“The fate of reading,” a heavy phrase for which I bear some responsibility, suggests at least a subprophetic talent for anticipating future developments. When things get out of hand, when they seem to speed up, it is tempting to master by very large claims one's panic at being left behind, at becoming obsolete. In literary criticism too, someone redraws the map each year, but new movements quickly become as obsolete as those they displaced.

Terence remarked that books have their fates. Many are one day in fashion, the next day discarded. A quick look at the remainder tables at Barnes and Noble or at Chicago's Powell's reflects last week's or last month's reading. The fate of these books—our books—is clear. Books have their fates, but so do their authors and their readers, and it is the fates of those authors and readers that I want to speak of. Ours seems to be a time of transition, and this transition has created much fear and anxiety within our ranks. We see the possibility that younger colleagues will be displaced, tossed away much like the books on the remainder table. Or if they do find work, they will be employed marginally—employed part-time, underpaid, and exploited. This fear has had both personal and political repercussions over the past year for many of us. Yet we are a profession that reads, and the act of reading is an optimistic one, especially in the cold, dark night of the soul.

Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cocking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.

In focusing the novel Beloved on Sethe's forced infanticide, Toni Morrison places social and familial trauma at the center of American discourses on race. This emphasis opposes two forms of the denial of trauma that have characterized American politics since the late 1960s—neoconservative denial of the continuing effects of institutional racism and the New Left and black-nationalist denial of violence within African American communities. Beloved invokes an essentially liberal position of the sort that culminated and largely ended in the Moynihan report of 1965. But Morrison corrects the errors of this form of liberalism by insisting on the agency and autonomy of African American culture and on the positive roles of women.

Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, like Sylvia Plath's, dramatizes issues of primary psychological and sexual experience, issues that many critics have taken to be purely biographical. The openly apostrophic character of Tsvetaeva's writing has generated critical judgments about her character. Tsvetaeva's address, in both her lyrics and her letters, is embarrassing—not, as Jonathan Culler maintains, because apostrophe never fulfills its claims but, as Barbara Johnson argues, because it is a naked expression of need. Johnson's Lacanian conception of apostrophe as the child's demand illuminates Tsvetaeva's writing and helps to explain why Tsvetaeva has been charged with being a bad mother. However, Tsvetaeva's practice suggests that far from being contradictory impulses, demanding and giving can hardly be distinguished—a confusion that is reflected in the ambivalent responses her work has inspired.

In his Narrative (1845), Frederick Douglass constructs a self based on conversion rhetoric and binary logic. In the greatly expanded My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he complicates this textual self by both imitating and criticizing tropes conventionally used in the slavery debate, such as metaphors related to animals, Christianity, and manhood. Emphasizing the constructed nature of mimesis and metaphor, Douglass demonstrates his ability to escape the bondage of reductionist language even as he claims the power associated with linguistic mastery. This revision of self emerges from his experience of northern racism, manifested in his limited role in William Lloyd Garrison's organization. Douglass's renunciation of Garrisonian dogma and his entry into political action—including his striking textual reinterpretation of the United States Constitution—coincide with the stylistically “modernist” self of the second autobiography.

Cleanness, an alliterative Middle English poem attributed to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, contains a graphic account of the destruction of Sodom. Elaborating the theme of cleanness, the poet advocates not only sexual purity but also right conduct and respect for God's will. Exhortations to clean behavior are conventional; less expected are the poem's bold censure of “unclean” sexual acts, especially sodomy, and insistence that the clergy maintain vigilant surveillance of sexual wrongdoing. A poem with a salacious cast, Cleanness takes unusual risks in describing sodomy while denouncing it. Using Foucault's “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses,” I analyze Cleanness in relation to contemporary manuals of confession, which avoid mentioning sodomy for fear that the word might encourage the act. The poem's description of Sodom concludes with a construction of the feminine that serves as a corrective to the sins of male lust.