Journey to Mecca (; al-Rihla al-Makkiyya; 1941), by the distinguished Moroccan historian and legal scholar Ahmad al-Rahuni, recounts a hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, sponsored by the fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1937. Franco's support for the hajj was part of a vast propaganda effort to cast Franco's Spain as a friend of Islam and a defender of the cultural heritage of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia). Al-Rahuni's travel narrative blurs the line between Mecca and Spain by casting Spain's Islamic heritage sites as a metaphoric Mecca to which Muslims should make pilgrimage. The account thus highlights the collaboration between Spanish fascists and Moroccan elites. It also complicates the dominant scholarly narratives about modern Arabic literature, which have tended to focus on Egypt, the novel, and secular epistemologies. Al-Rahuni's text speaks, instead, to the persistence of Arabic prose genres that do not conform to a Eurocentric notion of literature.

The conceptual foundations of ecology were laid in the seventeenth century by the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, when he developed the idea of “the oeconomy of nature.” Digby transformed the practical agrarian discourse of “natural oeconomy” (household management), which links human beings to their environments, into the natural-philosophical concept of the oeconomy of nature. Using the oeconomic values of thrift, regularity, and efficient dispensation to conceptualize natural processes, Digby projected a human institution, with all its ideological baggage, onto the natural world. But, for Digby, closely observing nonhuman creatures in the framework of oeconomy opened up the more radical possibility of a decentered system, in which each creature is a potential householder, each the center of its own oeconomy of nature.

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

Situating Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood in the changing racial geographies of post-World War II Atlanta, this essay argues that Hazel Motes's religious journey toward embracing Jesus as his Savior allegorizes a recuperative fantasy of the white Southern subject's journey from Jim Crowto white flight. Through this journey, Wise Blood offers an astute vision of the racial struggles over Atlanta, out of which neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, we might reconsider O'Connor as a central participant in the aesthetic and political struggles over the making of postwar urban space and politics.

Caroline Levine's Forms has been received as a prototype and a manifesto, a sign of the new formalist times in American literary studies. In the cover endorsements for the hardbound edition, Amanda Claybaugh calls Forms a “book of a generation,” Bruce Robbins “a big, brilliant, necessary book”—large claims for a text of 150 pages. Levine's treatise promises no less than “a way to understand the relations among forms—forms aesthetic and social, spatial and temporal, ancient and modern, major and minor, like and unlike, punitive and narrative, material and metrical” (23). Levine claims to provide “a reading practice that does not fit any familiar formalism,” a practice that instead “draws from all” formalisms (21).

Why did it take so long to start writing the history of close reading? For the best part of a century, close reading has grounded literary studies in the university, structuring assessment, teaching, employment, and publication. A basic proficiency in close reading has long been a professional obligation for faculty members and a course requirement for students. It makes sense, then, that Caroline Levine's Forms begins with a description of our method in action. A reader is settling down to work with a copy of Jane Eyre. She has a lengthy education behind her and a wealth of interpretive techniques for the book in front of her. Still, one thing is certain: our critic will broach the forms of the novel by drawing from “close reading methods” while using “historical research methods to analyze sociopolitical experience.” “But,” Caroline Levine asks, “would our critic be right to distinguish between the formal and the social?” (1).

Caroline Levine's Forms is a study of form as much as a sociology of forms—a tracking of the many ways that they relate to one another or are conjoined in creative works. While offering an extended meditation on the formal categories of whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network as they are manifest in such works, the book organizes this meditation under the separate category of collision. Other terms are substituted for it—overlap, encounter, interaction—but the metaphoric intent remains the same. If the book seeks to sharpen our understanding of four major forms as universal elements of texts and social experience, its other interest is in honing our awareness of the complex ways these forms collide within and through narrative. his interest spurs Levine to look to sociological theory for examples of how to think about this complexity, a tradition that dates back at least to the time when György Lukács was writing under the influence of Georg Simmel, around 1910. Here I will show how her conversation with sociology follows yet another familiar path: the literary critic's borrowing of conclusions or concepts from sociologists while eschewing the methods and theoretical models through which these conclusions or concepts are arrived at and understood. In particular, I consider the consequences of drawing on sociological thinking to make general claims about complex relations while excluding some of the methods by which generalizability is established and problematized in the social sciences. This exclusion marks a fundamental disciplinary divide that sociologically inclined literary critics continue, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of perceived necessity, to preserve.

What kind of action is literary criticism? In literary criticism: a concise political history, Joseph North tells us up front: it's political action. His history “is explicitly motivated by present concerns: one has something like a goal, and something like a plan for reaching it,” and his goal is to persuade “readers on the radical left” that there is something at stake for them in “an extended discussion of matters literary, aesthetic, and methodological” (viii, ix, x). Or, rather, his goal is to persuade both readers on the left and “readers within and around academic literary studies” that their interests align: that the “materialist account of the aesthetic” at the root of close reading is “properly understood as part of a longer history of resistance to the economic, political, and cultural systems that prevent us from cultivating deeper modes of life” (x).

About six years ago I was having lunch with a colleague who ended our conversation by announcing that she was headed over to a symposium on Lucretius and modernity. “You don't sound too enthusiastic,” I said. “Well,” she sighed, “it's the new good materialism, right?”

whoosh, hum. Imagine that sound, like an air vent cycling on. It circulates fresh air, the fresh air of poems that breathe into our lungs, whether we are standing in the Titian Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or reading the poems on a porch, looking out on a summer day. You will not find a description of that sound in the pages of Susan Howe's book Debths, only the phrase “Titian Air Vent.” Its rush of phonemes energizes the whole. he verbal rhythms and the visual patterns respond to its acoustic energy, pulsating across the different parts of the book, creating not so much a hierarchy of theories or subtexts as an interlocking and interwoven set of patterns that spread out on every page—in irregular or fragmentary form, in neat prose paragraphs, and in blocks of verse. In Debths, where so much depends on sound orchestration, verbal transformations, and visual arrangements, the networks connecting sight and sound are always being tightened, loosened, playfully intensified. Whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. These are Caroline Levine's terms, here embedded in my account of Debths. What might a book like Howe's, drawing on many aesthetic modes but built on the foundation of poetry, ask of Levine's Forms, a remarkable theoretical intervention whose many examples are nearly all narrative?

Recently, some literary critics have proposed that we might relate to texts in a different way than we're used to. Instead of plunging into critique, plumbing a text's depths, or coolly analyzing its symptoms, instead of “digging down and standing back,” as Rita Felski puts it, critics might adopt a less skeptical, less paranoid— less critical—stance. We might attend to a text's surfaces, in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's terms. We might get “close but not deep,” as Heather Love suggests. We might practice a new formalism, neither naive nor nostalgic but keyed to the aesthetic and the political.

It is such an honor to have Forms chosen for a special feature in PMLA, and I am grateful for the time and energy these scholars put into their thoughtful responses. Taken together, these contributions point to three core questions that divide us in the field today: What is politics? How should we understand agency? And what is the value and purpose of literature and literary studies?

George Moses Horton (1797?-1883?) is one of three African Americans known to have published poetry while enslaved in colonial north America or the United States. The recently discovered holograph manuscript of “Individual Influence” is the only available evidence that Horton also wrote short essays. Written in 1855 or 1856 and published here for the first time, “Individual Influence” provides a new perspective on Horton's writing process, his strategic affiliations in Chapel Hill, and his changing ideas about the relative efficacy of political and divine influence. More generally, the essay expands the available archive of writing by enslaved African Americans.