Plath makes a major contribution to the development of the elegy with a series of poems mourning her father's death, even though they have seldom been read as elegies. More than any of her forebears, Plath intensifies the mourner's aggression toward the dead, dramatically expanding the boundaries of the genre. She summons a furious anger that most earlier elegists eschew in favor of pathos, reverence, or homosocial rivalry. At first deflecting rage inward in elegies of masochistic self-reproach, Plath dramatizes an ever more explosive grief. Although the “female elegy” has been defined as a “poem of connectedness,” Plath writes elegies of violent separation and rupture, rejecting the prostrate role assigned by literary and gender codes to the female mourner. She helps to remake the elegy for the twentieth century, shifting its psychic work from consolatory mourning to the violent, contradictory, and protracted work of melancholia.

Ishmael Reed's disparate novels analyze control: its origins; its relation to patterns of racial domination in American history; and its role in sex, business, religion, and government. Foucauldian control offers a way to analyze human interactions, as do Freudian theories of sexuality and Marxist economics. American control artists, including Reed, Acker, Burroughs, Mailer, and Pynchon, offer a strangely similar set of visionary concerns: problems with sexual identity, images of homosexuality, grotesque presentations of heads of state, efflorescent anality, magic, and radical revisions of foundational myths. More successfully than these other satirists, Reed manages to suggest an answer to the problematics of control — an alternative social structure, whose center is the cultivation of certain pleasures rather than macho courage, delayed gratification, self-control, or unattached drifting.

Proverbs and tales are closely related; a tale's lesson is declared at its beginning or summarized at its end by a general wisdom saying that can circulate and attach itself to different tales. Tale-based proverbs, in discourse, are either plot summaries or tag lines. They allude to stories in the cultural inventories of communities, and they are high signs between speaker and listener. Generally, by reminding the hearer of the circumstances of a familiar story, the speaker recommends a course of action or warns against it. Spanish Jews, exiled from Spain in 1492 and subsequently resident in North Africa and in the Ottoman Empire, shared a corpus of maxims, which have been assembled in collections. Some of these proverbs are inaccessible because their narrative contexts are forgotten; some survive because they contain powerful images that send clear messages without narrative context. Other sayings will be generated as new popular stories gain currency. (HG)

Implicit in Beowulf's thematic involvement with language is a marked and persistent hostility toward the epistemological foundation underpinning the practice of literacy. While the poem seems to acknowledge the psychological posture conditioned by, or at least compatible with, literate practices, the acknowledgment characterizes that posture as a clear, direct threat to the ordering structures—and thus to the basic survival—of the poem's central system of personal interdependencies. Beowulf confronts the psychological demands of the reading experience by persistently reaffirming those idioms of speech and patterns of interaction that require the open immediacy of spoken exchange. The confrontations set in conflict not simply the characters of the poem but the psychological structures that the characters epitomize and thus the linguistic practices most compatible with those structures. (MRN)

I've been haunted by a poem, as apparently simple as a ballad and with a ballad's appeal of timelessness. It's by Elizabeth Bishop, a white North American with middle-class roots. Orphaned and deracinated as a child, she grew up as a lesbian, a traveler-exile, living a significant part of her life in Brazil. She's not thought of as a political poet by most people who admire her; she's most often praised as a poet of minute observation and description. The poem is called “Chemin de Fer”:

Flaubert's representation of the 1848 revolution in L'éducation sentimentale brings irony and the sublime into a relation of simultaneous opposition and dependency. An uncertain irony constructs the revolution as an aporia: as both an impoverished imitation of 1789 (a cliché) and a tragic modern apocalypse. Particularly in the famous Fontainebleau episode, where the rhetorical violence of irony is enacted in the analogy between the awesome turbulence of nature and the chaos of a nonteleological historical process, irony gives rise to the affects of fear and transport characteristic of the sublime. And the turn from an uncanny irony to the countermode of self-empowerment is set in motion by the same fear of death that haunts the novel's historiographical intertext, the Micheletist cliché of resurrection. But while the Micheletist sublime constructs a version of historical and ontological truth, the Flaubertian sublime transforms meaninglessness itself into power. Reified as ideology, that power would be neither inflexible nor monolithic, for it emerges and recedes repeatedly in the context of a self-interrogating and fundamentally ironic narrative. (VKR)

Ballard's novels return repeatedly to some scene of trauma to explore the perverse effects that derive from that moment. This essay focuses on three novels. Crash (1973) is most obsessively concerned with the erotics of violence and injury, while Empire of the Sun (1985) and Running Wild (1989) locate the traumatic events in childhood. What Ballard finds is a failure of the representatives of authority (fathers, kings, capital) to found a reliable world, leading children to cling to the often horrible satisfactions of some early experience. The results in Ballard's world include mixtures of masochism and advertising, middle-class terrorism and the fetishization of presidents, war and ecstasy. And what might once have appeared a wild aberration, a violent exercise of the death drive in the pursuit of enjoyment, becomes a way of life.

The Mill on the Floss is divided between two sibling narratives. This essay argues that the effect of each and of the rivalry between them is a critique of the novel's nominal status as Bildungsroman. Shoving Tom Tulliver's story of self-culture off to the side and insisting on its moral insufficiency, Eliot displaces the classic apprenticeship from the center of her text; dramatizing Maggie Tulliver's difficulty in even entering this story, she stages the genre's tendency to preclude a female protagonist. Maggie's trouble with formation corresponds to Eliot's trouble with the novel of formation. Eventually I ask what the uncomfortable fit between The Mill and the Bildungsroman reveals not only about this work but also about this category; placing early-1970s formulations of the Bildungsroman in the context of emergent American feminist criticism, I indicate what some of the genre's ideological uses have been. Finally, the dialogic structure of The Mill may invite a more relational mapping of development and suggest retheorizing the novel of development as an instance of cultural debate about formation. (SF)