Literary critics have long imagined that T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920) shaped the canon and methods of countless twentieth-century classrooms. This essay turns instead to the classroom that made The Sacred Wood: the Modern English Literature extension school tutorial that Eliot taught to working-class adults between 1916 and 1919. Contextualizing Eliot's tutorial within the extension school movement shows how the ethos and practices of the Workers' Educational Association shaped his teaching. Over the course of three years, Eliot and his students reimagined canonical literature as writing by working poets for working people—a model of literary history that fully informed his canon reformation in The Sacred Wood. This example demonstrates how attention to teaching changes the history of English literary study. It further reveals how all kinds of institutions, not just elite universities, have shaped the discipline's methods and canons.

Recent discussions of form have argued that literary forms exist whether or not we pay attention to them. However, formalist criticism often begins with close reading. This essay uses medieval astronomy to consider the relation between form and perception. Chaucer's short poem The Complaint of Mars (c. 1385) presents a conjunction between the planets Mars and Venus as if it were a love affair. his celestial arrangement, wherein two planets seem to move toward each other before parting, reflects the way that celestial motion seems to an observer within a brief period of time. The arrangement disappears when integrated into a fuller account of the regular motion of the planets. Mars generates a similar excess in its literary language. Impressions of form that emerge in the process of reading dissolve against the background of larger, more stable forms when the poem is seen as a whole. These perceived, illusory forms reveal an interdependency between certain kinds of form and the time of reading.

Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.

Alan Bewell identifies a newly globalized, consumerist nature in the Romantic period, one aspect of a larger context in which Michel Foucault observed the “dawn of biopolitics.” This historical context, along with Erasmus Darwin's best-selling poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), is brought to bear here on William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion and on traditional readings of it that manifest nostalgia for an idealized past, a past predating enclosure's separation of population and environment, of human being and nature. Correcting the prevalent misidentification of the marigold that Oothoon plucks in Visions, my reading newly envisions an Oothoon whose relation to the life-forms around her replicates the modes of domination and exploitation inherent in capitalist ideology. What have seemed to be anomalies in Oothoon, her curious connections to Bromion and her offer to procure girls for Theotormon, instead reflect central character traits. In the end, a reaccounting of the historicity of Blake's poetic text yields a heroine and a reading population struggling to view themselves as at the center of a reflexive system that governs and exploits the mutual relations of natural and social surroundings but that also is governed and exploited by the same biopolitical apparatus.

Walter Pater's writings advance an affective historicism: an embodied experience of the past that Pater conceived in dialogue with Victorian neuroscience. Pater theorized art's freedom from the present by drawing on insights into reaction time, the subject of influential scientific studies in nineteenth-century culture. His slow-moving prose lifts readers out of the now, while simultaneously binding them to material realities. These tendencies fueled charges of sexual deviance against The Renaissance (1873) insofar as medical and religious writers understood belated reactions as a symptom of effeminate ennui. But in Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater reinscribes religious sentiments in terms of postponement. Its hero's sensory education, set in late classical culture, aligns the feeling of postponement with nascent doctrines of resurrection and temporal returns. After elaborating this account, the essay revises Georg Lukács's observations on weak secular heroes, extending queer scholarship to show how, through the feltness of the past, Pater's hero learns to resist incorporation into modern social forms.

Rereading Eugène Ionesco's postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. his new approach to a central text of the theater of the absurd invites us to reexamine the politics of language and language learning in wartime and postwar France.

It has already become a critical commonplace to begin a discussion of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) by invoking its powerful opening declaration:

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.

Viet thanh nguyen always insists that he is a refugee, not an immigrant, and that his novel the sympathizer is a war novel rather than an immigrant story (“Viet Thanh Nguyen”). In an era when the refugee has become the epicenter of debates about extreme nationalism and closed borders, the distinction between refugee and immigrant demands further parsing. Nguyen states the difference clearly when he contrasts the refugee, rendered stateless and vulnerable by persecution or catastrophe, to the immigrant, whose mobility reaffirms existing narratives of bounded territories. “Immigrant studies,” he writes, “affirms the nation-states the immigrant comes from and settles into; refugee studies brings into question the viability of the nation- state” (“Refugee Memories” 930).

Among the numerous accolades and awards garnered by viet thanh nguyen's debut novel, the sympathizer (2015), the one receiving the least attention from academic critics will probably be the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. After all, The Sympathizer boasts aesthetic achievements that far exceed the generic confines of a conventional mystery novel. Also, even in the age of cultural studies, when the divide between the popular and the elite is supposed to have all but disappeared, literary scholars, if they are honest with themselves, still hang on to the notion that there is a qualitative difference, or a hierarchy, separating literary fiction from crime fiction, the highbrow from the lowbrow. It may be true that we no longer live at a time when an eminent critic like Edmund Wilson would attack mystery novels by asserting, as he did in 1945, partly in response to Agatha Christie's popular mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that “with so many fine books to read …; there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish” (qtd. in Bradford 117). And there is more than half a century separating us from the era when Ross Macdonald, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the mystery genre as well as a trained literary scholar, lamented in his 1954 lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he had received a doctoral degree in English, that “[t]hough it is one of the dominant literary forms of our age, the mystery has received very little study” (11). Even after Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida enshrined Edgar Allan Poe's detective short story “The Purloined Letter” as a darling of poststructuralist analysis, most literary scholars worth their salt would continue to regard crime fiction as a subpar genre, something that, as Macdonald said, is reserved for their leisure hours, akin to crossword puzzles in a newspaper (11). Or, as Wilson put it, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” (qtd. in Bradford 117).

Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam” (29). What quickly becomes evident is that the plot (and perhaps the point) is the narration. In an extraordinary formalist feat (or coincidence), the narrative illustrates the materialist dialectic as proposed by Marx and Engels (122-38). The narrator's confession, which frames the novel, becomes linked to his material reality in an extreme and vivid form when the narrator is imprisoned and consequently generates the narrative from the knowledge that his bruised body allows his mind to piece together. He incarnates, in his slippery and changeable identity, the essence of social reality: dynamism. This dynamism, as the subject (and hope) of Marx and Engels's theorization, illustrates through Nguyen's vertiginous plot the Marxian dialectic. The dialectic holds that opposites—as Hegel pointed out—inhere in one another and that the process of change occurs through transformation of quantity to quality. It also shows, dramatically, how the law of the negation of negation operates. These aspects of the dialectic are cleverly developed through a process that implicates the reader and is nothing short of brilliant, recalling the poem that opens Charles Baudelaire's collection Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), at the end of which the poet addresses his reader as an “[h]ypocrite” (“hypocrite”) while also resembling him and being his “frère” (“brother”). Although Nguyen's narrator does not reach out to the reader in this type of direct address, he does establish complicity with the reader through the use of metaphor and revelations in the plot.

The rise of an interethnic imagination in recent american literature has been remaking what we think of as ethnic fiction into interethnic fiction. While memory, history, and tradition continue as shaping forces in American letters, an urge toward encounter with others is vividly reworking fictional structures, plots, casts of characters, and uses of language, as well as social visions, literary ambitions, and currents of intertextual influence. In some cases, the mind of a protagonist or narrator, indeed the very mind of a text, comes to seem the site of a momentous encounter of peoples, a living human nexus (Rody). Such is the case in the fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which the interethnic impulse generates a remarkable pronominal drama, a performance that oscillates between a narratorial “I” and a “we” to negotiate—across the pain and struggle of war, dislocation, and immigrant Americanization and across disparate political and literary allegiances—a Vietnamese American voice.

Viet thanh nguyen's recent successes might appear to have come out of nowhere. before the sympathizer won the pulitzer prize and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was long-listed for the National Book Award, and before he was named a MacArthur Fellow, Nguyen was another hardworking academic, laboring away in a field that no one outside it knew much about. For those who labored alongside him in the same field, the story looks different. When many of us were finishing graduate school and looking for our first teaching jobs, there was a joke going around that all the applicants on the market that year were waiting to find out what Nguyen would do. He had gotten all the job offers in the field, and the other top contenders were hanging out on the waiting list. His irst book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), a study of how the idea of resistance circulates in critical discussions of Asian American literature, landed with a splash, becoming one of those works other scholars had to be familiar with. What made it stand out was his insistence that we not idealize resistance. If the standard story that scholars liked to tell was that Asian American literature adopted a radical posture when it came to race, seeking to critique racism and to conjure alternative social possibilities, Nguyen pointed out that the story was incomplete. Asian Americans, including creative writers, are as heterogeneous ideology-wise as they are heterogeneous in every other way.

Although the united states lost the vietnam war on the battlefield, it won the war on two long-term fronts: economic ideology and cultural memory. A mere eleven years after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnamese government officially transitioned from a ration economy to a market-socialist one. This perestroika resulted in capitalist development, more akin to what the United States had propagated when it entered the war to prevent the cascading growth of communism throughout Asia. The United States also triumphed in terms of memory, dominating narratives of the war through the global influence of its culture industries.

Reviews of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) regularly cite the vietnamese-french-american protagonist's self-characterization: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). A less-cited version of the same characterization appears later in the novel: “I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—” (325). Nguyen's unnamed narrator, a Northern Vietnamese spy with Southern sympathies, has exploited, betrayed, and even murdered his own. If the above statements are any indication, this Cold War history of slippery allegiances takes an existential toll. But the second statement adds a layer of intrigue. With rhyme, anaphora, and considerable theatrical aplomb, it transmutes ethnic duplicity into literary figuration and casts the narrator as another murderer with a fancy prose style. Murder and style, though, are not Nguyen's only connection to Vladimir Nabokov, whom Mark McGurl takes as iconic of the “codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of … ‘metafiction’” (9). Like Lolita and much of Nabokov's other fiction, The Sympathizer and many of Nguyen's writings hold up that special mirror of “modernist reflexivity.” For Nguyen, however, the chance to wield this mirror comes with the added responsibility of being a Vietnamese American author writing about Vietnamese America. Hence, if Nabokov's iction delivered “an elaborately performative ‘I am’” that enabled his “programmatic self-establishment” (10), Nguyen's equally performative “I am” instantiates not only an authorial program but also a political program of ethnic representation.

As someone who has spent most of his career writing about others, i find it odd to see myself, or what passes for me, being written about by others, especially academics, the people with whom I am most familiar. Who is this “Viet Thanh Nguyen” that they are discussing? Is he the one whose name appears as such on the cover of the Vietnamese translation of his short story collection, The Refugees, instead of as Nguyên Thanh Vie t, his Vietnamese name? Has “Viet Thanh Nguyen” disabled, in himself, the authenticity that most Vietnamese people hold dear and that he has been reminded of constantly throughout his life, symbolized in his name and his mother tongue? More important and urgent to him, is “Viet Thanh Nguyen,” in being discussed in such a manner, already dead?