The malaise depicted in early nineteenth-century French novels is said to characterize the age but is in fact a malady of men. In these works male alienation takes the form of emasculation. Nevertheless, Chateaubriand's René illustrates how the male protagonist's feminization becomes a sign of moral superiority and poetic genius. Although the hero claims to tell a tale devoid of conventional intrigue, he makes his solipsistic discourse prurient and melodramatic by introducing a woman who suffers the consequences of desiring him despite his disablement. The mal du siècle strategy consists in creating interest in character through the feminine in the man while providing drama in plot through the man's fatal effect on the woman. While the early Romantic novel breaks down stereotypes of masculinity by feminizing the hero, its conventions of narrative causality and discursive empowerment draw on traditional ideologies of gender difference to reempower alienated postrevolutionary man.

Theoretical accounts of the “postmodern” have recently invoked the aesthetic category of the sublime, but without attending to the rhetorical complexities that the category names and conceals. This essay opens by considering disturbances legible in Fredric Jameson's proposal of a postmodern sublime, then goes on to consider narratives by Thomas Pynchon that interrogate and allegorize the burdens of such a proposition. From the early short stories to V. and Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's texts develop increasingly complex stagings of the sublime, putting into question the psychological and epistemological consolations that these scenarios exist to afford.

Critics have failed to grasp that Yeats's “tragic joy” is a version of the sublime. The phrase captures the affective dynamic of the sublime—the transformation of defeat and terror into joy—as do similar concepts in Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, and Schiller. Yeats can help us understand death as the ultimate occasion of the sublime. Through his lyrics of tragic joy we can trace the psychic and rhetorical resemblances that connect diverse modes of the sublime: curse, prophecy, and apocalypse. These modes encode affirmative responses to destruction, so that the psycholinguistic violence in the poems may owe less to fascism than to the Romantic sublime. Although Yeats turns the sublime of Blake and Shelley in a reactionary direction, the politics of the sublime are inherently neither right-wing nor left-wing but open to either articulation.

Sturm und Drang's self-critique of its rebellious impulses resembles Kant's virtually contemporaneous struggle to formulate the principle of autonomy, for both involve the reconciliation of individual freedom with rules that can make such freedom accountable. Dramas of Goethe, Klinger, and Schiller acknowledge the need for principles of accountability by presenting the violent Kraftmensch within plots designed to justify the figure's actions. The frequent repetition of words and phrases in the drama of Sturm und Drang is part of the tradition's search for repeatable rules within the scope of its own impulsiveness. Among major writers of Sturm und Drang, only J. M. R. Lenz avoids depicting the Kraftmensch. Because Lenz will not mitigate the culpability of his characters, his drama can deal more honestly with problems of freedom and individuality.

Goethe's poem “Selige Sehnsucht” has been variously interpreted in the light of different readers' notions of what is characteristically “Goethean.” This essay examines syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical ambiguities in the poem and adds to the variety of interpretations by suggesting that the opening lines' elitist restriction of the message to “none but the wise” is, ironically, democratic and that the familiar closing maxim discriminates not between “us” and “them” but between “before” and “after”—between blessed, half-blind (“trübe”) desire and a brilliant fulfillment potentially in store for everyone. Goethean enlightenment, like irony, is indirect. Temporarily obfuscating, it promises—beyond time and selfhood—a consummate unitary illumination.

In Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie ‘Mimologics: A Voyage into Cratylusland,’ Gérard Genette introduces his readers to a new genre of discourse that cuts across disciplinary boundaries: mimologism. Beginning with the “founding text” in Plato's Cratylus, Genette explores the twists and turns of the debate between mimeticists and conventionalists over the origin and nature of language. The terms mimologism and Cratylism describe the position of Cratylus and all those in his wake—aestheticians, poets, and philosophers of language—who believe, “rightly or wrongly,” that “there must be a relation of reflective analogy (a relation of imitation) between ‘word’ and ‘thing,‘ that motivates, or justifies, the existence and the choice of the former.” At the same time, the “Cratylian desire” for perfect harmony between word and thing expresses itself unconsciously in “reveries,” or mimologics, in which the dreamer—whether Schlegel, Renan, Proust, or Saussure—muses on the mimetic potential of language (Genette 9).