Prefaces to critical books often display more self-consciousness and uneasiness than we usually associate with critical discourse. These moments when critics speak about their own work can undermine our assumptions about disinterested scholarship. Moreover, they can lead to a reexamination of the critical activity and a search for new ways of evaluating critical prose that take account of the critic's attitude toward his own work. We need to examine criticism's stylistic and formal properties, not just its paraphrasable content. Such analysis can reveal the way a critic's interests and commitments are woven into the texture of his language. That language, however, will always partly betray or suppress the critic's experience. Criticism, moreover, can neither wholly escape nor wholly dominate the texts it treats. Yet it can also never be entirely self-effacing. As a result, criticism is a particularly ambivalent and compromised form of writing.

The prevalence of dentists in recent novels by Grass, Bellow, Updike, Pynchon, and Vonnegut suggests a shift in cultural attitudes toward teeth. Teeth have conventionally represented potency, beauty, or pain. The first attribute is most common in myth, folklore, and psychoanalysis. The topos of beautiful teeth, familiar in literature from the Old Testament to Poe, was inverted parodistically by fin-de-siècle writers like Mann and Benn. The attribute of pain assumed particular significance for Dostoevsky, H. C. Andersen, and Mann—heirs of the romantic association of disease and art—as a clue to the psychic state of the individual. Following the revival of the organismic theory of society, decaying teeth were seen to provide a more general symbol: in the novels of Koestler and Greene dental health consistently reflects social health. Hence the dentist enters contemporary fiction as psychic healer and social analyst.

The MLA is a vital association whose aim is to maintain the study of languages and literatures as a necessary and basic component of our culture. Its evolution in the last few years, guided by the suggestions of the membership and implemented by the central MLA Headquarters’ Executive Director and staff, corresponds to the evolution in our cultural and educational situation. But in 1975 the Association, whether as a whole or via its individual members, has not taken any effective stand to counteract the deleterious effects upon the profession of an economic and cultural regression that is threatening the future of humanistic study in schools and universities. An overall effort to counteract the present trend is indispensable.

Something more than the obvious psychological interpretation must be made of Rosebud, the. object from the protagonist's childhood that is the focus of the plot activity in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). This essay applies traditional methods of literary criticism—interpretation of symbolic imagery, close reading of dramatic language and gesture, and source and influence study—toward a solution of this major critical problem in one of the most important films. To assume that Rosebud will provide a definitive explanation of Charles Foster Kane is to disregard the function of the film's complex narrative organization. The position that Rosebud will explain everything is maintained by a character who is an object of comedy; the film's symbolic imagery and dramatic organization pose the issue quite differently: not Rosebud will explain everything! but Will Rosebud explain anything? Far from being a sign of the film's intellectual shallowness, Rosebud is the surest guide into its undetected complexities.

Luther studies have traditionally been confessionally oriented. Today, this author's significance is also secular, and it is most readily interpreted by disinterested literature teachers. Disputes about his writings radically increased European literacy rates. His songs and pamphlets engaged popular tradition in order to achieve broad, democratic appeal. Aside from the increase in readership after 1518, Luther as critic and interpreter brought about a more important qualitative change in literacy. In this way, he influenced writings of other lands and of later centuries. He treated the Bible as literature with great relevance to the individual life. Karl Holl and Heinrich Bornkamm give excellent accounts of his hermeneutics, but the literature student is most impressed by Luther's imaginative participation in the text. He took his contemporaries and countrymen into account, and their experiences, in order to achieve a meeting between their passions and those of the biblical authors.

Carl Zuckmayer and Heinz Hilpert adapted Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) for the Berlin stage in 1931. The unpublished manuscript of the play “Kat” reveals that the German adaptors, while making several original contributions, relied heavily upon Annemarie Horschitz' translation of A Farewell to Arms (In einem andern Land, 1930). By participating in the dramatization, playwright Zuckmayer sought to win a wider audience for Hemingway; at the same time, he was responding to current trends in the Berlin theater and to the political situation facing the Weimar Republic. Zuckmayer's political consciousness, manifest in the earliest of his successful plays, reached a new level of seriousness in “Kat.” Stepping out from behind his own humorous satire, he permitted Hemingway's endorsement of individual freedom to come to life in the Deutsches Theater at a time when the cause of freedom was being threatened as never before in Germany's history.

The Earl of Surrey’s five “personal elegies” demonstrate his sophisticated use of traditional rhetorical patterns, specifically his manipulation of the two types of structure for epideictic praise, that focusing on the subject’s biography, or that delineating his virtues. His sonnet on Thomas Clere follows the first type, and the Excellent Epitaffe on Wyatt adheres closely to the second, but even in these pieces Surrey departs from convention when it suits his larger rhetorical and poetic purposes. Individual modifications are even more apparent in his three less public tributes. The two sonnets on Wyatt serve as sequels to the satiric ending of the Epitaffe, and “So crewell prison” extends personal grief over the death of the Earl of Richmond to the level of an ubi sunt lament for the passing of an age. The elegies illustrate, finally, that the successful manipulation of convention by a good Tudor poet is itself a kind of originality.

Since 1937, critics have been discovering integrated into the structure of literary works various numerological and symmetrical patterns. Lines, chapters, books, episodes, characters, images, etc. are found in symbolic numbers like 3, 4, 10, 33, etc. and in symmetrical arrangements (concentric, triadic, or parallel). Both were known in classical times, but nowhere in surviving classical theory is there explicit recognition of any large-scale use of number or pattern in literature; nor are there important references in modern critical writing before this century. Nevertheless, even though the esthetic relevance of highly complicated or esoteric number systems is doubtful, many symmetrical (often concentric) and numerological patterns have been convincingly demonstrated in works from the Iliad to the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as well as in other poems and novels from the Renaissance to the present. But problems remain as to what can properly be measured and what validates the patterns detected.

Platonism, in its eclecticism and hidden continuity, proved congenial to Coleridge, whose conception of the nature and role of philosophy differed profoundly from the empirical orthodoxy of his time (and ours). Coleridge's conception resembles the Greek ideal, found in Plotinus and others, of philosophy as less a purely rationalistic pursuit than a form of gnosis involving the whole man and leading toward ultimate perceptions. Platonism has important literary consequences: Coleridge's “philosophical” writings may be read as a complex (and often beautiful) form of prose poetry. Analysis suggests that the mode of argument in crucial chapters of the Biographia (xxi-xiv) is substantially poetic in nature and perhaps deliberately paralogical. Coleridge attempts certainty, without attaining it, and shows, astonishingly, an equivalent of Keats's “Negative Capability” in the disinterestedness of his symbolic investigations or “constructs” of reality. Literary form and style are more important in Coleridge's intellectual prose than has been thought.

Wallace Stevens noted in his journal that while aphorisms are never believed for very long they help us make brief, intensely felt discoveries about ourselves; there he made a connection between his love of aphoristic expression and his theory of human perception of reality as a perception of fragments, never the whole. Exploring the nature and variety of his aphorisms as a manifestation of this concept is important to the understanding of his poems. The tendency to experience life as fragments is, on the one hand, a centripetal tendency akin to aphoristic expression, since in each case one momentarily pulls experience into a self-contained unit. But such moments invariably give rise to a centrifugal tendency, an encompassing of the plenitude of experience in all its contradictory fullness. The juxtaposition of these opposing tendencies lies at the heart of Stevens' aphoristic technique and of the tension in much of his poetry.