This article identifies a major contradiction in Jürgen Habermas's theory of the emergent public sphere. In his account, Habermas gives pride of place to Swift and his fellow Tory satirists. Their assault on the Whig oligarchy, he suggests, is emblematic of public-sphere debate—even though Swift and Company are also the public sphere's fiercest critics. This contradiction is not simply Habermas's; it is the Tories' own. The defining challenge facing the Tory satirists is to conduct a critique of the public sphere—that is, a critique of critique itself—from within that sphere's institutions. We might best understand such satire, then, as a kind of publishing that is not public, a genre that circulates freely in the print marketplace while renouncing the standards of public rationality. Tory satire will bestow this project on the category of literature that emerges later in the century—the project of a public textuality that operates outside the public sphere.

Enlightenment intellectuals viewed the moral cultivation of the individual through aesthetic pleasure to be a crucial means for regulating social relations in bourgeois civil society. G. E. Lessing's drama criticism and plays reveal how important reshaping women's social identity was to the definition of morally productive aesthetic pleasure in the Enlightenment. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, this essay explores how and why the tension between aesthetic pleasure and morality that runs through Lessing's work centers on developing bourgeois norms of femininity and on their violation in French classical and epic dramas. The essay reveals how the gender-specific moral demands placed on cultural pleasure in Lessing's drama criticism helped lay the foundation for a cultural crisis in the late eighteenth century, as well as for a divided public sphere. Lessing's plays, however, offer a more complex vision of the audience's interests and needs and a more open vision of women's possible social roles.

“Flash,” the slang of the criminal and boxing subcultures, illuminates Byron's Don Juan more than critics have recognized. This slang was devised to hide meanings from most listeners, and the flash language in the scene in which robbers attack Juan exemplifies discursive encryption in general. Such encryption is not always evidence that the speakers need to conceal their meaning, but it reminds us that in Byron's Britain many groups of people needed to communicate in secret, most often because of illegal activity, including illegal sexuality. The poet's most dangerous secret was sodomy, a capital crime, and the form of flash he had needed most was the coded language on which sodomites had to rely. The robbery scene bestows darker connotations on the polyglossia that runs throughout Don Juan: such diversity can reflect not just emancipation but also constraint.

Psoriasis is the structuring principle of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. The condition is also a metaphor for Updike's writings, in their concern with surface and their proliferation. Updike seeks to avoid self-revelation by making Self-Consciousness a memoir about the other. Displacing his psoriasis into a consideration of black and mixed-race skin. Updike reflects, in the mirror of the autobiography, his self with a letter to his half-black, half-white grandsons. In a series of pronominal substitutions, in which Updike's grandsons are transformed from addressees to narratees. Self-Consciousness discloses a racial unconscious. This racial unconscious is also that of American history. As slavery was founded on a Manichaeanism of black-white skin, desires for crossing the skin border were repressed. The unconscious dimension of racism survives in the stigmatization of differently marked skins. Reading the surface of Self-Consciousness as profound, this essay assigns Updike a novel place in a racially conscious American canon.

I have no way of knowing whether it was fate that has pushed me onto this dais but as various lucky coincidences have created this opportunity I may as well call it fate. Putting aside discussion of the existence or non-existence of God. I would like to say that despite my being an atheist I have always shown reverence for the unknowable.

A person cannot be God, certainly not replace God, and rule the world as a Superman; he will only succeed in creating more chaos and make a greater mess of the world. In the century after Nietzsche man-made disasters left the blackest records in the history of humankind. Supermen of all types called leader of the people, head of the nation and commander of the race did not baulk at resorting to various violent means in perpetrating crimes that in no way resemble the ravings of a very egotistic philosopher. However, I do not wish to waste this talk on literature by saying too much about politics and history, what I want to do is to use this opportunity to speak as one writer in the voice of an individual.

About halfway through the 1998 film shakespeare in love, a group of players and hired extras, under the critical eye of the theater owner Philip Henslowe, begins rehearsing a new play at the Rose. While Henslowe observes the process with a simultaneously proprietary and befuddled air, his financial backer, the apothecary Fennyman, comes to ask him about the play's progress. Suddenly Fennyman notices a tall, handsome figure bustling about, shouting both instructions and thanks. “Who is that?” the skeptical Fennyman asks. The movie audience knows that it is Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's version of Will Shakespeare, assembling the cast for his play. “Nobody,” replies Henslowe. “The author” (Norman and Stoppard 49-50).

Despite efforts among recent critical theorists to remove, banish, or even kill the author, the author remains at the center of general critical attention. It is commonplace now to understand that all texts produced by authors are not the products of individual creators. Rather, they are the result of any number of discourses that take place among the writer, the political and social environments in which the writing occurs, the aesthetic and economic pressures that encourage the process, the psychological and emotional state of the writer, and the reader who is expected to receive or consume the end product when it reaches print. Even if not intended for an audience or the publishing marketplace, a piece of writing cannot escape the numerous influences that produce it. All discourse is socially constructed.

We felt the first stirrings of collaborative desire fifteen years ago. since then, we have published one book (and some miscellaneous pieces) together and have finished another. They are very different, though related, books, and while producing them we have had different, though related, thoughts about our collaborative authorship. One thing that collaboration teaches you is that there is no last word on anything. Someone looking over your shoulder or over your draft is going to find a better word or cross out your word entirely.

A story of origins: We began to talk about writing a book together while trying to finish our dissertations. It was helpful to fantasize such a project—it presumed that the dissertations would get finished and that when they did, we would be alive and well and still writing. But the fantasy of collaboration addressed other anxieties, especially over the word original in the demand that the dissertation be a “significant and original contribution to scholarship.” Each of us knew how much her work depended on the scholarship she had read and how much the shape of her work had been affected by conversations, in reading groups or over coffee, with other graduate students, professors, friends, bartenders. Worse, in our theory classes we were being rewarded for pontificating about the demise of the very author we were working so hard to become. The notion of solitary authorship on which intellectual authority depends seemed a lie. At least in our cases. We certainly felt like frauds, but then as women in programs in which the students and professors were no longer exclusively but still predominantly male, we were perhaps predisposed to feeling like frauds. To write a book that had two signatures, we mused, would formally acknowledge that authors depend on other authors and would as well trouble the notions of original and originary. Intellectual honesty seemed to require the candid dismantling of the solitary author, of the original and originary genius.

To say that globalization is ubiquitous is stating the obvious. for globalization has become a household word in boardrooms, local and international institutions, the academy, and the media. It also shapes the everyday life of all but the most disadvantaged communities. Besides having the world at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day, courtesy of CNN and other news channels, I am connected by a mere click of the mouse, even in South Africa, to colleagues across vast geographic distances locally and abroad. The supermarket down the road in my Johannesburg suburb offers me the choice of Oprah's Book Club, the “taste of Provence,” and African, Indian, Chinese, English, and a host of other flavors, not to mention Coca-Cola, because I live in a society made up of different cultures and ethnicities. Without having to move even a mile, I feel like M. de Vogüé, of whom Harper's Magazine said in 1892, “[He] loves travel; he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas; his interests are as wide as the universe; his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be ‘global’” (“Global”).