This essay provides a historical prologue for theorizing the cinema in postmodernity. The origins of the mobilized gaze are situated in the nineteenth-century flâneur, that paradigm of modernity. As the department store supplanted the arcade, space opened for a new urban subject, a female flâneur—a flâneuse. The mobilized consumer gaze led in turn to an apparatus that simulates spatial and temporal mobility: the cinema. The most profound symptoms of the postmodern condition—the disappearance of a sense of history, entrapment in a perpetual present, the loss of temporal referents—stem in part from the implicit time travel of cinematic and televisual spectation. The shopping mall—the present-day extension of the arcade—has the multiplex cinema and the VCR as apparatical exponents. The title of the essay is thus an appropriative double pun (on fleurs and on mal), locating the flânerie of the postmodern cinema spectator in the shopping mall.

Nuclear holocaust is often mapped as a circle around a point designated zero. Zero itself, historically a paradoxical sign, recapitulates in its form the circle around an absent center. The paradoxes of this (non)center inform Derrida's pivotal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” And all these paradoxes bear on Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, which takes place two thousand years after a catastrophic nuclear war. Set in the circle of towns surrounding what was once Canterbury, it evokes a center that is nothing less than “the idear of us.” Hoban uses continual reinterpretations and shifting tangents to generate a narrative circle in motion, both counterpart of and counter to the circling Power Ring that produced the nuclear zero.

Depictions of the Virgin in Middle English lyrics of the Passion are one of the most common medieval sources for accounts of a woman's gaze. Her gaze in these laments, however, runs counter to cultural proscriptions of female gazing, as illustrated in Dante, Chaucer, Alan of Lille, and Bernard of Clairvaux and as theorized in recent feminist film theory. The Marian poems complicate the gaze by repeatedly enjoining the reader to view Christ's suffering and mutilated body through an intricately mediated visual enterprise: the reader looks not only at the figure on the cross but also at the Virgin gazing, a sight that is further mediated by the poet, often in the persona of someone watching at the scene. Spectatorship in the laments sets up a complex tension between the Virgin as spectacle and the Virgin as a trasgressive subject of maternal and erotic power.

Mario Vargas Llosa's La tía Julia y el escribidor consists of the rigorous alternation of two textual registers that nonetheless appear to have little in common. A careful reading reveals that these seemingly unrelated tracts can be taken jointly as a fantasy depicting the triumph of oedipal desire and configuring a tale of the author's coming into being. This fantasy provides an insight into the ideology of writing that underlies Vargas Llosa's entire textual production. The phantasmatic empowerment of the writing subject thus identified is linked finally to Vargas Llosa's widely disseminated pronouncements regarding economic and political agency in Latin America and to his equally influential views on the nature of the literary act.

In 1930, to blunt attacks from legislators, social reformers, and investors, the American movie companies adopted the Production Code, a skein of dos and don'ts that regulated, among other things, the screen treatment of sex and crime and that, by 1934, had its own executive apparatus. Though Joseph I. Breen, the director of the Production Code Administration, was called “the Hitler of Hollywood,” Production Code censorship operated through negotiation and compromise; even Breen himself was less repressive or moralistic than reporters or historians imagined. From 1934 to 1941, the Production Code Administration, the West Coast studios, and the East Coast corporate offices formed a machinelike network whose power Breen used not only to license but to facilitate the production of controversial films, including those presumed most harmed by the code—sex comedies and social-problem pictures.

This Year, the Committee on Amendments to the Constitution received one proposal for a constitutional amendment from the Executive Council. Having completed its work on the proposal, the committee will forward the amendment presented below to the Delegate Assembly. The assembly will vote on the amendment at its regular meeting on 29 December 1991. So that members may be fully informed about proposed amendments, the MLA constitution (article 13.B) requires that all amendments to be brought before the Delegate Assembly be “published in an appropriate publication of the association at least ninety days before the meeting at which they are to be voted on.” If approved by the assembly, the amendment will be submitted to the membership of the association in the spring of 1992 for ratification by mail ballot.

The presentation of the banquet temptation in Paradise Regained unfolds a complex system of allusions that allows us, first, to ascertain the place of male sexual difference in Milton's canon and, second, to reassess how we interpret Milton's genders and their relation to the sexual epistemology of the later Renaissance. The sylvan setting invokes a tradition of increasing specification of homoeroticism in Renaissance receptions of classical pastoral, and the presence of Ganymede and Hylas recalls vernacular idioms of sodomy and sexual transgression. These associations place male sexual difference within the Miltonic canon in a way that has seldom been recognized, but a further survey of exegetical manipulations of homoeroticism demonstrates that Milton's use of this motif serves the larger project of rewriting “common glosses.”

The texts of the late-nineteenth-century European male avant-garde reflect an imaginary identification with the feminine. Examined here with specific reference to Huysmans's Against the Grain, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, this topos is evident both in the representation of “feminized” male subjects (the aesthete and the dandy) and in a self-conscious writing practice that foregrounds style, parody, and quotation. While ostensibly challenging sexual and textual norms through a subversion of bourgeois masculinity and realist aesthetics, these works in fact reinforce gender dichotomies by persistently associating woman with vulgarity, materiality, and the tyranny of the natural. The preference for art over nature in early modernism thus reveals a misogynistic dimension that is intimately linked to, rather than dissolved by, its parodistic and antirealist aesthetic.

This paper seeks to elucidate the complex interaction of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in El jardín de al lado by using a heuristic and dialogic approach—that is, by counterpointing Donoso's novel and one of its implicit subtexts, Thomas Mann's “Death in Venice.” Focusing on the aesthetic contradiction between modernism and postmodernism brought on by the rise of the culture industry, El jardín de al lado dramatizes an artistic crisis that has ethical and political implications. The narrator's traditional discourse of value is subverted by the ethics and aesthetics of the marketplace, which create contradictions (bourgeois versus bohemian subjectivity, production of the text versus reception of it) similar to those Mann deals with in “Death in Venice.” Ultimately, El jardín de al lado is a response to political crisis from the standpoint of autonomous literature.

Marginalized herself in discussions of the New German Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta sets out in her film Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit) to recover the experiences of women as subjects in history. Using feminism as her lens, von Trotta deconstructs and re-visions history through a fictionalized version of the lives of Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the Red Army Faction, and her sister Christiane, a feminist journalist. Von Trotta presents their story from the perspective of Juliane-Christiane, whose memories reveal parallels between public and private, past and present forms of repression and who rediscovers the importance of sororal and maternal bonding. The film emphasizes that the political and the historical are indivisible from the personal. In doing so, Marianne and Juliane politicizes spectatorship and destabilizes the economies of violence and gender on which many visual accounts of German history depend.

In the 1620s the disgraced Francis Bacon turned increasingly to France for an audience. Yet his 1625 volume of essays, which offers wry homage to Montaigne, seeks to undermine the authority of France and particularly of Montaigne. In the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon opposed the unlimited skepticism of “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” and rejected the Democritean tone of the rest of Montaigne's essays. In “Of Truth,” the first of the 1625 essays, he restates these views more forcefully, covertly depicting Montaigne as a “jesting Pilate.” In “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” he voices more vigorously his opposition to the unlimited openness of Montaigne, an opposition first expressed in the De Augmentis (1623). Furthermore, he ascribes the extremism of Montaigne to French society in general and, in “Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates,” acclaims England as a land paradoxically “great” in its “middle” people. Still the French remain, he believes, more likely to listen.

By telling the story of the “invisible woman”—a character traditionally silenced and effaced in fiction—The Color Purple challenges patriarchal constructions of femininity and female desire and makes representation itself a compelling issue. Initially, the great twentieth-century cultural narratives of sexuality and socialization, Freud's oedipal theory and Lévi-Strauss's theory of kinship systems and the exchange of women, are played out in the drama of Celie's life. But this differently crafted, quilted novel is also differently sexual; it replots the heroine's text within an alternative framework of desire and disrupts the symbolic order with its carnivalesque celebration of polymorphously perverse pleasure.

Focusing on several classic works of children's literature in English (such as The Wizard of Oz, the Alice books, and Peter Pan), this study examines the self-reflexive and metaliterary thrust of the genre's characteristic fantasy-framing device, the return-to-reality ending, and suggests a tripartite taxonomy of closural effects: therapeutic-socializing, fantasy-rejecting, and tragic. The familiarity of the return serves to screen conflicting adult agendas in literature for children. The traditional role of the adult as regulator of transitional states (i.e., of childhood itself) consorts oddly with the Romantic reversal of the adult-child hierarchy and with post-Romantic anxiety regarding both traditional and Romantic models of the relation between adult and child. While the return works to restore the conventional orders of significance temporarily neutralized by the fantasy plot, it also tends to ironize such conventions, including the convention of narrative closure.

Feminist film theory sees the instruments of both gynecology and filmmaking as tools for examining women; this equation is made in a different register by David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, a film that subordinates the examination of women to the relationship between twin brothers who are gynecologists. Dead Ringers imagines that the camera and the speculum extend each other's province, thus drawing our attention to the way women are figured in the film even when they do not appear. Cronenberg also uses the camera, however, to establish identities where they do not otherwise exist. His film therefore occasions questions about the analogous status that film theory has given to its various analytical devices. By making us ask about the similarities and differences between the functions of the camera and those of the speculum in investigation and representation, Dead Ringers interrogates the ways feminist film theory can integrate psychoanalysis.