the text highlight this undermining: the free mule story and its chain of associations, the buzzard tale that moves from the inside to the outside of the free mule story, and the novel's pervasive physical imagery. Language that forces readers to juggle multiple and contradictory meanings intertwines with an acknowledgment of physicality — human sexuality, human death — in a powerful display of the limits of rational truth telling. Rooted in African American women's history, the novel confronts the complexities of racism and sexism while undercutting a belief in any monological understanding of person or politics, text or nation.

In his Laokoon essay, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing concludes that “[b]ei uns scheinet sich die zarte Einbildungskraft der Mütter nur in Ungeheuern zu äuβern” ‘in modern times the susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself solely in monsters.‘ In contrast, masculine imagination yields beautiful statues, beautiful men, and subsequently harmonious cultures. The idealization of classical sculpture displaces the generative power of the mother, who, if not totally impotent, is the source of the fragmented, deformed body. The Laokoon text incorporates and abjects the fragmented body of the woman. It is ironic that she represents both the void and the only object capable of filling the subjective vacuum. Stable masculine subjectivity is contingent on the abjection of woman and yet unattainable without her recovery. Accordingly, the Laokoon is based on the abjection of the feminine while simultaneously stuffed full of fragments of the woman's body and imagination. Lessing's aesthetic project fosters the circumscription of feminine imagination by the myth of the unifying function of masculine fantasy.

Literary historians have celebrated Wordsworth's pastoral poems for their realism; more recently, new-historicist critics have criticized them for idealization. Reading the poems as ironic, even as parodie in Bakhtin's sense, explains what makes such opposite assessments both plausible and insufficient. My chief example is “Michael.” Formal symmetries in “Michael” suggest a mythic dimension, but they are subtly breached so that the poem cannot be read definitively as idealization. Conversely, while the poem's emphasis on labor suggests reality, its subtle exaggerations also discredit the use of labor as a mere device of realism. Wordsworth invites readers to consider pastoral's primary symbols, sheep, in two symbologies simultaneously: spiritual and material. Such cross-valuation, which recovers an ambivalence crucial to both biblical and classical pastoral, neither mimics nor distorts reality but rather foregrounds the way reality is constructed from symbols. Considering Wordsworth's pastoral as a version of Bakhtinian parody further illuminates the anti-interpretive functions of both modes.

Italo Calvino's “Sotto il sole giaguaro” (“Under the Jaguar Sun”), a story about the sense of taste, is the culmination of his lifelong research on desire; it presents and analyzes all the primary functions of food, from the satisfaction of a biological need to the possibility of transgression, from the narrative sign to the cognitive tool used to outline the problematic relation among self, others, and the world (or among subject, nature, and history). “Sotto il sole giaguaro” deals with the dialectics of logos, sitos, and eros in an extremely original manner, by foregrounding primary images (like the female protagonist's mouth and the jaguar sun of the title) and by combining the narration of a tourist's journey with a love story and an anthropological inquiry into Aztec cannibalism. In this beautiful and challenging text, gastronomy fuses within itself anthropology and eroticism, while the underlying discourse probes the nature of literature. (G-PB)

When revisiting Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões with La guerra del fin del mundo, Mario Vargas Llosa constructs an intertextual sequence analogous to that constituted by literary and other texts within European culture, the sphere against which Latin American writings are usually measured. As the two books examine a complex historical event, they consider the composition, physical environment, and history of South American populations, attempting to define a characteristically Latin American culture and to question the relevance of European explanatory schemes for such a definition. The relation between the two texts suggests that intertextuality can be a tool in the service of shaping a national — or continental — consciousness.

The conclusion Northrop Frye contributed to the Literary History of Canada (1965) depicts in narrative form his evolving sense of how critics necessarily become involved in their critical creations and, further, of how the degree of this involvement provides a measure of their own imaginative development. Frye reads the Canadian literary tradition as a romance that implicates him in its structures. Because the conclusion glosses the fall-and-redemption myth that inspires much of his work, it illustrates his conception of literary history making as simultaneously an act of self-making. Viewed from the perspective of Frye's own transforming voyage through it, the conclusion appears in a new light as a romance about the creation of the idea of Canada, a metaphoric conception that is transhistorical, autonomous, and distinctly literary. (RL)

Coleridge's theory of “creative Imagination” and his description of The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination” have usually encouraged critics to search for the work's unity. This endeavor represses the text's manifest disjunctions of form and content, as well as slighting Coleridge's use of Gothic conventions. Freudian commentary, while addressing The Rime's irrational, dreamlike qualities, cannot account for the poem's emphasis on linguistic inadequacy or for the horror of the female that pervades the Mariner's tale and his identity. Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and of how the subject “abjects” the maternal in attaining the symbolic suggest that The Rime narrates the unspeakable process through which the symbolic is reached. From this perspective The Rime describes the creation of imagination.

In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection.

To begin, I will confide in you a feeling. Already on the subject of headings [caps]—and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. More precisely, of someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of overacculturated, overcolonized European hybrid. (The Latinate words culture and colonization have a common root, there where it is precisely a question of what happens to roots.) In short, it is perhaps the feeling of someone who, as early as grade school in French Algeria, must have tried to capitalize, and capitalize upon, the old age of Europe, while at the same time keeping a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore. Keeping, in truth, all the marks of an ingenuity still incapable of this other old age from which French culture had, from very early on, separated him.

In the four-part novel Torquemada (1889-95), Galdos allegorizes the philosophical complexities of his age with a powerful negotiatory energy. Historical exigencies modify his miserly protagonist's figurai force by submitting the venerable sin of avarice to a secular revision that appropriately reflects the nineteenth-century positivist episteme. Since Dante's Divine Comedy provides the structural framework and the typological authority for the protagonist's successful social ascent, a sense of cognitive disjunction is inevitable. Comte's synthetic Religion of Humanity crosses with the medieval value system implied by Dante's Christian allegory, leaving the capitalist moneylender in a state of mortal anxiety and moral confusion. The epistemological dimension of Galdós's macroallegory equals in scope and signifying intensity the most famous twentieth-century models for allegorizing modern history —the archaeological, the tropic, the dialectical, the deconstructive—and underscores the role of positivism as a precursor of these oracular practices. (JPB)

Patrick Süskind's best-selling novel Das Parfum applies the postmodern literary practice of pastiche and playful allusion to pursue a critical purpose: an adumbration of the destructive logic that underpins the instrumental reason of Enlightenment culture. Süskind's critique is informed by ideas put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialektik der Aufklärung and by the sociohistorical methodology of the Annales historiographers. In the Active history of Grenouille, the monstrous master perfumer who murders young women to capture and exploit their aromatic “essences,” Süskind depicts the will to power and overpowering fundamental to enlightened reason. This parabolic histoire des mentalités of Enlightenment culture is thrown into relief by two strategic moves: the transposition of the Enlightenment's visual prejudices into the olfactory domain and the contextualization of Grenouille's development as perfumer in the history of Western aesthetics. Süskind thereby implicates modernist aesthetic sensibilities in the dialectic of Enlightenment.

Rilke's poem “Die Flamingos” turns on a curious image in which exotic birds are compared to the Greek courtesan Phryne. By tracing the development of the Phryne motif in Baudelaire's poems “Lesbos” and “La beauté” and in Gérôme's painting Phryné devant l'Aréopage, this essay argues that Rilke's poem takes issue with the notion of autonomous art and with the aestheticist cult of beauty, for which the motif had come to stand. “Die Flamingos” not only breaks with the idea that art and aura are necessarily linked but also questions the ability of Baudelairean allegory to restore poetic wholeness. In so doing, the poem represents not a continuation of the nineteenth-century “art for art's sake” movement but a final phase in the complex history of aestheticist self-questioning.

Olaudah Equiano manipulates the binary terms of racial representation in eighteenth-century England to establish himself as at once a reasoning black subject and, paradoxically, as what I term a “transgressive” subject: one who refuses any definitive racial (perhaps even social) categorization. A profile of the transgressive I in his autobiography reveals a fluid positioning rather than an essence. Initially identified as an African slave, Equiano goes on to depict his narrative self as a social reformer, someone both in and of English society whose differences with it seem resolvable within the existing order. When he suddenly reintroduces evidence of the narrative self's liminal status, therefore, white readers perceive a revolutionary challenge to the binary logic of their social world. Out of this ambiguity arises the possibility that individual and collective identities might be reimagined in a nonbinary mode. Moreover, subsequent black narrators have inherited Equiano's liberating ability to envision a transgressive self. (SMM)

Does the business of writing shape the works of even the most private authors? A demonstration that one of the major figures of French literature was influenced throughout his career by Renaissance publishing policy might clarify the relation of professional demands to individual genius. The way Montaigne expanded and enlarged his book from edition to edition, one of the most salient features of his writing, has been variously attributed to biographical and philosophical causes—that is, to sources in his creative energy. The historical records, however, suggest that Montaigne's revision of his Essais was inspired also by the need to reestablish ownership over a work that was about to fall into the public domain. Legislation from the period reveals that publishers regularly released revised editions to renew their privileges (short-term bookselling monopolies). (GH)