In the center of the pre-k classroom at the urban day elementary School an easel stood. On the easel a translation poster rested. Above blue lines, the uppercase letters, in manuscript and in cursive, and then the lowercase ones—all through the alphabet.

Early Hollywood horror, and Boris Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in particular, must be understood as cultural products of the age of polio. Polio survivors have drawn attention to kinetic similarities between their experiences and Karloff's gait, but horror and polio culture also share interests in experiments on simians, shadowy medical research, and ambiguously paralytic states. As well as locating the origins of some of horror's formal conventions, this essay draws attention to a dangerous gambit played by medical authorities in 1947, when, to energize the public in the fight against polio, they exploited those conventions for an educational horror film.

This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevailing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Glück practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional immediacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocutionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Glück's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.

Postmodern aesthetics' vaunted hermeneutic flatness is routinely equated with emotional flatness. In large part, it is this equation that underpins postmodernism's fall from favor in the face of the critical humanities' recent turn to the analysis of affect and emotion. Through a close reading of David Cronenberg's paradigmatically postmodern film Crash (1996), however, this essay draws on a long-standing lamination of texture to emotion in order to undertake a radical reappraisal of postmodernism's emotional life—recoding postmodern aesthetics' notoriously flat, depthless surface as a richly textured plane that oscillates between the high polish of the glossy surface and the cragginess of the rough. In doing so, the essay argues not only that postmodern aesthetics is unexpectedly hospitable to emotions but also that an analysis of these emotions may help to reconfigure sedimented scholarly understandings of the relation between surface and depth, true emotion and false, critical “then” and critical “now.”

Philip Roth invented Nathan Zuckerman to manage the temporal dissonance between the gradual and frequently posthumous canonization associated with Roth's modernist forebears and the instantaneous and contemporaneous celebrity characterizing his own postmodern career. After the mass cultural renown precipitated by Portnoy's Complaint and the devastating attack on that text by Irving Howe, Roth decided to re-create his career on the model of his literary forebears—James, Flaubert, Proust, Malamud, Mann, and especially Kafka, who died young after having published little. The first Zuckerman trilogy and its epilogue absorb the charismatic powers of these ancestors, after which Roth kills his avatar in The Counterlife, catapulting him into a pseudo-posthumous Jamesian major phase. The entire Zuckerman cycle, then, is a unique but also historically symptomatic strategy for dealing with the problem of celebrity authorship under a postmodern dispensation.

If it is true that legends never die but only grow and transmogrify, then the death of the African literary giant Chinua Achebe, at the age of eighty-two, on 21 March 2013, will do nothing to dim his assured status as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Two months after his death, he was buried in his hometown, Ogidi, in the state of Anambra, Nigeria, after a week of funeral rites in the national and state capitals, as well as at Nsukka University, where he worked as an academic in the early 1970s. The ceremonies marked Nigeria's sense that here was a writer whose vision had shaped not only the nation's understanding of itself but also, and as profoundly, anglophone world letters. In 2007 these contributions were justly acknowledged with the award to Achebe of the Man Booker International Prize, which recognizes the full trajectory of a writer's career and achievements.

When Adriana Ivancich is mentioned as a figure in ernest hemingway's life, it is usually with derision, incredulity, or else a barely constrained “Did they or didn't they?” breathlessness. The idea that Ivancich, who was not even born when Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), was the inspiration behind the teenage contessa Renata, Colonel Cantwell's improbable love interest in Across the River and into the Trees (1950), has generated a sometimes hostile reaction. However, this crucial figure in Hemingway's post-World War II life and writing deserves investigation. To the extent that she has been a blind spot in scholarly circles, the oversight can be attributed to a language gap. Her letters to Hemingway, her memoirs, her brother's memoirs, and much of the important analysis of Hemingway's involvement with the Veneto are written in Italian.

On 11 november 1844, a Mob gathered outside philadelphia's chesnut street theatre for, in the words of the theater's manager, Francis Wemyss, the purpose “of a grand row” (395). The crowd intended to prevent the opening of The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, a play George Lippard had adapted from the work he was simultaneously publishing serially; it would become the best-selling novel of the first half of the nineteenth century. Capitalizing on a sensational 1843 murder case that fascinated Philadelphians, the novel retold the story of Singleton Mercer, a Philadelphia clerk acquitted of killing his sister's seducer. Infuriated by the playbill, Mercer attempted to purchase two hundred tickets for his supporters, who threatened to destroy the theater (Durang 247). Wemyss wanted Mercer jailed, but the mayor, wary of “riot and bloodshed,” countered, “I really think you have struck the first blow in your playbill” and called for the play's cancellation (qtd. in Wemyss 319-20). As the crowd of irate Philadelphians gathered, Lippard strode through it draped in an “ample cloak and carrying a sword-cane to repel assaults” (Bouton 20). Facing the very real prospect of violence, Wemyss reluctantly canceled the production.