The epigraph for this address, which sets both theme and tone, is the first tercet of a love sonnet by the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard:

Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma dame;

Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons,

Et tôt serons étendus sous la lame….

Time moves on, time moves on, madam;

Alas, not time, but we are moving on,

And soon will be stretched out beneath the stone….

Mesdames et messieurs, chers amis, chers collègues, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and colleagues, I had hoped that the various Canadian laws concerning the obligatory use of both French and English on commercial products, in official government documents, on street signs in the province of Ontario, and in some schools would carry over to the 109th convention of the Modern Language Association of America and, for the occasion, to the whole of North America. For instance, I would have welcomed the obligation to deliver my address in French and in English, not translating sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph but using both languages in individual sentences, so that my salutation this evening would have been “Mesdames and gentlemen, dear friends et chers collègues.”

When did the Berlin Wall come down? However much this event took us by surprise in the autumn of 1989—indeed, no one foresaw either its rapidity or its consequences—I believe that the fissures in the wall began to be clearly felt in the early 1960s. A few unknown scholars—thinkers expressing disturbing ideas in hermetic idioms—were regrouping, like a colony of ants, to carry out subversive labors. Too complex for the already nascent media culture, their work was, of course, invisible from Paris or New York; but the masters of the Kremlin were not unaware of its undermining effects.

Translators' note. The first few pages of this essay are not printed here. In this omitted portion Yury Lotman distinguishes between two major functions of texts. The first function is the adequate transmission of information, and the second is the generation of new meanings. The most desirable condition for the first function is the complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages. Since this situation is virtually impossible, an intermediary is developed, which Lotman terms the “text-code.” The text-code, of which the Bible is the most obvious example, serves an interpretive and prescriptive role in the transmission of texts. The traditional linguistic, structural approach to analyzing texts, exemplified by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, often results in the construction of a text-code. The linguistic, structural approach presupposes a closed set or system whose elements can produce an infinite series of texts. In contrast, the second function of texts suggests an immanent, literary approach that attempts to situate texts within the confluence of their contexts, antecedents, and descendants. A text analyzed in its second function will be noted for the heterogeneity of its constituent elements, some of which form “texts within texts.” In the remainder of this essay, presented here in its entirety except for one elision, Lotman develops this approach, which he associates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Semiotic theory during the 1980s and early 1990s in the former Soviet Union departs significantly from earlier, structuralist models. Central to this new declination is Yury Lotman's theory of the semiosphere, a metaphor that, in its spatialization of meaning, draws on Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere and Bakhtin's idea of the logosphere. This article evaluates the semiosphere from historical, comparative, and feminist critical perspectives. The historical perspective situates Lotman's theory within the Russian organicist philosophical tradition (including Vernadsky and Bakhtin), and the comparative considers Russian theory as a counterpart to Western models of signification. The feminist critique is motivated by the fact that, in relying on metaphors borrowed from reproductive biology, organicist theory participates in a theoretical discourse that has perpetuated stereotyped categories based on gender differences. (AM)

In classical rhetoric, irony is included in allegory (“other speaking”) as one of its species: contradiction, or antiphrasis. Because contradiction is incompatible with the classical definition of allegory as “continued metaphor” and with the synecdochal and associative mode of thinking (polysemy) typical of complex allegorical works, irony was excluded from allegory in postclassical literary theory. Nevertheless, the conditions for allegorical expression are grounded in the systematic confrontation of antiphrasis and polysemy, as in a grid. For allegory to emerge from this scene of confrontation, polysemy must predominate, transforming the grid into a perspectival regress to an origin that remains out of sight. This transformation is accomplished by means of interpretation, to which irony, being confined to the realm of the subject, is inimical. Antiphrasis remains present throughout. But it is interpreted as the resonance of the origin that remains out of sight. (GT)

A textual edition can be read as a cultural performance if one considers its interlaced linguistic and bibliographical codes as monumentalizing rhetoric, opening the textual space of the edition into the social space of its production, distribution, and reception. Mary Shelley's 1824 edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems and the pirated volume published by the radical William Benbow in 1826 each produce what might be called a “rhetoric of Shelley,” a product of—and participant in — a larger set of social discourses and mechanisms of cultural reproduction. Whereas Mary Shelley's edition was successful, however, Benbow's “illegitimate” edition was not. Derwent Coleridge's discussion of Benbow's piracy reveals how the failure to appropriate Shelley for radical discourse could be claimed not merely as a justification of the “purity” of Shelley's poetry but also as what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “sociodicy,” the justification of an entire social hierarchy. (NF)

In Our Nig (1859), Harriet E. Wilson offered the story of her life for sale to save her son's life. In her appeal for patronage, however, Wilson looked not for charity but rather for an economic exchange by which the cultural value of her critique of the mid-nineteenth-century northern states could be acknowledged. The narrative defines this exchange as an entrance into a moral economy — a new system of social relations based not on an ideal of cooperation but on the recognition that conflict and distrust among and within culturally defined social groups are inevitable. In this way, Our Nig responds to proslavery forces that found ready arguments in the injustices of capitalism and calls attention to the ethical motivations behind economic relations. (JE)