I have recently been indulging in a favorite fall pastime of MLA presidents, reading the presidential addresses of previous years, and the reminiscences of both Germaine Brée and Northrop Frye about earlier conventions set me to thinking about my own first MLA meeting in 1950. Though I do not recollect the particular meeting, what I do remember from that period is a feeling of collegiality, the sense of belonging that characterized our whole profession thirty years ago. Of course we were a much smaller organization then, with about six thousand members, as opposed to the nearly thirty thousand we have today.

Franz Kafka’s “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung” ‘An Everyday Confusion’ is a skeletal, or “poor,” text in that one code of reading—the referential—dominates it, while other codes present in a classic, or “rich,” text are almost absent. Using a method freely adapted from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, my article closely examines the referentiality of Kafka’s text, juxtaposing the proverbial (or common-language) response evoked by the text with the personal reactions of a single reader. Kafka’s theme, the inability of common, proverbial language to make real communication possible, is allegorized in the brief tale of A and B, whose comings and goings are mirrored, and at times interfered with, by the language in which these events occur.

Most literary historians have found that the romantic shift from mimetic to expressive theories of art was “fatal to the audience”—leaving the poet a soliloquist, the audience an unnecessary appendage. Blake's idea of the audience helps show that, while artistic withdrawal certainly defines a polar phase of the theory, the logic of the theory does provide a complementary phase of fulfillment characterized by union between artist and audience. Since theories of art are often latent social theories, we can extend the logic of romantic aesthetics to outline a society of imagination.

Evidence from other medieval texts suggests that the phrase “a mare” in the portrait of Chaucer’s Pardoner should be translated “a homosexual.” While the establishment of this gloss does not eliminate the alternative interpretation of the Pardoner as a “geldyng” or eunuch, it does obligate us to explore the implications of the Pardoner’s possible homosexuality. His pardons and relics provide a link between this sexually anomalous Christian and his church. Unable to confess his sin, the Pardoner seeks forgiveness vicariously through the sale of pardons; believing his body to be a vessel of sin, he seeks, through the display of relics, affirmation that his body is also a temple of God. Although Chaucer sees homosexual acts as sinful, he appears not to view them as uniquely detestable; the suggestion of homosexuality contributes not to the portrait of a damned soul but to the representation of the “sondriness” of humanity.

Samuel Beckett, early in his career and on James Joyce’s advice, read Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache ‘Contributions toward a Critique of Language,’ the three-volume, 2,200-page work written between 1903 and 1923 by the Austrian philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner. Significantly influenced by the work, Beckett gave literary shape to several of Mauthner’s ideas: the correlation between thinking and speaking; the denial of any certainties outside language, even certainty about the existence of self; and the impossibility of overcoming the limits of language. Both authors place language at the center of their works, subsume all knowledge under it, and then systematically deny its basic efficacy, thus using language to indict itself.

My field consists of those works of diary or epistolary fiction in which the author has limited the narrative voice to one diarist or letter writer. The strategy allows the author to focus on a drama of self-perception involving two main participants: the diarist and the text. The outcome of the drama basically depends on how the diarists write and how they read what they write. In the first part of my essay, I treat the drama of successful self-discovery through representative works by Tennyson, Mauriac, Bernanos, Sartre, and Gide. In the second part, I treat Werther, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Mariane of the Lettres portugaises as writers who use their literary mode in essentially the opposite way: to maintain an existing idea of themselves.

Scholars have attempted to determine the precise details of the dice games played in the tavern in Le Jeu de saint Nicolas but have not connected these particular games to the play's larger structural and thematic design. Jean Bodel's alterations of the Iconia Sancti Nicolai legend are governed by the concept of game as an activity defined and delimited by rules, set off from events of the “real world,” yet intently pursued. His modifications are appropriate to a dramatic representation, for drama itself in the Middle Ages was considered “play,” a game. The idea of game was deeply rooted in the medieval imagination: all human history was seen as a contest between God and Satan that is controlled and determined by God. Bodel contrasts the rule-governed realm of the pagans with the Christian realm of belief and celebrates God's supreme control of the game of history.

As thematic actions, dying and lying divide up Conrad’s narrative in Heart of Darkness between main story and controversial coda. Steeped in the formulas of literary fatality, including the symmetries of ironic reprisal and the summarizing retrospect of last words, Kurtz’s death is modeled on fictional expectations so as to secure its dark transmissible import, only for that import to be betrayed by the supposedly beneficent mendacity of Marlow’s lie in the final interview with Kurtz’s Intended. Marlow as reader or interpreter of tragic meaning degenerates to Marlow as false author of a euphemizing fiction. The essay traces the complex preparation for Kurtz’s death, including the suicide and murder of earlier surrogates for Marlow, as these scenes establish an interpretive framework by which to assess a coda that becomes, for a narrator repulsed by the “flavour of mortality in lies,” yet another indirect but self-indicting death scene.

As the daughter of two notorious Romantic rebels and as the wife of a third, Mary Shelley was encouraged from her youth to “enrol [herself] on the page of fame,” to prove herself by her pen and her imagination. But since Shelley also wanted to conform to the more conventional feminine model—to be modest, self-effacing, and devoted to a family rather than to a career—she developed a prevalent ambivalence toward self-assertion. In the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, this ambivalence surfaces in her criticism of the egotistic imagination and in the grotesque but sympathetic monster that symbolizes its essence; the 1831 revision applies this judgment more forcefully to her own youthful “transgression.” Nevertheless, by characterizing the artist as the victim of an uncontrollable destiny, Shelley also sanctions the very self-expression she professes to regret and elevates the dilemma of the female artist to the status of myth.

The theater-dream metaphor raises fundamental ontological and epistemological questions and treats them in much the same way as phenomenological thought does. Both the metaphor and Edmund Husserl’s theory “reduce” the ontological problem to a play of experience—to activity and process—leaving the final question of what is “real” unresolved. Such activity necessarily involves Heideggerean “dimensions” that are not only open, mobile, temporal, “in play” but also structural, patterning. Examples ranging from Renaissance to modern drama, from the Russian to the American stage, show how dimensions are revealed both as the familiar structures of our thinking (stratifications, circles within circles, temporal delineations, subject-object categories, etc.) and as the structuring principles by which “real” and “imagined” worlds establish relationships. Thus we can move among such implicit structures to consider multiple stage-world relations—the interplay of subjects and objects of experience and concomitant audience-art-artist implications.