What the Widsith-poet's profession was, and what his purpose in writing, have long been matters of conjecture. Without stopping just here to scrutinize previous proposals, I wish to bring forward another in which some of the items inconvenient and rebellious to other theories may find a place.

The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee are frequently criticized for their lack of specific application to the social and political concerns of his country. In Dusklands, the first and least studied of these texts, the author makes an implicit response to the controversial and weakly defined question of the political value of literary works in postcolonialist discourse. For Coetzee, the inherently masculinist, aggressively terrorist underpinnings of the very concept of value urgently require demystifying; for the purposes of this paper, Roland Barthes's distinction between studium and punctum provides the analytic key.

It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah how the events referred to as the Shoah produce a reference to themselves. The film presents a montage of encounters, of unanticipated details discovered in filming, of instances selected and arranged as openings to other encounters not included in Shoah. Through careful choreography, the film invites the return of signs from the past. Shoah offers a way of seeing and invites encounters that—like the filmmaker's arrangements—are open to the force of evidence as that evidence constrains interpretative response. Lanzmann's stance, an openness to significance that precedes interpretation, provides a model for a viewer's relationship to Shoah and its material, to the otherness that addresses the audience through the film. In tracing what can be traced and in filming what can be witnessed, Shoah can turn spectators into producers in the work of bearing witness.

As has been said many times before, South Africa is a land of contrasts: Between races, landscapes, economic strata, political viewpoints, and lifestyles. A complex contrast, but one that is relevant to science fiction, is the disparity between levels of technological literacy. Some of the country's population have access to advanced technology, such as Internet connections and cell phones, but most citizens have a monthly income well below the comfort level. Illiteracy is extremely high, despite the efforts of a large number of educational organizations. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has reached crisis proportions; by 2010, approximately sixty-five percent of the country's adult population will have died of the disease if the current rate of infection continues unchecked. In this context, one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments; neither can one assume even a basic acquaintance with published literature.

Many Romantic poets were fascinated by the idea that a special historical sense could hear the cultural difference of remote epochs in the sound of the sea or of the wind. This essay traces that fascination back to late-eighteenth-century attempts to imagine a new kind of secular afterlife that fused nature and history, thereby combining the permanence of a natural process with the consoling collectivity of social existence. The most influential parts of James Macpherson's Ossianic poems were the ostensibly archaic ghosts who literalized Enlightenment fantasies about this form of historical immortality. In poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Felicia Hemans, historical sensations function as intimations of immortality and as signs of culture's primacy over other forms of class distinction. The essay closes by suggesting that late-twentieth-century film and literary criticism continue to promise their audiences a similar kind of earthly immortality.

The malaise depicted in early nineteenth-century French novels is said to characterize the age but is in fact a malady of men. In these works male alienation takes the form of emasculation. Nevertheless, Chateaubriand's René illustrates how the male protagonist's feminization becomes a sign of moral superiority and poetic genius. Although the hero claims to tell a tale devoid of conventional intrigue, he makes his solipsistic discourse prurient and melodramatic by introducing a woman who suffers the consequences of desiring him despite his disablement. The mal du siècle strategy consists in creating interest in character through the feminine in the man while providing drama in plot through the man's fatal effect on the woman. While the early Romantic novel breaks down stereotypes of masculinity by feminizing the hero, its conventions of narrative causality and discursive empowerment draw on traditional ideologies of gender difference to reempower alienated postrevolutionary man.

LOCKE'S mention in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) of the blind man who thought he understood what the color scarlet was because it was represented to him by the sound of a trumpet, startled people, like the trumpet blast or glaring color referred to, or even more like the combined effect of both loud sound and loud color. This unbelievable speculation was, however, soon substantiated by other similar observations and, henceforth, became a much repeated paradoxon of literature. The analogy between sound and color was first given a scientific foundation with Isaac Newton's Opticks in 1704. Newton in his comparison between sound and color went so far as to proclaim that the spaces occupied by the seven primary colors were similar to the relative intervals between the notes of the octave.

Histories of rhetoric have characterized Plato as an opponent of rhetoric and have seen Gorgias primarily as a negative critique of rhetorical abuses. Such an understanding ignores the dialogue's own rhetoric and slights Plato's insight into the problem of inescapable and inadvertent injury that confronts anyone who uses language. But it is such injury that makes rhetoric philosophically interesting. Socrates's claim that the value of rhetoric lies in its ability to allow us to attack our loved ones is not an ironic dismissal of rhetoric but part of his attempt to develop the ethical point of refutation, as Gorgias itself is not an attempt to prove the obvious point that rhetoric can be abused but rather an eloquent argument as to why rhetoric should be taken seriously.

When read in the context of the European discourse on China since the Enlightenment, Kafka's “Constructing the Great Wall of China” (1917) and one of its likely sources, Dittmar's travelogue In New China (1912), reveal their political and cultural significance as early-twentieth-century conceptualizations of China during the late Ch'ing dynasty. Caught in the conflict between empirical observation and textual preconceptions, Dittmar manipulates orientalist discourse in his colonialist construction of Chinese progress guided by the Western powers. Surpassing his precursor in self-reflective insight into the rhetoricity of orientalism, Kafka appropriates the recurrent topoi of this field for an ironic exploration of the interactions among power, language, and sociopolitical stagnation. Kafka's story can be read as an intertextual subversion of Dittmar's Eurocentric ideology, as a response to the shattered hopes for revolutionary change after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and as a critique of orientalist discourse in general. (RJG)

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.

The work of E. L. Doctorow is difficult to place on the map of postmodernism because he is equally concerned with narrative or representational technique and with issues of history, power, and identity. Doctorow has focused his concerns in the question of technology, representing in each of his major works technological principles that not only typify the historical epoch in which the novel is set but also characterize the representational mode of the novel itself. The differences among technologies in his novels produce an arc of development that moves from a critique of the coercive power of a system epitomized by the electrical circuit in The Book of Daniel to a celebration of the possibilities for imaginative and representational freedom created by the computer in Loon Lake. Concentrating on the technology of narrative, Doctorow has contributed striking redefinitions of the historical subject while testing and extending the resources of the contemporary novel.

The history of the book is everywhere. Intersecting with the thoroughgoing historicism that has dominated scholarly conversation in the last several decades, the study of material texts has flourished in all fields of literary study. An already vast bibliography is growing exponentially as graduate courses in the history of the book proliferate, universities establish centers for those who study material texts, presses publish series dedicated to book history, and more and more scholars recognize the fascination of studying anything “… and the book.” This field of inquiry has been newly codified, not only within numerous institutional structures but also in the most etymological sense, for codify ultimately derives, through code, from codex. Scholars of book history are eager to excavate the codes that are embedded within the codex—that is, more generally, the systems of thought that are both revealed and created by the physical structures through which ideas are expressed. Their true subject is neither the disembodied poem floating free of its material support nor the nuts and bolts of quiring and print runs but “the sociology of texts,” in D. F. McKenzie's memorable phrase (Bibliography). The history of the book thus offers scholars their own kind of system, for it draws methodologies together with theories in a particularly compelling way.

No one has hitherto undertaken an investigation of Shelley's relation to Robert Malthus. Previous Shelley scholarship contains no adequate examination of the remarks on Malthus in Shelley's prose. No attempt, furthermore, has ever been made to relate these remarks in the prose to any of the poems; and, therefore, some probable and significant allusions to Malthus in the poetry have gone entirely unnoticed. Various scholars, to be sure, have called attention to the main allusions discoverable in the burlesque Oedipus Tyrannus; but past interpretations of these references are in need of some modification. More important, however, than what pertains to Shelley's burlesque is the probable occurrence of hitherto quite unsuspected allusions to Malthus in a number of the major serious poems—including Prometheus Unbound.

The range of subject-matter treated in the German drama of the sixteenth century will appear wide and varied only to the scholar who does not think of the vast expanse of the Biblical field as featureless and barren. Beyond the confines of the Bible-drama there are, of course, some religious battle-plays, of the Pammachius type, the morality-plays of the Homulus-Hekastus series, a few dramas built on classical material, sundry “Türkenschauspiele,” some scattered romantic comedies, drawing on foreign or native legend and, exceptionally, plays from contemporary history; the Latin school-drama often mirrors delightfully the color and bustle of everyday life; but, in the end, all this is of secondary interest: and the fact must be recognized that sixteenth-century drama stands in the sign of the Book. It might be fairly said that there is hardly a chapter in the Bible which was not adapted for dramatic use or, at least, dragged upon the stage. As one reads the titles, the conclusion, as Froning remarks, almost inevitably presents itself: either the dramatists of those times must have possessed an extraordinary faculty of dramatic adaptation, or else they had no inkling of the demands of stage-craft.

The essay argues that Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) grapples with the role of things in the constitution of persons. It is a paradigmatic novel about the fortunes of private, psychological interiority under commodity culture; its immediate context is the empire of things after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Villette represents subjectivity as a cabinet of curiosities, an interior–like a parlor–filled with intensely meaningful, even fetishized, bibelots. Lucy, the novel's narrator, longs to retreat from the public spectacles of commodity culture but, ironically, finds her identity also through relations with things. The novel suggests that bourgeois subjectivity, though it points to a thorough intimacy with objects, is paradoxically defined by the nostalgic notion that true interiority has been beset by or even lost to the pressure of things.

An essay on language that Benjamin wrote in 1916 provides access to his “arcades project” (Das Passagenwerk), the materials on nineteenth-century Paris that he collected from 1927 until his death, in 1940. The arcades, glass-and-steel structures enclosing spaces between houses into exotic commercial zones, function as Benjamin's emblems of capitalist modernity. Rhythms of ceaseless production and obsolescence not only absorb all counterideologies (revolution) but control the language of possible experience. By juxtaposing documents on objects, technologies, and dreams with glimpses of allegorical clarity in Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, and others, Benjamin seeks to establish a text that will both embody and unmask the myth of history that obscures these rhythms. His goal is a structure of quotation that will speak for itself. Such speaking requires and makes possible “awakened” readers, able to translate the repetitious syntax of commodified individualism into a usable political language.

One of the most striking features of the style of Old English poetry is the frequent use of rhetorical understatement. A. H. Tolman was apparently the first to point out this stylistic trait, and more recently passing references to it have been frequent. The following article attempts an investigation of its origin, occurrence, and uses.

Introduced at the start of The Prioress's Tale but then dropped as an overt topic, usury nevertheless informs that anti-Semitic text. This essay situates Chaucer's narrative in the complex and contradictory history of medieval lending as a theory and a practice. I stress the architectural ironies of usury in the tale and in medieval English history. The tale demonizes Jewish usurers by associating them with the most abject of built environments, the latrine, and celebrates Christians through their links to the exalted space of the church. But, in a move that reflects the flow of capital throughout Christian society, the tale ultimately undermines the opposition of church and pit. Analyzed not as fixed entities but as contingent, fluid spaces joined through the usurious infrastructure of the tale, the minster and the privy suggest a materialist critique of efforts to conceive of a purely religious space.

The 1828 appointment of Thomas Dale to the Chair of English Language and Literature at London University (England's first) was also the first attempt, inculcated by the powerful Henry Brougham and University Council utilitarian allies, to institutionalize the university study of English literature. The “search committee” deliberations, the record of how Dale taught his courses, and the reasons for his premature resignation should be weighed in discussions of the ideological impact of formative nineteenth-century English literature programs on literary theory, on the socialization of literature, and on the development of the literary canon. The founding impulse behind Dale's appointment was social reform rather than ideological control or the academic investiture of culturally desiderated readers and was primarily the result of Brougham's desire to democratize literature and encourage national literacy by popularizing and legitimizing the “reading habit.”