The long 1960s saw a broad awakening of interest in the breath. Paying attention to this pneumatic turn reveals new channels of inspiration; this essay considers one such. It listens for a resonance between two artists in separate fields and cultures who knew little if anything of each other: the poet Paul Celan and the musician John Coltrane. Despite their differences, a radical pneumaticism connects them, and it begins around the year 1960. In a series of influential performances, Coltrane and Celan expressed an exhaustion with and of musicality. This exhaustion enabled the development of a new kind of expression, an expression of tightly compacted sound and meaning without conventional development. The aspiration of this expression was toward the other, even the wholly other, and its representation and performance was the breath.

This study approaches Henry David Thoreau as a model housekeeper whose genderqueer housekeeping generates nonexpansionary modes of relation. I bring together Thoreau’s biography, reception history, queer literary history, and ecolinguistics to resituate Walden within, rather than against, the popular discourse of domestic economy. By restoring Thoreau’s connections with conventional femininity, one can begin to see how his housekeeping, gardening, and animal husbandry in Walden expand his sense of kinship and give rise to a radically social environmental practice. By playing with the boundary between house and habitat, Thoreau frugally expands his affections and comforts without expanding his ecological footprint.

This essay examines early modern commercial drama’s capacity to make people public—that is, to introduce to large crowds of people vividly embodied representations of individuals both real and fictional, actual and virtual. My focus is on Falstaff, who occupies a peculiar place in early modern mediascapes and, crucially, in theories of character from the eighteenth century on. Falstaff is, like all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic characters, an intermedial creature fashioned out of written and printed texts and embodied performance. But he is also exceptional in his multiplicity. Even his name is doubled (Falstaff and Oldcastle). I ask, What happens to persons when they are “characterized” onstage? What are the limits, and possibilities, of being made into (as the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson puts it) “a by worde”? How might such work help scholars rethink associations between “roundness” and “liveness” in their assumptions about how character is produced and felt to matter?

James Baldwin is a thinker of the potential of “the individual” in disenchanted modernity. Drawing on work by Ashon T. Crawley, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, the essay explores this claim by tracing the resonances between the museum scenes found in two of Baldwin's novels: one in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), where characters visit the Museum of Natural History, and the other in Another Country (1962), where they are dazzled by a work of abstract expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art. The echoes between the two scenes actualize Baldwin's suggestion that it is in aesthetic practices, whether within or outside the museum, that diasporic modernity's aborted potential can be resuscitated. In particular, at stake is the actualization of the self-generating diasporic subject, unbeholden, in protest or adaptation, to any preconceived schemas of white epistemology.

One particular effect to which Shakespeare puts the verbal rhythms in his sonnets is to generate a kind of prosodic unrest. To illustrate this effect, this essay first distinguishes and coordinates a set of six or seven forms of syllabic emphasis involved when a reader prepares to voice a sonnet aloud. This prosodic taxonomy allows readers to discern and appreciate a kind of tension Shakespeare generates in the syllables that make up his rhythmic verses, a prosodic tension that underscores the emotion depicted in many of the “dark lady” sonnets and in some of the more angst-ridden of the other sonnets, particularly those where he treats the injuries that the fair youth and he have suffered at each other's hands.

This essay argues that in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, Dorigen develops a selfhood that remains unflinchingly available to others. While the tale’s men pursue a closed selfhood subtended by chivalric expectations for heroic masculinity, Dorigen’s porous selfhood represents a different, vulnerable ideal. Dorigen’s selfhood is open and trusting, and it meets the material world in all its ugliness and danger. Throughout her promise and her complaint, Dorigen maintains a subjectivity that is open to all and bound to none; her difficulties, we argue, arise not from naivete but from the ways in which the buffered, chivalric world disallows and even destroys other formations of selfhood. Although Dorigen recedes by the tale’s conclusion, her boundless, permeable subjectivity is held up as The Franklin’s Tale’s ideal, and the threats to it are clearly exposed as broader harms by the tale’s end.

This essay follows the translation history of the Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar’s novel The Vale of Cedars (1850) from London through central and eastern Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Conjoining world literature, translation studies, diaspora studies, and Jewish literary studies, it argues for two interventions: a rethinking of world literature vis-à-vis diaspora, and a global, multilingual, and translational approach to the literature of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Aguilar’s novel, a work of minor literature about crypto-Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, was originally intended as a refutation of English conversionists. By the end of the century the novel had inspired multiple free translations into Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic, refashioned to instill readers with pride in historical Jewish nobility and martyrdom. Mapping the book’s multilingual, transcontinental journey and elucidating the linguistic and cultural markers of its rewritings, the essay shows how diaspora connected such diverse translations and offers a new perspective on world literature.

This article troubles the racial foundations of our mediated age by tracking the relocation of the patent form from US intellectual property law to nineteenth-century African American literature. According to an Enlightenment racial schema, people of African descent were considered fit only to be the means for the propagation of European life. This racist ideologeme was enforced by the legal exclusion of free and enslaved African Americans from patenting their inventions. In this article, I examine the Creole inventor Norbert Rillieux’s patented sugar-refining apparatus for how it encapsulates key characteristics of the concept of mediation. I then turn to Solomon Northup’s reworking of the patent form into literary form. In the description of his invention, Northup problematizes notions of intellectual foresight implied in the patent form, ultimately revealing how the power of mediation is tied up with a racial capitalist system that claims to secure property rights while simultaneously undermining them.

The dedicatory preface to Francisco Balagtas’s 1838 Tagalog poem, Florante at Laura, introduced a new conception of time to Philippine literature by referencing mortality as “búhay ma,i, mapatid,” or “life with a cut.” Mapatid, meaning “cut,” contradictorily has the same root word as the Tagalog word for sibling, kapatid. Zeroing in on the term’s simultaneous connotation of cessation and relation, this essay seeks to better understand the specificity of time’s emergence as an object of representation in Philippine literature through mapatid. It examines Lope K. Santos’s 1906 Tagalog socialist novel, Banaag at Sikat (Soft Glimmers before Dawn), for its omission of a representation of US colonial rule. I argue that this omission is a development of Balagtas’s notion of time and that cutting the historical context of US colonialism allows the novel to criticize colonialism.

This essay examines novels by Tao Lin and Caroline Kepnes alongside data companies’ managerial literature to account for the relation between consumer surveillance and contemporary fiction. First, it identifies the creep as a character type who appears in novels about digital life. Second, it shows that the creep, usually in the guise of an online stalker, shares a key concern with the platforms that structure the commercial space of the Internet: both must conceal the extent of their surveillance for fear of scaring away their object or customer. This essay draws out the literary genealogy of the creep by revisiting canonical theories of the novel and disciplinary surveillance.

This article argues that Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War (2017), offers insight into the possibilities of trauma fiction in the twenty-first century. American War is analyzed as a case study for the trauma novel of the twenty-first century—a literary exploration of future and ongoing trauma, rather than a text “working through” a past event. The novel offers as well an unrelenting image of the cost of refusals of care in the early twenty-first century, the last decades in which the impending disaster might be averted. Queer affect theory inflects trauma studies in ways that allow us as readers to describe trauma that is systemic and ongoing; it also allows us to articulate the disproportionate effects of climate trauma on certain human communities, the physical and mental toll of such effects, and the necessity of bearing witness to climate trauma’s causes and consequences in ways that not only create space for but also call forth interventionist action.

Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some ecocritics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning. I argue that the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed “climate Bildungsromane,” which envision various transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of one significant example, Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims, I explore climate Bildungsromane's tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I contemplate how and why this seeming paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.