PMLA welcomes essays of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature. As the publication of a large and heterogeneous association, the journal is receptive to a variety of topics, whether general or specific, and to all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives. The ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind; addresses a significant problem; draws out clearly the implications of its findings; and engages the attention of its audience through a concise, readable presentation. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000-1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended to the Editorial Board. Articles of fewer than 2,500 words or more than 9,000 words are not considered for publication. The word count includes notes but excludes works-cited lists and translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations. The MLA urges its contributors to be sensitive to the social implications of language and to seek wording free of discriminatory overtones.

Literary practice may be more deeply shaped by basic literacy training than we have noticed. This is particularly true for English writers of the late fourteenth century, when the constant movement out of Latin into English in schoolrooms both ensured that translation exercises became a method for making vernacular poetry and demonstrated that English had a grammar of its own. As the most basic grammatical concepts and the simplest exercises of literacy training evolved into resources for literary technique, the style of writers such as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower became “grammaticalized.” For this reason, a more detailed understanding of the forms of pedagogy employed in grammar schools can be equivalent to a genealogy of the important elements of a style.

The illustrations created by Jörg Breu for the 1515 edition of Ludovico de Varthema's account of his voyage to the Middle East, India, and the East Indies (Die ritterlich uñ lobwirdig Rayss “The Noble and Praiseworthy Journey') were reprinted in other travel narratives published in the mid-sixteenth century, including Hans Staden's Warhaftige Historia ‘True History’ (1557), about his captivity among the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil. As recycled illustrations their presence in Staden's text is usually ignored or derided, but their iconography and placement suggest that they were chosen deliberately and not merely for the sake of economy and expedience. By analyzing the images' relation to the accompanying text and comparing the images with those used in other editions and other travel narratives, the article argues that these traveling illustrations do not merely demonstrate the interchangeability of exotic ”others“ but rather suggest a growing awareness of and interest in ethnographic specificity among mid-sixteenth-century European readers.

The reception of Aby Warburg's first published work, his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli, has overlooked layers of meaning implicit in Warburg's word choice. His study of the afterlife of antiquity relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as Inspirator (“inspirer”), Stimmung (“mood,” “atmosphere”), and Milieu (“milieu”). Warburg brings out the reference to air in these words, invoking their philological nuances and physiological contexts. The air designated is not only the physical medium in which Botticelli's windblown accessories move but also the quattrocento's cultural atmosphere in which Botticelli's creativity thrives. In addition, air implicitly functions as a disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend traditional art history.

Studies of the New Negro Renaissance have long emphasized the emergence in black poetry of the vernacular and of folk-oriented rhythms in particular. Sterling Brown's critical work and poetry show, however, that traditional English meters had a central role in the discourse and poetics of New Negro poetry. Reading his 1931 Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes together with James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) suggests that these meters counteracted dominant racialized ideas about black bodies, rhythms, and song. The polymetrical surface of Brown's own early poem “When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home” (1927) reveals that Brown treated iambic pentameter as a vernacular form, destabilizing entrenched divisions between conventional and innovative, white and black, past and present. Future studies of black poetry might therefore look to prosodic hybridity as a powerful critique of audience ideology.

The role composition plays in the contemporary American university, particularly in relation to the english department, has changed from the days when composition was not an expertise but a duty. Initiated on the college level in the 1870s, as John Brereton has argued, at a time much like our own, when the American college was “in danger of becoming irrelevant to a rapidly changing nation” (3), composition consolidated the many kinds of writing done in the courses (and in the extracurriculum) of universities into a required academic subject, positioned at the threshold of college education. It was charged with preparing students for the rigors of college study and for citizenship and professional life. For many generations of college English teachers, composition was an expected part of the job: everyone, whatever their specialty, taught first-year writing.

Composition studies concentrates on students, not texts. We in this field want to know who our students are. What abilities to use language do they bring to the academy? What new kinds of intellectual work are they able to do? What challenges does academic discourse pose for them? These are research questions we explore with rigor but also compassion and, sometimes, admiration. My favorite origin story claims that this field's modern iteration sprang from reluctance to use first-year writing courses, required at most universities, simply to eject the “boneheads.” Instead, we learned from Mina Shaughnessy and others to regard even the most struggling undergraduate writers as agents, operating among intersecting and competing discourse communities. For us, student writers are not solitary creators, nor are they intertextual blurs.

Any modest attempt in comparative rhetoric to think beyond aristotle and beyond a single culture is enough to reveal Diversity in the use of language to converse, to instruct, and to persuade and in the concepts and theories developed to inform language practices. Since the publication, in 1971, of Robert Oliver's Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, one of the early studies that recognized the need for and benefits of studying non-Euro-American rhetorics, comparative rhetoric has made significant advances as interest in moving beyond Euro-American-centrism in studies of rhetoric steadily grows. Comparative rhetoric, committed to different ways of knowing and speaking and to different forms of inquiry, investigates across time and space communicative practices that frequently originate in noncanonical contexts and are often marginalized, forgotten, or erased altogether. Acting in response to globalization, comparative rhetoric aims to transform dominant rhetorical traditions and paradigms. As an interdisciplinary enterprise, it intersects with cognate studies and theories to challenge the prevailing power imbalances and patterns of knowledge production.

In the late first century CE, probably under the rule of the Roman Emperor Titus, the Greek Bithynian Sophist Dio Chrysostom traveled to the city of Rhodes to scold its citizens for their treatment of statues. These were not religious statues, nor were they exemplary works of art. They were certainly not the marble statues commissioned by wealthy individuals for private display. In what would be known as his “Rhodian Oration,” Dio interceded on behalf of honorific portrait statues, erected by the city to honor those who had provided public gifts or services. This exchange of gift and honor is now referred to as euergetism (good works) or benefactions—a system of finance and governance whereby individuals subsidized public functions (such as religious festivals) and the construction of public facilities (such as the baths) or provided other gifts and services to the city. According to Dio, Rhodes was reusing honorific portrait statues—authorizing artisans to chisel out the names of those previously honored and reinscribe the statues' bases with the names of new honorees. As Dio argues, the city was, effectively, plundering its own statues.

Globe magazine featured a “world exclusive,” not even a year into Barack Obama's first term as president of the united states, charging him with homosexual infidelity and his wife, Michelle, with coordinating a cover-up (“Obama Gay Cover-Up!”). The magazine followed up two months later, asserting that Obama's lover resided in the White House and was none other than his personal aide, Reggie Love (“Obama's Gay Lover”). Globe, of course, is a dime-store rag whose mission is to sensationalize. I refer to it here because it is perhaps the most relentless among a slew of white-run media outlets that consistently and unfavorably queer Obama, amplifying his nonnormative masculine traits and then, on that basis, assigning him a deceitful, nonheteronormative sexuality.

“I was sure it would make a great story, first for telling and then for writing down,” writes harriet MCbryde Johnson, explaining why she accepts an invitation from Peter Singer to a debate at Princeton University (2003). Initially, Johnson, a disability-rights activist and lawyer who has a neuromuscular disease, is unsure how to interact with Singer, whose philosophy of preferential utilitarianism argues that it is ethical to kill babies born with severe disabilities. Johnson first encounters Singer at an event at the College of Charleston, and she looks to the rules of decorum to help her decide how to handle the situation. When she sees Singer talking to friends, she considers leaving before even being introduced to him. “Hereabouts,” however, “the rule is that if you're not prepared to shoot on sight, you have to be prepared to shake hands. I give Singer the three fingers on my right hand that still work. ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Singer. I'm here for Not Dead Yet.‘ I want to think he flinches just a little” (204 [2005]).

Translingual writing is all the rage among scholars and teachers of writing studies in the united states. The last decade has seen a plethora of publications on this topic, many of which have received prestigious awards, and conferences have highlighted translingual writing and related topics. It seems that translingual writing has established itself as an intellectual movement. The attention to language in United States writing studies—a field that has traditionally found ways to dissociate itself from language—is a welcome change. At the same time, I am uneasy about the term translingual writing because, as the enthusiasm for this new and evolving intellectual endeavor continues to grow, the notion of translingual writing seems to be uncritically accepted and celebrated.

The visitor to Karl Marx's Grave in London's highgate cemetery is confronted by a large polished granite plinth, atop which squats an imposing bronze head and shoulders of Marx. Although the artist Laurence Bradshaw designed the rectangular plinth as a proxy for Marx's body, the effect is still to emphasize the head, the supposed locus of Geist, esprit, intellect. Marx was a headworker, it is true. Even in the depths of poverty, plagued by bodily ailments, he was never obliged to purvey körperliche Arbeit (“body work,” “manual labor”) in the restricted sense—that is, a körperliche Arbeit located in a social split that structurally denies the body worker access to the abstractions of a developed geistige Arbeit (“intellectual labor”).

Unlike most others teaching (English) literature, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is intimately knowledgeable about philosophy, especially German. Her deep knowledge of Kant, Marx, and Gramsci is a red thread running through her many books. And, given her interest in what we call less and less happily “postcolonial” theory (the hesitation coming from an awareness of the problematic meaning of the prefix post-), her discussions of such canonical and inexhaustible philosophical texts never lose sight of the sociopolitical implications of the ideas gleaned from the encounter. Thus, she brings a philosophical tradition to bear on contemporary social issues of a keen actuality. This solid philosophical background does not make her texts always easy to read for literary and other cultural scholars eager to get ideas—preferably quickly—about “how to do” postcolonial literary studies. Spivak's work is as challenging to read, understand, and absorb as it is important in content.

Postcolonialism emerged as a field within literary studies during the 1980s as part of the discipline's general restructuring. That restructuring has, perhaps, been insufficiently acknowledged by the profession, and at any rate there seems to be little consensus as to its significance and shape. But it seems undeniable that, during the 1980s, literary criticism ceased to ground itself on its attention to its objects' literary qualities or on its efforts to establish convincing literary judgments about them. It turned rather to thinking about literature as, for instance, a vehicle of cultural-political identities, or as a resistance to ideology, or, more neutrally, as articulated into broader signifying or social structures.

In her essay “nationalism and the imagination,” there is a tantalizing glimpse of Gayatri before she was Gayatri Spivak. When she gave the essay as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth Association for Languages and Literature in Hyderabad, India, and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, her two audiences, though completely different, were evidently asking the same questions about nationalism in a supposedly postnational world. But what is most fascinating for me about the talk is that it hints at the autobiography to come, the story of a girl born in Kolkata whose earliest memories include “the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theater in World War II” (276). Would she be surprised to know that, coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire? Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.