THE BALLROOM of the Chicago Marriott may strike some people as a strange place to observe cultic rituals. Yet the cultic aspect of the occasion we are celebrating this evening—the annual address of the outgoing president of the MLA—has often been noted by past speakers. Germaine Brée (1975) referred specifically to this “tribal ritual” of ours while Northrop Frye (1976) alluded more obliquely to the fate of divine kings in The Golden Bough, who vanish into limbo as axes grind ominously in the background.1 Even if our mode is merely ironic, the ritual proceeds, as Helen Vendler (1980) pointed out, according to “invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions.”

To disengage moral error from the structure of narrative in Paradise Lost, Milton had, on the one hand, to renounce allegory and, on the other hand, to redefine the probabilistic conception of truth in contemporary theories of the heroic poem. While Spenser associates error with the meanderings of narrative, Milton polarizes error and truth so that no ambiguous wandering can occur in the intervening space—precisely the space where allegorical narrative must occur. Milton sought to teach by direct statement, Spenser to form character by engaging the reader in an interpretative game.

The Intimations Ode appears at the end of Wordsworth's collected poetry, and both the placement and the ending of the poem implicitly encourage us to expect an assured closure. I argue that Wordsworth deliberately suggests and then refuses such closure, that while the odic tradition generically warrants the attempt at closure, the Intimations Ode's refusal is unique. The overall temporal sequence that Wordsworth gives the poems and the frequency with which narratives and odes end groups of poems show that he consistently includes lyric in a larger narrative plot, an inclusion that also occurs within the Intimations Ode itself. Seeing Wordsworth's ode as a narrative and in relation to earlier English odes helps us understand that its uneasy coexistence of statement and uncertainty, which many critics consider its greatest weakness, is actually its greatest strength.

The essay returns readers of the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris to the well of Narcissus, or the Fontaine d'Amors, and explores Guillaume's reliance on two additional Ovidian myths, those of Hermaphroditus and Attis, in his re-creation of the Narcissus setting. An examination of the evidence for Guillaume's familiarity with the two myths precedes the discussion of the contributions that the Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis myths make to Guillaume's depiction of romantic sexual love. The essay rejects the notion that Amant's fall into love represents a transcendence of Narcissus's tragedy; instead it urges that Amant himself falls into a destructive passion that has its origin in self-love.

If a dialogics, inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, were recognized as an art of discourse on the level of the arts of rhetoric and dialectic, it might shape a critical practice different from those governed by the more familiar arts. Tzvetan Todorov's recent essay on dialogic criticism and Merle Brown's account of F. R. Leavis's “collaborative exchange” in criticism contribute to the invention of such an art; further efforts to rationalize it seem desirable and possible in the present critical conversation.

Spenser's Faerie Queene is constituted by the fiction of a single transcendental body that is at once spiritual, politic, and aesthetic. The poem's allegorical structure reflects an implicit doctrine of “the poem's two bodies.” Its poetics is an aesthetic theology based on the motifs Kantorowicz discerned in Tudor “political theology”: perfect wholeness, secular perpetuity, and a doctrine of “assimilation.” Analysis of the negative moment in the dialectic of this theology shows allegory to be a strategy for summoning the poem's ideal body into representation as a sublimated negative image of its natural, or written, body. Spenser's image for this ideal body, the veiled hermaphrodite, confounds not only sexual difference but also the difference between metaphor and catachresis, or between mimetic and iconoclastic decorums. No purely mimetic critical reading can do justice to this structure, which demands that a reader “overgo” the text in the production of a historical or political “truth.”

Although critics have remarked on the connection of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” with classical ode and hymn and have identified Mirth as one of the Graces, they have usually approached these poems as re-creative pieces and overlooked the way in which their classical form and the presence of patron goddesses influence their development and meaning. Both poems, however, follow the formula of classical ode and hymn in which a patron deity is invoked and asked for gifts proper for that deity to confer. Because Mirth is the Grace Euphrosyne and Melancholy, as I argue, is the Muse Urania, goddesses associated in antiquity and in the Renaissance with poetical inspiration, Allegro and Penseroso ask their respective goddesses for power to compose poetry. The poems unfold in turn as though the goddesses were infusing their power, Mirth inspiring a light comic vision and Melancholy an epic and tragic mood.

Despite its prominence in many critical lexicons, the term “literary convention” rarely receives sustained theoretical scrutiny. Rather, it has served interpreters, and even theorists, as a kind of general-purpose catchall, loosely synonymous with “custom,” “habit,” “assumption,” “myth,” “cliché,” “fiction,” or the French convenance. I argue that a philosophically rigorous definition of social convention may work heuristically to clarify what literary convention means and how it functions within a larger poetics. In particular, an intelligible notion of literary convention will help clarify the dialectical relation of mimesis and semiosis—what derives from the “natural” world and what results from an internal economy of parts and whole.

The comic conclusion of Much Ado about Nothing, which ends with the conventional closure provided by multiple marriages, leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated. The language of the play sets up a complex association of the word, the sword, and the phallus and represents the “merry war” between the sexes as a masculine struggle to maintain control of representation. To read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated. Masculine privilege is contingent on the legibility of women, whose ambiguous “seeming” gravely threatens the men of Messina and provokes them to use various defensive strategies against it, from the exchange of tendentious jokes to the symbolic sacrifice of Hero. The play itself is implicated in these strategies insofar as the characters' plot to recuperate Claudio through the fiction of Hero's death is also the plot of the play.

Emerson's prose speaks to American expectations for becoming a man. His most forceful rhetoric unmans the manly types, particularly his censorious father, with an imperious nonchalance. Emerson's “man-making words” also transform the class conflicts that intensified the ideology of manhood from 1825 to 1850. Dreaming of a new elite, Emerson challenges social definitions of manhood and power. He does not, however, question the code that joins manhood with power at the expense of intimacy. When power fails him, as “Experience” recounts, his seeming candor masks an evasive note of depressive accusation directed at the women who take care of him. To emphasize Emerson's class and gender politics deflates his reputation somewhat. As “representative man” he represents only a liberal tradition that mystifies conflicts. Yet we can see him more clearly as a man, struggling with himself as well as with his time.

Narrative theorists generally assume that narratees in novels are distinct from actual readers, as narrators are from authors. In early novels by Stowe, Gaskell, and Eliot, however, “engaging narrators” encourage actual readers to identify with the “you” that appears in narrative interventions. These novelists explicitly hoped to stir actual readers' sympathy for real-world sufferers, possibly even to move readers to action. An engaging narrator, unlike a “distancing” one, calls the narratee “you” (not “the reader”); assumes that the narratee sympathizes with the story; claims that the characters are “real”; and consistently directs the actual reader to consider the parallels between the fiction and “real life.” Since these strategies seem to originate in certain nineteenth-century women's texts, narrative theory's omission of them may have implications for gender criticism.

In Wordsworth's language a voice as enduring as epitaphic inscription interpenetrates a writing as immediate as the breath of speech. While voice might seem the appropriate linguistic ideal for a poet who saw himself as “a man speaking to men,” Wordsworth's desire for a more durable language produces a competing “insistence of the letter.” “Images of voice” in nature exist in a “strength / Of usurpation” with the written characters that nature imprints. The epitaphic text emerges as the intersection of voice and letter, in which the autobiographical subject attempts to constitute itself in textual form. Wordsworth's meeting with the blind Beggar strikingly illustrates the interpenetration of voice, self, and text. Writing, for Wordsworth, is not the death of voice but the consummation: it is the accomplishment of voice.