When I was asked to address the role of the personal in contemporary scholarship, I went back and did a quick word search through the various things I've written over the past few years and learned that since 19891 have used the word / in my work no fewer than 7,300 times—and that's not counting this sentence, in which I've managed to use it another 6 times already. So I feel qualified to speak about the use of personal narrative in scholarship—or, more accurately, compelled to speak, since I'm actually too shy to volunteer a response on my own.

Throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, Ethan Allen Greenwood, a rather pedantic young diarist, each day recorded the weather and the title of the book he was reading. He sometimes observed that a particular work was “instructive” or “entertaining” and occasionally noted the library from which the volume was borrowed–the Adelphi Fraternity Library, the Social Friends Library, or the unnamed circulating library he joined in 1806. His meticulous account of his activities and expenses–whether he was living at home in Worcester County, Massachusetts, or at Dartmouth College or later in Boston or traveling around the countryside as an itinerant painter–provides posterity with an unusually comprehensive portrait of “Ethan Allen Greenwood, his life and times.” Looking over the record that he left, we can well imagine that we know this serious and sober, parsimonious and abstemious young man Franklinesquely working his way toward fame and fortune. But then we encounter a curious diary entry: “Rode out with the ladies. Returned and spent the evening agreeably. What I do not write here will not be forgotten.”

As I was preparing this paper, I kept thinking that the topic 1 was treating was not The Place of the Personal but The Uses of the Personal. This tenacious false memory is symptomatic, of course; it means that I do not question the place of the personal in scholarship: as far as 1 am concerned, it has always been there, whether stated, overstated (as some think it is), or (as it has generally been) understated, concealed behind the “impersonal” doxa of the day. I do not, then, question the place of the personal (except to suggest that it has more than one place) but instead consider its uses and its function in scholarship, its diverse uses and its diverse functions in different cultural and scholarly traditions that intersect in my practice as a scholar in this country. Indeed, as I tackled this paper, those intersecting traditions made my thinking about the place of the personal in my work immensely difficult. I kept asking myself not only where and when and how I resort to the personal but also, and pressingly, for whom I am personal when I am personal.

I want to discuss the value and function of the personal as it has been called into service in the academy. Specifically, I want to examine the institutional function of racial identification: the place(s) of the racialized personal in scholarship. How have individuals marked by racial difference been asked, in order to enter the assumed universal mode of academic subjectivity, at certain historical points to forget the personal as it resides in them as racialized beings experiencing race and at other times not only to recognize the personal as racial but to foreground it particularly in their scholarly duties?

A Funeral Elegy was written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies, A Funeral Elegy received scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”

Mallarmé constructs a “crisis of verse” that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation to produce his celebrated poetic purity. Indeed, he constructs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on ambiguity. The significance of this defilement spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé‘s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Third Republic, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Moreover, because defilement is at once material and symbolic and because that “symbolism” is an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality, Mallarmé‘s cultivation of defilement is a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure” philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential.

Eliot's Middlemarch reveals the effective alliance among ekphrasis (a literary response to a visual work of art), narrative, and the portrayal of desire. The novel's richest example of this dynamic occurs in the Vatican Hall of Statues scene, when Will Ladislaw and his painter friend Naumann observe Dorothea poised beside a celebrated antique statue, “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra.” Capitalizing on this statue's history of mistaken identity, Eliot affirms the power of visual art for literary representation by using the statue in three important ways: as a catalyst for the birth of desire, as a prefiguration of the novel's romance plot (through narrative references to the myth of Ariadne), and as a vehicle for representing female eroticism, which the statue's long-standing association with Cleopatra underscores.

Some critics cite book 4 of Augustine's De doctrina Christiana as a source of the anti-rhetorical style of Renaissance English prose. However, such critics do not recognize that book 4 offers instruction in extemporaneous oral performance. Nor do contemporary critics note Augustine's pervasive orality, though a substantial critical literature addresses this fact. The relation of orality to literacy was complex in late antiquity, particularly as illiterates converted to Christianity, a text-based religion. Augustine's prescriptions can be seen to illustrate the development of “innerness” among Christians. Book 4 shows how Scripture reading, prayer, and style can be marshaled to produce extemporaneous oral performances that provoke interior religious experiences. Modern criticism of book 4 that views oralily and literacy as simple opposites and that privileges literacy can lead to misreading. As a document imbricated in the complex relation of literacy and oralily, however, book 4 makes a different kind of sense.