With The January 1981 issue, PMLA began soliciting essays under a revised statement of editorial policy, one that may well be in effect in 1984, when the journal celebrates its hundredth birthday, just a year after the association's own centennial. (Our Committee on the Centennial, chaired by former PMLA editor John Fisher, has wisely decided to make 1983–84 the MLA's anniversary year.) If it has the impact we hope for, the new policy may even be in existence by the journal's bicentennial. The realist in me, however, doubts that it will be, since the statement, like all its predecessors, is quite clearly not carved in adamant but written in the sands of time. The needs of the profession change, decade by decade, and our journal should reflect these alterations, even when they are not especially dramatic. The new statement, in fact, represents only a shift in emphasis from the one that has been in effect since 1973, though this shift could have a substantial influence. The central difference? We no longer insist that every essay be of significant interest to every MLA member, but instead we announce, less ambitiously, that we welcome essays “of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature.” Implicit in this wording, of course, is the hope that our journal will stimulate discussion and debate among a wide readership, but we acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that not every essay we publish will appeal to every member.

Though in principle I am speaking as the voice of the MLA and expressing its concerns, I have noticed in reading past presidential speeches that presidents are helpless to do other than to express their own hopes, couched in various literary frames of reference, in addresses tending toward the homiletic. I cannot hope to escape the invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions of the convention. But perhaps the expression of my own thoughts can be on this occasion what Stevens calls the little string that speaks for a crowd of voices. I choose as my text Wordsworth's vow at the end of The Prelude: What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.

Although Nabokov enjoyed high acclaim as a serious artist, his work never pretended to the high seriousness of “moral fiction.” Yet he obviously intended, through his forbidding forewords and enticing texts, to invite his readers to reflect on the engagement with “reality” that serious fiction encourages. With principled wit, his compositions shatter the durable illusion that “realistic” characters and readers can somehow cocreate the structures that hold them captive. Nabokov's characteristic refusal to finish off his compositions frees both characters and readers to create a posttextual existence. His novel Invitation to a Beheading, although often misunderstood as a transparent allegory, is an opaque parable that resists the complicity of writer and reader, of leader and follower, to execute identities and meanings. Nabokov's modernistic narrative—as much as, if not more than, the conventional moral fictions of mimetic realism—is an ethical form that values the irreducible density of human experience.

The Tales of Belkin have suggested that they are not what they seem—a cycle of simple, diverting stories. Why Pushkin chooses to filter the telling of the Tales through several narrative voices, why he puts “poetic” epigraphs into ironic play with “prosaic” narratives, and why he develops the narratives around a web of allusions to major Western literatures and to Russian literature have led to a lively, expanding discourse among Pushkinists. But why Pushkin frustrates the Russian character who imitates a foreign model, why he takes the poetic models of the epigraphs as points from which to “step down” to prose, and how he sees the parodic debate between foreign and domestic models as a necessary step in the development of Russian prose are unanswered. Moving toward a new reading of “The Coflmmaker,” the asymmetrical story generally considered of only anecdotal interest, our essay addresses these questions.

In all his plays Shakespeare uses the Vergilian figure hendiadys some three hundred times, most frequently in his middle plays and most of all in Hamlet. Rare in English speech or other English poetry, hendiadys joins nouns, or sometimes adjectives, in a false or specious union (e.g., “sound and fury” for “furious sound”). Its effect in Hamlet, where it appears perhaps sixty-six times, is often to elevate, estrange, and baffle; and this stylistic use of conjoined terms that are neither parallel nor complementary mirrors the play's deepest themes—especially the suspect character of personal unions and metaphysical connections. Once aware that Shakespeare frequently combines terms this way, we can understand better many puzzling phrases, including some celebrated ones. Three appendixes list instances of hendiadys in Hamlet, tabulate its incidence in all the plays, and discuss some misleading definitions in the OED.

Leslie Stephen chose his daughter Virginia Woolf as his literary heir and trained her extensively in history and biography to prepare her for a writing career. Traces of Stephen's training can be found throughout Woolf's work but especially in her literary criticism. Woolf and Stephen share the same assumptions about the nature and aims of literary criticism, assumptions that place them in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve. Further, Stephen and Woolf focus on the same set of forces to describe the birth and evolution of literary genres: both father and daughter say that shifting class structures produce a dominant historical consciousness and that this historical consciousness in turn expresses itself in an appropriate technical form. In the light of this literary historical process, both writers insist, the critic of self-conscious historical vision must be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms.

When we create or interpret a text's meaning and genre, numerous and often conflicting historical concerns mediate our insights. Because of its historical situation, Macbeth imperfectly articulates its tragic dimensions and thus empowers later interpreters to draw on their historical situations to imagine Macbeth's motives. Two eighteenth-century illustrations of Macbeth II.ii radically reconceive Macbeth's troubling choice of action: both designs invite contemporary critics to define his inchoate yearnings, to identify the play's tragic vision. John Zoffany playfully appropriates the “Choice of Hercules” topos to represent Macbeth's predicament satirically, allowing us to see Macbeth's appalling regicide as a tragic product of now common entrepreneurial schemes. The melodramatic confusion of motive and motion in Henry Fuseli's watercolor reveals another kinship with Macbeth, a psychoanalytic linkage between our desires and his deed. Interpreting these interpretive illustrations enables us to see through the problematic surface of Macbeth to its tragic richness.

Luis Martín Santos' Tiempo de silencio displays a peculiar vulnerability to commentary. The novel both invites interpretation and “thematizes” the invitation. In this essay I offer a reading of the novel that explores—and exploits—such vulnerability. More concretely, I offer a reading anchored in two related notions, repetition and excess, for in and through them the work discloses its hermeneutic complexity. Accordingly my discussion moves from substances to events; it moves, that is, from a consideration of how excess is embodied in certain emblematic substances (Secs. 1 and 2) to a consideration of the repetitiveness of the novel's events (Secs. 3 and 4). Such an exercise should not only shed new light on one of the most significant Spanish novels of this century but also, implicitly, raise important questions about the relationship between a commented text and its commentary.

Matthew Arnold asserts that because the motivation of the Antigone's heroine is obsolete the play's action no longer interests us. This dismissal contrasts sharply with Hegel's recurring celebration of the tragedy's ethical and dramatic perfection. Moving between these positions, George Eliot accepts the modernity of Antigone's character as moral pioneer but finds the play's action without much application to Victorian reality. For Virginia Woolf Antigone is a natural counter within the feminist polemic of Three Guineas and an image capable of complex novelistic development in The Years, while Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age makes the purported irrelevance of Antigone's motivation to the 1970s the very basis of the play's absurdist appeal. The Antigone thus serves, pace Arnold, as an Arnoldian touchstone to correct his merely “personal estimate,” that of a statist who might naturally object to the heroic treatment of an individual in defiance of the state's claim to primacy.