Previous commentaries have emphasized the correlation between this piece and the host of motifs and problems that Franz Kafka never tired of treating. While this method seems mandatory in an overall account and has led to stimulating insights as well as aberrations on various levels of symbolic interpretation, a close analysis of “The Burrow” on the primary level, granting the given data of its non-Euclidean geometry, is attempted for the first time. Outstanding features include a demonstration of the unique quality of the recital as the synchronous coexistence of a ninety-minute monologue in the form of an emergent or progressive present with a life span of many years extending from maturity to senility. The progressive derangement and deterioration of the hero are analyzed, and his persecution mania is correlated with manifestations of a repressed, abnormal libido that allows inferences regarding a traumatic experience of his youth. Finally, it is shown on inner grounds of both a formal and a material nature that the piece is complete, allowing of no meaningful continuation.

Goethe's Tasso is approached from a fresh angle by an examination of certain recurrent epithets, notably “klug,” “schön,” and “edel.” By comparing in detail passages in which these adjectives occur, and by adducing evidence as to Goethe's usage outside Tasso, new light is shed upon the kernel of the drama, which may be seen as a contest between sets of relative values with the author ambiguously refraining from committing himself to an overriding judgment. The observation that the play is centrally concerned with the act of judging character, illustrated by Goethe's stress upon “kennen” and “erkennen,” makes it possible to penetrate beyond the conventional view of Tasso as an artist drama to the insight that it presents the complex confrontation between two modes of self-consciousness or ways of being. Through the technique of vocabulary analysis within a context of dramatic argument certain recalcitrant problems of Tasso criticism, such as the vexed question of the denouement and the exact nature of Antonio's reversal, are freshly illuminated and the ambivalence and relativity of the various moral and social ideals is conclusively demonstrated. At the same time Goethe extracts from this contest of epithets a tentative positive vision of “Seelenadel.”

The treatment of esthetics by Schiller influenced the conception of esthetics in Hegel's lectures. The notion of appearance (Schein) acquired a fundamental importance in Hegel's esthetics. Schiller had made it possible for “appearance” to be made the cornerstone of an esthetic system by enlarging its importance and rescuing it from the negative valuation given it by the logic of rationalism and the analytical metaphysics of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel could thus base his definition of the beautiful upon “appearance.” On this definition of the beautiful is based the dialectical and historical method of Hegel's theory of the arts. (In German)

The image of the Hermaphrodite with which Spenser presents the union of Amoret and Scudamour in his original conclusion to Book IIIof The Faerie Queene draws on two distinct iconographic traditions: the Ovidian scene of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis which had become a symbol of marriage in Renaissance emblem books, and the single androgynous figure found in antique Roman statues which bear an uncertain relationship to Platonic notions of perfection. Such a conflation enables Spenser to emphasize and complete patterns of imagery which he has been developing throughout Book III: Britomart as patroness of Chastity has assumed an Amazonian role which stresses her androgynous self-sufficiency, but she has been repeatedly shown as tormented by visions of love. Like Guyon in Hook II, she fulfills her immediate quest when she liberates a victim of enchantment; but although she differs from Guyon in her destined participation in British history, she remains aware that within the context of the Book of Chastity she can be wholly chaste only at the price of her continuing incompleteness as a woman. Spenser's poem in its three-book form shares with other Elizabethan works a preoccupation with the paradoxical identification of love and death, a recognition that the self can triumph over change only by accepting its own destruction in marriage.

The sexual ambiguity of Shakespeare's boy Cleopatra embodies the clash between two poetic theories the theory that poetry imitates Nature and is therefore subject to rules of decorum and verisimilitude and the theory that poetry creates a new, “golden” world to which the truth-criteria for extrapoetic experience do not apply. Both theories were prevalent in Shakespeare's time, as we see in Sidney's Apology for Poetry; and both persist today, as we see in modern controversies about the play. Shakespeare's dramatic strategy in Antony and Cleopatra involves the interplay between these two notions of poetry and poetic truth: the first is associated with the Roman viewpoint and the kinds of dramatic evidence that support it, the second with the Egyptian viewpoint and the kinds of poetic and dramatic evidence that support it. Only by studying the play with both theories in mind can we approach its structural and thematic center and see that its problematic features Cleopatra's enigmatic character and motivation. Antony's ambiguous stature as a tragic hero, and the eccentric structure are – like the boy Cleopatra, necessary components of its dramatic strategy, functional embodiments of its themes.

This article incorporates the text of nearly 800 lines of verse written in 1729 and 1733 by Henry Fielding, printed from his holograph. The MS is itself a rarity, being the only extant literary writing in Fielding's hand. The verse has never been published or identified. Textual footnotes record Fielding's corrections and explanatory notes identify the people and events to which he refers. The article discusses the verses as mock-epic and polemical epistle. and as material illuminating Fielding's literary and political relationships: with Pope and the Scriblerus writers, with Robert Walpole, and with his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Fielding imitates Pope's Dunciad, yet rebukes its savagery. He appears as a vivid reporter of the topical scene, a supporter of Whig rule as a bastion against Roman Catholicism and Jacobitism, and an upholder of the ancients against the moderns. The new verse provides the earliest glimpse of Fielding working in burlesque and in comic epic, and an early example of the moral value he placed on benevolence. The various implications of this new knowledge are considered here.

Although most critics have registered disappointment with Book v of Wordsworth's Prelude, a reading of that part of the epic in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theory reveals that in it Wordsworth made a supremely unified and significant poetic statement. Such a reading of Book v demonstrates that Wordsworth feared that the overly manipulative systems of contemporary educational theorists would sever children from the sources of their imaginative growth. The Book shows that Wordsworth believed, in contrast with most contemporary educational theorists, that freedom and spontaneity were the sources of the imagination. If the childhood of humanity were deprived of the freedom necessary for imaginative growth, human culture, so important to man's earthly existence, would wither and die. In Book VWordsworth took a stand against what he thought was an overwhelming contemporary evil. If we read Book v in its proper intellectual context, the structural and conceptual integrity that previous critics have missed becomes apparent.

Emerson's place in our poetic tradition is granted to be central, despite the elusive and variable style of his poetry. Because he was an avowed experimenter, the development of Emerson's style must be traced quite apart from the Emersonian ideas sometimes offered as his complete poetic stance. Throughout, his poetry can be called meditative in aim, and is based on a question-and-answer form dramatized as an encounter between the poet and Nature; the prototype is in the introduction to Nature (1836). There are three phases in his career: (1) poems of 1834 modeled after George Herbert and the art of neatness also visible in Nature; (2) the vision of wild, bardic freedom (1839-41), which led Emerson to a looser form and to the techniques of Anglo-Saxon poetry as they were understood by his contemporaries; (3) a wearing away of enthusiasm, spurred by Emerson's losses and growing skepticism in the 1840's. Then the techniques used to express bardic freedom take on a different color, no longer bold heavy strokes but witty, nimble leaps; in the central encounter Nature turns sly and contemptuous, refusing to answer questions directly, while the poet is passive, though serene and appreciative, in the face of a world much less knowable than in 1836. In. the third and major phase the poetry becomes compressed in both form and consciousness, a movement toward the “titmouse dimension.” And this style, more than his contribution to Whitman's bardism, is Emerson's legacy to modern American poets.

In spite of the marked degree to which twentieth-century art and literature have reflected the influence of mechanization on modern experience, the dominant tone of American literary treatments of the machine remains one of tension. Particularly apparent in the novel, this tension functions as a central conflict in books by Norris, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others. It is most evident in novels about World War II, when mechanization, industrialism, and statism reached their violent zenith, and is nowhere better illustrated than in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. A structural pattern that reveals the army as the epitome of the machine in a society that is universally mechanistic, a symbolically pivotal clash between the natural organic world and the invading machine, and imagery and style drawn from the substance and language of the machine world, all combine to form a total metaphoric environment in which the central characters personify and articulate the opposing values of the machine-oriented “system” and the will to individual integrity. Thus the function of the machine as a controlling metaphor in American World War II novels is underlined and clarified by the informing centrality of that metaphor in the first really significant, probably the best, and certainly the most imitated of those novels.

In Part III of Stello Vigny's concept of Destiny in historical and personal events is set forth by Blaireau, Doctor Noir's servant who is also part-time gunner in the French Revolution. Blaireau's first appearance reflects the fact that radical political changes can occur in one man's lifetime, and this reinforces Vigny's larger point in the novel, that to seek political fortune is a tenuous and vulnerable business. Blaireau's second appearance demonstrates Vigny's notions on the existence of blind Chance in history as opposed to Joseph de Maistre's idea of a beneficent Providence. In his third appearance Blaireau unwittingly causes the downfall of Robespierre and is consequently called “l'homme de la Destinée” by Doctor Noir. By “Destiny” Vigny means the capriciousness of events that alter the lives of persons and of nations. As for man's freedom, Vigny provides man with a leeway whereby he can mold events in his life and direct, to a certain extent, the powers of Destiny. While only “superior men” succeed at this, all men, including Blaireau, are given the possibility for doing so. Negatively Blaireau demonstrates the vulnerability of political fortune; positively he implies the possibility of resisting the powers that rule over man. His three appearances at beginning, middle, and end of the Chénier episode give esthetic and ideological unity to the work.

Behind the apparent diversity of subject matter in Giraudoux's plays there is a central unity, the persistence of the great Romantic theme of the search for a suprahuman ideal. Typically, the hero of a Giraudoux play is seeking some image of beauty, power, and mystery that lies beyond the range of human experience. But this ideal world, however attractive, has its opposite in the limited human world of daily existence with its own beauty, grace, and comfort. Moreover, each of these worlds has a negative aspect; the human world may be characterized by greed, hatred, and vulgarity just as the ideal may be cruel, inhuman, fatal. As a result, Giraudoux's plays are marked by a profound ambiguity and express deeply divided attitudes not only toward the suprahuman but toward its human opposite as well. The four tragic works from the great series of plays of the nineteen thirties form a natural group and, because the conclusions toward which they drive are at once desired and feared, they reveal this essential ambiguity more directly than any others. Judith, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (Tiger at the Gates), Electra, and Ondine all show, by means of a dramatic image of destruction through a quest for the ideal, those central attitudes and concerns which characterize Giraudoux's art.

The comic in Sartre's fiction stems primarily from exaggerated ridicule of certain characters. In La Nausée, Roquentin describes the bourgeois surrounding him as completely devoid of individuality. The comedy results from the substitution of the mechanical for the human, from the distance between the pretenses of the bourgeois and reality, and from the parody of literary giants such as Proust. Le Mur shows Sartre's comic power in portraying people's bad faith. Again, comedy results from humans losing their humanity and from the contradictions inherent in certain visions of reality. The subject of Les Chemins de la liberi éallows for less comedy, but humor is not lacking in Sartre's last novels. Sartre uses comedy mainly to denounce bad faith. He uses it also to indicate certain changes in a character's situation and, in La Nausée, to underline his hero's predicament. The importance of comedy in Sartre's fiction proves that he is not only a philosophical novelist but also a comic one. (In French)

Robert Scholes's view that Joyce was primarily interested in constructing a genre composed of epiphanies as texts, and not equally interested in the epiphany as a process of esthetic apprehension or in the possible use of the epiphany as a structural principle, is disputed in these comments. This argument seeks to establish briefly that Joyce held the epiphany—process and text—as essentially integrated and inseparable. The comments are a response to Robert Scholes's correspondence with Florence Walzl (PMLA, March 1967).