Wallace Stevens noted in his journal that while aphorisms are never believed for very long they help us make brief, intensely felt discoveries about ourselves; there he made a connection between his love of aphoristic expression and his theory of human perception of reality as a perception of fragments, never the whole. Exploring the nature and variety of his aphorisms as a manifestation of this concept is important to the understanding of his poems. The tendency to experience life as fragments is, on the one hand, a centripetal tendency akin to aphoristic expression, since in each case one momentarily pulls experience into a self-contained unit. But such moments invariably give rise to a centrifugal tendency, an encompassing of the plenitude of experience in all its contradictory fullness. The juxtaposition of these opposing tendencies lies at the heart of Stevens' aphoristic technique and of the tension in much of his poetry.

Something more than the obvious psychological interpretation must be made of Rosebud, the. object from the protagonist's childhood that is the focus of the plot activity in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). This essay applies traditional methods of literary criticism—interpretation of symbolic imagery, close reading of dramatic language and gesture, and source and influence study—toward a solution of this major critical problem in one of the most important films. To assume that Rosebud will provide a definitive explanation of Charles Foster Kane is to disregard the function of the film's complex narrative organization. The position that Rosebud will explain everything is maintained by a character who is an object of comedy; the film's symbolic imagery and dramatic organization pose the issue quite differently: not Rosebud will explain everything! but Will Rosebud explain anything? Far from being a sign of the film's intellectual shallowness, Rosebud is the surest guide into its undetected complexities.

In Wordsworth's early poetry, a description of natural tranquillity often follows a narration of human suffering. The most notable instance of this is the Pedlar's spear grass vision at the conclusion of The Ruined Cottage. This pattern of calm following suffering is not an attempt to evade the metaphysical questions provoked by evil and human misery; rather it represents a bona fide response which Wordsworth's imagination makes to the fictional representation of suffering. The poet contemplates the pathetic, as he does images of nature and memory, in order to provide himself with the excitement necessary to achieve the transcendental state he calls “calm.” This natural calm is Wordsworth's version of a significant and familiar response to fictive suffering, the psychological mechanism of catharsis.

Carl Zuckmayer and Heinz Hilpert adapted Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) for the Berlin stage in 1931. The unpublished manuscript of the play “Kat” reveals that the German adaptors, while making several original contributions, relied heavily upon Annemarie Horschitz' translation of A Farewell to Arms (In einem andern Land, 1930). By participating in the dramatization, playwright Zuckmayer sought to win a wider audience for Hemingway; at the same time, he was responding to current trends in the Berlin theater and to the political situation facing the Weimar Republic. Zuckmayer's political consciousness, manifest in the earliest of his successful plays, reached a new level of seriousness in “Kat.” Stepping out from behind his own humorous satire, he permitted Hemingway's endorsement of individual freedom to come to life in the Deutsches Theater at a time when the cause of freedom was being threatened as never before in Germany's history.

Study iii, undertaken in 1973–74 by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, is the most far-reaching of the Commission's three studies. Unlike Study l and Study n, which were based on responses from selected department chairpersons to a questionnaire prepared by the Commission, Study m is based on responses from individuals in English and foreign language departments. These individuals are in institutions selected by the American Council on Education (ACE) for its study of teaching faculty in American colleges and universities in 1972–73. Like the two earlier studies, Study in examines the status of women in the modern language profession, but it furnishes a more comprehensive profile of the profession as well as comparative profiles of the two major fields within the modern language profession, English and foreign languages.

Henry James’s late novels suggest a world of talk which is morally ambiguous because epistemologically unstable. James’s early and late dialogues are radically different: in the late fiction, talk becomes a process of imaginative collaboration, and language virtually creates the conditions under which perception is possible. In The Ambassadors, Parisian talk educates Strether even as it seems to dissemble. And in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, conversation shapes the terms in which certain actions will be possible; talking together, characters create a world that fits the shape of their desires. Jamesian talk is at once hypocrisy and art: lying becomes a mode of vision. But if James’s liars are artists, his artists are also liars. We prefer Maggie Verver to Charlotte Stant not because she is more honest, but because her language makes for the most harmonious and inclusive order.

The Earl of Surrey’s five “personal elegies” demonstrate his sophisticated use of traditional rhetorical patterns, specifically his manipulation of the two types of structure for epideictic praise, that focusing on the subject’s biography, or that delineating his virtues. His sonnet on Thomas Clere follows the first type, and the Excellent Epitaffe on Wyatt adheres closely to the second, but even in these pieces Surrey departs from convention when it suits his larger rhetorical and poetic purposes. Individual modifications are even more apparent in his three less public tributes. The two sonnets on Wyatt serve as sequels to the satiric ending of the Epitaffe, and “So crewell prison” extends personal grief over the death of the Earl of Richmond to the level of an ubi sunt lament for the passing of an age. The elegies illustrate, finally, that the successful manipulation of convention by a good Tudor poet is itself a kind of originality.

Critical reactions to the denouement of Corneille’s Le Cid are generally divided between the comic notion of a complete and happy union of Rodrigue and Chimène and the tragic notion of the impossibility of their marriage. However, it is possible to incorporate the two views into an interpretation of the play that emphasizes in the ambivalence of this ending the complexity of Corneille’s vision of man’s possibilities and limitations. Rodrigue represents the heroic order of humanity; Chimène and her mirror image, the Infante, exemplify the common order. The representation of the heroic quest in Le Cid not only portrays Rodrigue’s triumph but also depicts the women’s failures. Heroism and frailty coexist and interact; and it is essential to note that in the different outcomes of Rodrigue’s, Chimène’s, and the Infante’s efforts to unite hand, heart, and mind respectively, Le Cid offers a complex vision of humanity.

When read in the contexts of psychology, theology, and Old English poetry, Bede’s Death-Song can be confidently valued as a fine poem, and not merely as venerable wisdom. The design of this eighth-century poem shows substantial correlations with the design of the Epistola Cuthberti, in which it appears. The letter appears to combine eyewitness report with hagiographic conventions. Ambivalence at meeting one’s Judge is expressed both in its narrative and the poem; troubled feelings are balanced by a certain faith. Scriptural echoes reveal Cuthbert’s conscious intention to present the Bede of the letter as an imitator of Christ. Comparison with other Old English poetic treatments of Bede’s theme shows that the poem fully exploits the artistic potential of the vernacular tradition.

Conrad’s knowledge of the Malaysian Archipelago was that of a sensitive expatriate, not of a native. But he balanced his lack of intimate knowledge with profound “suggestions” drawn from his Malaysian experiences. The events in his fiction reveal the historical disarray of a region invaded by colonial powers, and serve as an inclusive metaphor for the discovery by his characters that no life pattern. Eastern or Western, has any final validity. In this sense nearly all the characters, European and Malaysian, are expatriates, not outcasts. They are mocked by the folly of seeking to master the infinite possibilities of human development revealed to them. In The Rescue, for example, Hassim and Lingard, both expatriates, have an ideal vision of successful intercultural commingling before their defeat by the abstractness of this objective. Such “nebulous ideas” or “suggestions” largely account for both the obscurities of Conrad’s style and the greatness of his vision.

Emerson’s lectures in Biography (1835) and Representative Men (1850) reveal his conception of history as a dialectical process involving the heroic individual and society. The heroes of Biography play an “antithetical” role: perceiving the ever-progressive truth of the Spirit, they express that truth in and against a static and retrospective world. Their words and actions constitute the Spirit’s response to the alienation from which the Spirit suffers in society, the established “thesis.” Representative Men demonstrates Emerson’s increasing reconciliation with society in the 1840’s. His heroes are no longer inspired rebels, but instead are products of both Spirit and society. History. Emerson now shows, is not so much a matter of conflict as of synthesis. In the dialectical process rightly conceived, however, no synthesis is final—a fact which Emerson illustrates by severely criticizing his Representative Men and by showing the tentativeness and defectiveness of even their greatest achievements.