Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator.

I attended my first MLA convention in Chicago, in 1973. A frugal graduate student, I stayed at a nearby YMCA but huddled in the evenings with a friend from graduate school in the Palmer House lobby where we shared, surreptitiously, a flask of bourbon and laments about the awful job market. I could never have imagined that forty-five years later I would be delivering the presidential address. During the years since that Chicago convention, I have worked with the executive director Phyllis Franklin, who invited me and a few others to think with her about how the MLA might accommodate what we then called composition and rhetoric. I have worked with Rosemary Feal, who became the executive director as I joined the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and who left the MLA shortly after persuading me to stand for election to the office of second vice president. In my participation on task forces, division committees, the Publications Committee, the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, the Executive Council, and most recently as an officer, I have been continually impressed by the talent, commitment, and resourcefulness of those who work for the MLA. I am grateful to belong to an association with such an excellent staff, and I want to offer special thanks to my friend Paula Krebs, whose first full year as executive director coincided with my term as president. Her keen intelligence, administrative skill, and fierce advocacy for our profession convince me that the MLA is in very good hands.

The postcritique debate tends to presuppose that reading suspiciously or restoratively is largely a matter of choosing to do so and that texts themselves do not incline us to read them one way or another. Drawing on works by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, this essay contests these presumptions. Both authors regarded distrust as a state of mind to which we are ineluctably condemned; only by reading artworks designed to allay our suspicion can we hope to be briefly relieved of it. Tolstoy's famous Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov's little-known variation on it, “Pozdnyshev's Address,” explore strategies for disarming readerly distrust. If these authors are right that suspicion is our existential condition rather than a freely chosen interpretive stance, the project of prescribing the ways that readers ought to relate to texts is unlikely to succeed—or cease. We might instead set ourselves the task of investigating how particular texts shape the ways they are read.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine discovers new forms of lyric subjectivity by rerouting the expressive lyric's investment in the singular self, recognized in well-established lines of American genealogy, into a sustained and historicizing attention to dispersed networks of black kinship. She does so in a revisionary allusion to Robert Lowell's Life Studies and thereby lays bare the fact that his landmark book, which she treats as a paradigm of the expressive lyric tradition, relies on the (usually unspoken) whiteness of its lyric subject for the force of its autobiographical disclosures. Rankine's Citizen thus not only helps us see confessional poetry—and the expressive lyric tradition for which it serves as apotheosis—in a radically new way but also develops an introspective lyric mode that remains alert, dispersed, and open to the political, social, and racialized formations that govern the lived experience of contemporary American life.

This essay, a reading of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), seeks to reconcile the promise of global environmental aesthetics with postcolonial theories of difference. While the Anthropocene is often framed as universal and unprecedented, Gordimer's ironic presentation of an earlier discourse—centered on resource limits and population bombs—demonstrates that certain themes have existed in the global environmental imagination for decades. Read alongside the history of South African conservation and Judith Butler's theory of precarity, he Conservationist develops an alternative green aesthetic, one that considers environmental problems to be produced by diverse and unequal social relations. Gordimer's dialectical response to apartheid-era conservation (an emphasis on utopianism and haunting) offers insight into South Africa's contemporary environmental politics and into ongoing debates in the environmental humanities about the value of the central analytic strategies of postcolonialism.

This essay examines Kenneth Lonergan's stunning and underviewed New York City film Margaret (2011), placing it in a larger corpus of post-9/11 artistic production while also drawing out its Victorian intertexts—most notably, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that gives the film its title. Margaret derives its organizing thematics and formal experiments with sound from the Victorian cultural trope of hyperesthesia: the drive to look beyond the self (the protagonist, the nation) and the answering anxiety that doing so would mean being overwhelmed by the frequency of human suffering. Margaret demonstrates the continued pull of Victorian aesthetics and politics of representation on contemporary literature and film and, I argue, the cost of this persistence. At once emphasizing and occluding the far-reaching and long-lasting violence of formal and informal empire, Margaret carefully attunes us to particular forms of suffering—but only by disattuning us to global catastrophe.

This essay investigates the personal check as it appears in two novels, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and James Weldon Johnson's he Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. In these novels, checks move money between a wealthy white individual and an African American; a close analysis of the check's form and function shows how Du Bois and Johnson revise mid-nineteenth-century connections among feeling, money, and social change by exploiting, rather than challenging, the abstraction of this financial form. The checks in Du Bois and Johnson present the logic of reparations. In doing so, the checks make a material difference in the lives of black beneficiaries, tying them to the flow of money made possible by finance capitalism, a flow from which most African Americans were excluded. At the same time, the check's figuration of the drawer's emotional motivations salvages the potential for progressive individual actions in those whose self-interest limits their willingness to act decisively for the benefit of others.

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) holds the dismal distinction of being the most important French Romantic you have never heard of. A child prodigy, Nodier was reading Montaigne and Plutarch, and writing fluently in French and Latin, by the age of ten. By twenty-five he had vandalized a guillotine, founded the ironically Freemasonesque antiJacobin society called the Philadelphes, published one of the irst French works of scholarship on Shakespeare, and served a month in prison for criticizing Napoleon in the poem “La Napoléone.” It was only then that he got serious, and in 1806 Les tristes was published, a collection of short stories, poems, dialogues, and essays that marked him as a disciple of the Romanticism of Goethe and Schiller and hinted at his future affinity for the visionary, fantastic mode of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

In November 1916, with the first world war in full swing, the Soldiers of the 82nd Territorial Infantry Regiment of the French Forces opened the latest issue of their monthly regimental magazine, Brise d'entonnoirs (“Breeze from Bombcraters”), to find a piece by the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Entitled “Curiosités du front” (“Curiosities from the Front”), it reinvents the everyday objects that cluttered the front lines: a shovel held up above the trench, for instance, becomes a dancing musical instrument as German bullets strike the shovel plate. This sense of humor was characteristic of the trench press, which existed to distract readers from the grim realities of warfare. Probably because it was thought to be so amusing or pertinent, Apollinaire's piece attracted some notice in its day. Several of its sections—“The Shovel,” “Trellis,” “The Bulletproof Shield”—found their way into other publications, at the front as well as in Paris, and some even made it onto the popular quotation pages of the official magazine of the French army, Bulletin des Armées de la République, of which an unsuspecting Apollinaire had written a year earlier, “Les pages consacrées aux citations sont merveilleuses” (“The pages dedicated to quotations are marvelous” [Letter to André Level]).

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.

Why comics? “All that it is Necessary to say … upon this subject, may be effected by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in comics, the comics will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.” That's not exactly what William Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, of course—he had “verse” where I have “comics” (112). Nor did Wordsworth say that the pleasure of seeing expressive, hand-drawn characters could produce

Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors of what we often now call symptomatic readings), and “personal registrations” or unfettered appreciation (597). While of course correlation is not causation, 1937 might mark an important fork in the subterranean lines in the United States, where the two trains of comics fandom and literary criticism begin to go in different directions, on trajectories that take them farther apart during and after World War II: comics toward the aesthetics of appreciation, and criticism to increasingly professionalized literary analysis. Critics today seem to be returning to this junction, asking how comics and criticism might reunite. Perhaps that convergence is happening now, through approaches variously known as surface reading (Best and Marcus), reparative reading (Sedgwick), close reading, postcritique (Felski, Limits), thin description (Love), or redescription (Latour)—each of which encourages professionalized critical appraisal without taking rolling stock into dead-end symptomatic tunnels. Perhaps it is through some other approach, one that may look like Hillary Chute's Why Comics?

At first glance, Hillary Chute's Why Comics? presents itself as a chronicle of the heroic deeds of a Pantheon of creative gods. Across ten chapters, Chute tracks the aesthetic achievements of more than twelve world-renowned comics artists whose innovations in sequential visual art represent a range of human experiences, from wartime violence to teenage sexuality to queer family history to living with cognitive and physical disability. In Chute's narrative, such luminaries as Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, and Marjane Satrapi rise up from the vast landscape of comics production as artists whose bodies of work testify to comics's aesthetic diversity and sophistication. These typically erudite cartoonists work at a distance from mainstream comics and produce adult-oriented, long-form graphic narratives considered aesthetic masterpieces. “Although comics of all kinds are flourishing in the twenty-first century,” Chute explains early on in Why Comics?, “there has been a dramatic uptick” in the kind of “auteurist comics” produced by these cartoonists (18), who relish, in Clowes's words, the way the medium allows them to “control absolutely everything and make it … exactly what you're seeing in your own head” (qtd. in Why? 18). For Chute, it is this “singular intimacy of one person's vision”—best displayed in comics produced by sophisticated adult cartoonists writing and drawing for other adults–that underscores that comics are also for grown-ups (18). By now, we all should know this, but we have not learned the lesson well enough (or perhaps some just refuse to listen).

Why Comics? is a celebration of all that has changed both in comics and for comics over the last generation, written by the person most qualified to host the party. Indeed, our being where we are today owes a good deal to Hillary Chute, who began her career writing some of the field's most intelligent and informative reviews and interviews and went on to write two of the most influential books in comics studies, Graphic Women (2010) and Disaster Drawn (2016). I first met Chute when she was working on her dissertation, and although the decade between us placed me in the role of outside reader on her committee, she was already leading the way forward for all of us in the field.

Why question Why Comics? in many ways this book does everything: It provides an insider's overview of the history and context of comics, deftly introduces some of the leading current creators and creations, and adopts a thematic approach that allows each chapter to raise broader societal questions. It is erudite, well-illustrated, clearly expressed, and fun. End of story? If it were, this series of essays would be the PMLA equivalent of a Chris Ware comic book in which nothing happens.

The inaugural conference of the comics studies society, held in August 2018 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, was the most professionally diverse conference I've ever attended. There were presentations by tenure-track faculty members, non-tenuretrack faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars; by people from four-year institutions, community colleges, and high schools; by literary critics, art historians, media scholars, research librarians, and working artists. Everywhere one felt the energy of a new field of study coming together, of institutionalization in a good sense: the gathering of past work to create a critical canon, the debate over methodology, the effort to establish priorities for moving forward as a discipline. he emotional palette that this event produced, at least for me, was an odd combination of excitement and melancholy—melancholy because, at a moment when traditional humanistic disciplines are having their support cut, it's hard to imagine a new ield getting anything like the resources or hires it needs to survive, let alone thrive.