“Reflections on a Manual” was Roland Barthes's contribution to the colloquium “The Teaching of Literature” held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1969. Organized by Tzvetan Todorov and Serge Doubrovsky, the Cerisy gathering featured other prominent theorists, like Gérard Genette and A. J. Greimas, whose concerns Barthes addresses and adapts to his own purposes in this paper. Reading manuals of the history of French literature as texts whose grammar is organized by a set of oppositions, he conducts a structuralist enterprise that becomes an inquiry into the myths enabling societies to create and preserve their identities. Barthes's reflections on the teaching of literature recall some of the major works that punctuate the phases of his career, from Mythologies (1957) to “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966) to The Pleasure of the Text (1973).

The figure of the wound is central to Derek Walcott's Omeros, one of the most ambitious works of postcolonial poetry. Walcott grants a European name to the primary bearer of the wound, the black fisherman Philoctete, who allegorizes African Caribbean suffering under European colonialism and slavery. This surprisingly hybrid character exemplifies the cross-cultural fabric of postcolonial poetry but contravenes the assumption that postcolonial literature develops by sloughing off Eurocentrism for indigeneity. Rejecting a separatist aesthetic of affliction, Walcott frees the metaphoric possibilities of the wound as a site of interethnic connection. By metaphorizing pain, he vivifies the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructs the experiential uniqueness of suffering. Knitting together different histories of affliction, Walcott's polyvalent metaphor of the wound reveals the undervalued promise of postcolonial poetry.

The title character in Toni Morrison's Beloved embodies the history and memory of rape. In fact, her supernatural form is the shape-shifting witch, derived by African Americans from the succubus, a female rapist and nightmare figure of European myth. Beloved functions like a traumatic, repetitive nightmare: in addition to representing characters' repressed memories of rape, she attacks Sethe and Paul D. Morrison also uses the succubus figure to represent the effects of institutionalized rape during slavery. Beloved drains Sethe of vitality and Paul D of semen, and these violations represent dehumanization and commodified reproduction. Finally, by portraying a female rapist figure and a male rape victim, Morrison foregrounds race, rather than gender, as the crucial category determining the domination or rape of her African American characters.

Since “American renaissance” criticism emerged in 1876, it has derogated women's writings while idealizing men's, despite its shifting definitions of period, canon, and literary standards. My genealogy of the critical discourse of renaissance details ways that this criticism has denied literary value to women writers, especially at historical moments of women's increased publicity and apparent gains of power, thereby helping to maintain larger gender and racial hierarchies. Because of this tradition, I argue, the renaissance discourse is inadequate to current efforts to reenvision United States literary history and to a democratic culture.

Although modem literary studies in the United States began well before the turn of the century, it was only through gradual evolution that the field acquired a self-conscious pedagogy differentiated from the methods of classical and philological education. A provocative barometer of this emergence is English in American Universities (Boston: Heath, 1895), a late-Victorian collection of twenty-five position statements by professors from leading universities and colleges from coast to coast, assembled by William Morton Payne in large part from papers previously published in the Dial. The following excerpts from this book concern pedagogical ethos (Martin W. Sampson, Univ. of Indiana), pedagogical drill (F. A. March, Lafayette Coll.), the undergraduate English curriculum (Melville B. Anderson, Stanford Univ.), and the premises of comparative literature (Charles Mills Gayley, Univ. of California, Berkeley).

A new form of intellectual authority and professional status has emerged in literary studies since the 1970s. Although some scholars have always been more influential and famous than others, only recently have such scholars been constructed as stars in the media and in the profession. This star system, similar to the one that flourished in studio-era Hollywood, makes leading scholars into personalities. It is related to the growth of the conference and lecture circuit and to the rise of literary theory. Although this system does not necessarily reward the wrong people, it does contribute to the public delegitimation of the discipline.