When Hermann Hesse received the Nobel prize in 1946 he was virtually unknown in this country. The critics who reluctantly turned to the new celebrity found his works threadbare and derivative. Today there exists a veritable Hesse cult in the United States among the dissident and the young. The affinities between the German author and the disaffected youth in America are many. They share similar attitudes toward adolescence, sex, drugs, the Orient, the nation, the state, the church, the military, the schools, and authority in general. A glance at the rebellious students in Hesse's native country, however, reveals that he is held by them in the same low esteem they reserve for the entire Romantic tradition of inwardness of which they regard National Socialism as an ultimate version or perversion. This contradiction of values held by sociologically and ideologically comparable groups puts the lack of a viable theory of literary evaluation into sharp focus. While traditional literary scholarship is reticent on the subject, its acts of criticism and historiography are replete with unreflected value judgments. A theory of evaluation based on the careful analysis of an author's reception, such as of Hesse's posthumous fortunes, could combat prejudice in scholarship and further the understanding of the historical dimension in the literary work.

From the cognitive statement that it was raining, we infer that the street got wet. In fiction, we cannot infer that the street got wet (nor that it did not): we cannot make the implicit explicit by applying causal laws. Historical events are implicitly posited in relation to the here and now. Fictional events are not. Thus, the implicit meaning of tenses changes when we turn from history to fiction. In both cases (causality and temporality), a gain in esthetic resonance can correspond to a loss in cognitive reference.

Gottfried von Strassburg, in his Tristan, substitutes for a description of the knighting of his hero a digression on certain contemporary authors, both of romances and lyrics. This digression has often been called “Gottfried's literary criticism,” but in fact it is a discussion of the various means of literary expression which were available to him for telling the story of a hero whom he believed to be unique and hence set apart from the knights of courtly romance. Gottfried examines both the visual (romance) and aural (lyric) types in a very specific order and finds both wanting, although he sees more potential in musical than in purely verbal forms of poetry. He decide? that the romance, in spite of its deficiencies, is the best available type but only with the proviso that the reader look beneath the surface and not be deceived by the form into thinking that Tristan was a “normal” courtly hero. The literary digression thus proves to be no digression but an integral part of the work, since Gottfried regards it as impossible to think of any story without considering the means by which it is told.

Novalis' fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais displays in its composition a degree of purpose and coherence with which it has never been credited. A close examination of the text reveals a carefully constructed schema that unites the seemingly disparate elements of speculation and poetry into a meaningful and uniform statement on the relationship between man and nature. In the first section, entitled “Der Lehrling,” Novalis defines the ego's binary direction into an outer realm and an inner realm as the dual approach to the reality of nature; he outlines these dialectically opposed paths according to a pattern of alternate juxtaposition that reflects their opposite trends while it allows, at the same time, for their fundamental unity by linking one alternative to the other. The initial object of Novalis' exposition in the second section, called “Die Natur,” is the range of man's power of knowledge; he employs its various aspects as points of perspective from which nature may be examined, a fact that becomes fully obvious only after the underlying pattern of composition has been recognized as one that follows Kant's systematization of the human intellect, in particular his system for the categories of understanding.

Despite the often praised realism of Rómulo Gallegos' major novel, some of its episodes are not very plausible, due not so much to an overriding allegorical symbolism as to still another narrative plane that has generally been neglected by criticism, that of folk mythology. Doña Bárbara is a legendary character introduced in a ritual style reminiscent of fairy tales. The entire novel is a retelling of a fairy tale, with Doña Bárbara as the evil sorceress, Marisela as the Sleeping Beauty, and Luzardo as Prince Charming. Doña Bárbara is called the “devourer of men,” an epithet that equates her with the flat grassland over which she reigns and identifies her as a type of nymph or siren who entices and destroys men. Inspired by both the European and American Indian legends, Gallegos endowed her with traits of European witches, as well as those typical of Indian shamans, especially nagualism. Thus, events hard to believe on the psychological plane of the narrative, such as the swift change in the character of the protagonist, appear logical on the mythical level, which is as important to the understanding of the novel as those of psychological realism and allegory. (In Spanish)

Numerous writings (especially by Morris W. Croll and George Williamson) have propounded the theory that a late sixteenth-century revival of Stoicism marked English thought and prose styles, replacing Cicero in popularity, that such Stoicism came to a climax in the period from about 1580 to 1630, and that Stoicism waned thereafter in the seventeenth century. The theory is disproved by the pattern of English publication of Stoic and neo-Stoic writers, and Cicero between 1530 and 1700. The important Stoic writers were more popular in the Restoration than before and little popular in the period from 1580 to 1630. Scholars of English literature have been misled by possible continental developments behind which England lagged and by insufficient exactness in understanding classical writers and thought. Seneca's style is said to be Asiatic rather than Attic, and Cicero is Stoic in such works as De Officiis. This one Ciceronian work was more popular in England than the total canon of Seneca. The evidence shows that an altogether new account is required for the history of neo-Stoicism in English thought and prose style, as well as of the development of English prose styles.

The five-act structure of Hamlet is modeled on the memento mori- timor mortis lyric as it is practiced in the English tradition from 1483 to 1600. Furthermore, the crucial fifth act opens with a set piece in the genre, taking as its point of departure Thomas Lord Vaux's “I Loathe That I Did Love.” But, as in other matters, Shakespeare's wide reading in the genre is evident in the set piece since it incorporates elements not found in Vaux's poem. Recognition of the eschatological concerns that are an inescapable part of the memento mori tradition helps us to see Hamlet's delays as an overwhelming concern for the plight of his soul.

Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes revives the ancient Greek notion that myth is the allegorical expression of natural philosophy. While Reynolds acknowledges the common Renaissance practice of moral and psychological al-legoresis, he insists that the truth-seeking exegete must read the ancient myths as “meere matter of Nature.” Most of the examples of allegoresis in Mythomystes reflect the interpretations of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the divine sense of the Narcissus commentary recalls the eschatology implied in some of Plato's myths. In method Reynolds' allegoreses are syncretic, like those of Philo and Origen, and etymological, like those of the Stoics. Involved in the syncretism is a sort of Euhemerism that ascribes Hebraic mortality to otherwise pagan gods. A spatial, rather than a temporal, typology is also part of Reynolds' method. The etymologies in Mythomystes resemble those in Cicero's De Natura Deorum. Though Reynolds' theory, practice, and method of allegoresis are ancient, his concern with knowledge of the secrets of nature, like Bacon's, is modern. However, Reynolds' instrument, mythological allegoresis, seeks to recover: Bacon's, induction, to discover.

Milton's references in the preface to Samson Agonistes and in The Reason of Church Government to the Book of Revelation as tragedy have great significance for his drama. His cited authority, David Pareus, and several other Protestant commentators identified the Book of Revelation as tragedy on the basis of form (the alternation of dramatic episodes and Choruses) and subject—the spiritual combat of the Elect with Antichrist and their torment and suffering at his hands throughout all time, reversed only at the end of history when they share Christ's Apocalyptic victory over him. Protestant exegates often linked the Samson story typologically with the Book of Revelation, presenting Samson as type of the suffering Elect and the exercise of Samson's vocation as Judge (deliverer of God's people and executor of the wrath of God upon His enemies) as type of the Elect judging the world with Christ at the last day. This context assists the interpretation of Milton's Samson, bringing into focus its treatment of Samson's judgeship. The Samson Apocalypse link also brings a new perspective to certain moot questions: the date of the play, the interpretation of Samson's character, the presence of contemporary political reference, the nature of the drama's tragic effect.

Recent criticism of John Gay's poetry has largely continued to slight its merit or to misread it. Trivia has been especially mishandled, the chief critical faults being the tendency on the part of some to take the poem too seriously and to overlook a number of aspects that reinforce its mock-georgic nature. Gay was completely aware of what he was doing at all times in Trivia, and it is only when one reads the poem closely, with Dryden's translation of Virgil in mind, that a great deal of what he was indeed doing is clearly revealed. Not only did Gay go to Dryden's Virgil for particular phrases: “certain signs” of the weather, the “spoils” of Russia's “bear,” “callow care,” and a number of others, but he also used single words in the unusual senses Dryden had already employed: “infest” to mean “attack,” “contagion” to mean “fire,” “laborious” to mean “undergoing trouble and hardship,” as well as others. There is a whole vocabulary, available in Dryden's Virgil, to which he could have helped himself, in addition to those borrowings that can be demonstrated. A number of passages in Trivia also take their point of departure from Dryden's Virgil. When one adds an occasional clear echo of the Bible or Milton, all intended to enhance the mock-dignity of his poem, there can be no doubt of Gay's poetic competence.

Hazlitt's early interest in painting and philosophy profoundly influenced his subsequent work as a literary critic. His view of abstraction as a process of individuation rather than generalization, developed between 1805 and 1812, was an improvement on the nominalist and conceptualist theories of the eighteenth century and anticipated the findings of modern philosophy. In its development, Hazlitt was clearly influenced by his training as a painter and his general conclusions find support in the writings of contemporary and nearcontemporary painters and art critics. His theory has important esthetic implications and provides a philosophical and psychological rationale for the new critical movement toward particularity in the evolution of which painting was a major influence. Since it was within this tradition that Hazlitt worked, it also determined the nature of his response to literature and the manner of its expression in his criticism. The influence of painting on his critical terminology suggests caution in accepting the view that music replaced painting as the dominant analogy in the literary criticism of the early nineteenth century.

Although a collection of stories, The Piazza Tales achieve unity by revealing Herman Melville's pessimistic state of mind during the early 1850's. Three persistent concerns of the author run through the six stories that make up the book: the difficulty of human perception, artistic and otherwise; the dangers of human isolation; and the catastrophic effects of human servitude.

Tortilla Flat (1935) was John Steinbeck's first artistic and commercial success. The novel's promise was dimmed by Steinbeck's evident inability to understand his real success. His continued insistence that a parallel to Malory's Morte d'Arthur does control the novel, and his reliance in later work on predetermined, external, and arbitrary ordering devices, make it sadly apparent that he did not learn much about structural harmony from Tortilla Flat. For, in fact, the novel is loose and episodic, and a sophisticated comic irony is used to locate socioeconomic and Catholic values in a colorful paisano community. In short, there is very little of Morte d'Arthur in Tortilla Flat. Moreover, the somewhat ugly commercial success of Tortilla Flat turned Steinbeck against the novel as it really is. Apparently he felt that he had structured the novel rigidly; that this was a good way to achieve structure; that only the stupidity of a mass audience obscured the issue. All of this appears to have had grave consequences in a good deal of Steinbeck's later work. The entire matter illuminates the failure of a greatly talented writer to develop into a major novelist—a failure that has puzzled many Steinbeck readers.

There is a strong parallel, in form and in theoretical basis, between the writing of Gertrude Stein and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The power and depth of the film demonstrate that Gertrude Stein's theory failed only because it was applied in the wrong medium; Robbe-Grillet's combination of images with words brings out its full artistic possibilities. That his work should so re-create hers, bringing out its latent value, is more fortuitous than a matter of conscious influence, but both artists spring to some extent from common modern tendencies in art and literature. Robbe-Grillet's critical essays share many conceptions with Gertrude Stein's, and would have led to an art as impenetrable as hers if he had followed his own prescriptions closely, but his repetition of word patterns accompanied by image patterns gives Marienbad that which Tender Buttons and A Novel of Thank You lack. Marienbad rises to the level of metaphor, and gives a dramatic meaning to the art without time, without plot, without character, and without outcome, that Gertrude Stein put forward in the early twentieth century.

Vauvenargues describes both the social and philosophical world as a battleground of conflicting interests, thereby extending the premises of Classical ego psychology into the Enlightenment. His heroes, political and philosophical, may be seen as seeking a new kind of peace in their triumph over men and systems metaphorically portrayed as rigid, blind, and imprisoned within their own egocentricity. His ideal philosopher reconciles all conflicting views in an overarching system of truth. Ultimately this system rests not so much on principles of logic as on the personal qualities of the thinker, his “pénétration,” “profondeur,” and “étendue d'esprit,” his ability to transcend the self. In the partially Spinozistic, partially rococo, and eminently conciliatory vision vouchsafed the true philosopher, variety submits to organic order, concepts and people maintain their autonomy, yet grow interrelated. Apparent contradictions vanish in the fullness of truth. Vauvenargues's early works suffer from his inability to articulate this vision within conventional, discursive forms. In the posthumous Caractères, he invents a new technique, the “définition,” which strikingly parallels the idiom of contemporary fictional realism. By capturing visible phenomena and exposing their paradoxically contrasting inner mechanisms, Vauvenargues reveals both the method and the nature of the truth he repeatedly struggled to express.

(On 1 June 1970, Fredson Bowers received a D.Litt. from Brown Univ. The following excerpts from his commencement address to the graduate school explore some of the central issues now facing the MLA. The parts of the speech omitted deal with the history and present state of the movement for a Doctor of Arts degree.)