In the consolidation of the nation-state, literature has served as one of the most prominent “representational machineries” of national culture (Prasad 72), but claiming that all or most Third World fiction writers articulate the national defeats the most important attribute of literature—its political and aesthetic autonomy. The articles in this cluster all discuss authors who, in Orhan Pamuk's term, do not feel “at home” at home. These authors' literary and philosophical expressions of alienation illustrate the necessity to challenge the universalisms of global literary studies, particularly the way Third World literatures are nationalized. Global literary studies has categorized Third World literatures as enunciations of the national, reserving the moment of emancipatory critique too easily for diasporic, exilic, immigrant, or postcolonial literatures produced in the West, with the underlying assumption that exposure to the West, through a Western language, literary tradition, or audience, is a precondition for critique. Concomitantly, latent in this “modernist conception of exile as a privileged state of consciousness” is the belief that a critique of the national is only possible outside the Third World nation-state (Giles 31). Jale Parla's and Nergis Ertürk's articles illustrate that many of the writers who felt not at home were indeed at home and in Turkey did not leave home to voice their critique of or reluctance to participate in linguistic engineering.

With little Ottoman and less French, the tragicomic hero of an early Turkish novel, Araba Sevdasι (1896; “The Carriage Affair”), finds himself at a semantic impasse before a line in a French poem that reads, “[K]elime şeyi resmetmeye borçlu ise” (“[I]f the word could represent the thing”). Frustrated, he throws the poem away, grumbling, “[T]ous les poètes sont fous” (“[A]ll poets are fools”). This defiant gesture marks the beginning of the linguistic issue the Turkish novelists confronted during the first century of the Turkish novel (1870–1970). The reformist objective of these novelists was the employment of a vernacular style to appeal to the readership of an emerging print culture. The subsequent nationalist attempts to simplify the Turkish language led, in Geoffrey Lewis's words, to the “catastrophic success” of the “language revolution” of the republican era and had dire consequences for the development of the novel in Turkey.

A comparative study of the politics and theory of language in the writings of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpιnar and Walter Benjamin, this article suggests that a rethinking of the discursive commensurability and incommensurability of modern Turkish language and literature with western European representational practices has crucial implications for critical comparative methodology today. I leave behind conventional accounts based on models of European literary influence, emphasizing instead changes in writing practices that accompanied the development of modern literature and comparatism. Of particular significance for my analysis are the intensification of print culture and language reforms. I examine Tanpιnar's writings as a special archive registering the problematic of representational writing, while exploring their continuities and discontinuities with Benjamin's work. I configure an alternative critical comparative framework, troubling the uneven epistemological categories of modernity through which “East” and “West” continue to structure even the transnationalist critical discourse that interrogates them.

In an examination of the varied responses to the Muslim Orient by the eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder, I try to locate the multiple identities he displayed in his treatment of Turks, the Koran, Arab thought, and the doctrines of Islam. What emerges is a series of different voices, employing different registers of language: a Christian response to Islam as a rival revelation-based monotheism (but, at the same time, a more sympathetic Protestant privileging of “Muhammadanism” as a belief system preferable to “papism”); a poetic register, in which “Muhammadans” move from spiritual ignorance to a status of aesthetic desirability; a philological response to the Muslim Orient, one whose emphasis on the Middle Eastern origins of European literature would assist Herder's project of the reprovincialization of Europe; and a nationalist vocabulary, one that would see the rise of Islam as a model for the emergence of Herder's German nation but that would also, paradoxically, express a Turcophobia that demonizes the Ottomans into the other of civilization.

Andrey Bely's novel Petersburg (one of the high points of Russian literary modernism and a rough analogue to James Joyce's Ulysses) repeatedly claims that parent and child, being of the same flesh and blood, share an ambivalent identity. At the same time, because the novel opens by invoking a major character's genealogical relation to Adam, the book implies that this kin identity is universal and can be applied to the entire human race. This essay analyzes the role of kinship metaphor in Petersburg, demonstrating that tropes of parent-child identity facilitate the novel's dizzying metaphoric conflation, that they form a kind of metafictional mirror in which the novel probes its own nature as a work of the imagination, and that Bely's theory and practice of metaphor touch on broader philosophical issues of figure and fictionality.

Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction.

This essay examines Thomas Mann's response to the “Jewish question” by focusing on a phase when he struggled to come to terms in his art with the repression of his homosexual desires and with his marriage to the daughter of assimilated Jews. Mann's attitude toward the Jews is primarily hostile in the controversial novella Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the Walsungs), in which he projects anti-Semitic stereotypes onto distorted images of his wife and new in-laws. In the novel Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness), Mann produces a more sympathetic portrait of his wife by giving her an ethnic background closely resembling his mother's. Mann's response to the Jewish question is linked to his tendency to think in racial categories; his ambivalence toward the Jews stems from his ambivalence toward himself as an artist with repressed homosexual desires and an admixture of foreign “blood.”

This essay looks at the American popular reception of modernist little magazines and of writers who were regularly published there, including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the 1920s, book reviewers, syndicated daily book columnists who reached millions, and celebrity columnists took notice of authors or books that were considered news. Experimental modernist writing was frequently discussed, even when it had appeared in obscure little magazines. Even editorials in major newspapers debated literary trends. This national conversation about modernist writing has been largely ignored by critics, although it dramatically affected the canonization of writers in this period. Examining the popular understanding of modernism rather than the ways modernists understood popular culture reveals that there was an intimate exchange between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were better known and, indeed, more popular than has been previously acknowledged.

The norms of art-cinema narration—evident in the work of such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut—reflect noetic processes and expectations engendered by a culture of the written word. Such norms are absent from Hindi popular films, which have been historically contoured by the psychodynamics of orally based thought and by devices and motifs common to oral storytelling. By funneling art-cinema narration's norms—already meticulously (and impartially) cataloged by David Bordwell—through the prism of orality and through the orally inflected characteristics of Hindi popular films and by conjointly engaging with literary theory concerned with issues of textuality, this essay develops a novel conceptual matrix for understanding the epistemic pressures that weigh on visual storytelling as both a spectatorial and a generative act.

The known biography of the early african american writer and lecturer Maria W. Stewart (1803–79) is as brief as it is fascinating. After the childhood loss of her parents, she married James W. Stewart, a Boston shipping agent, in 1826. The Stewarts had close ties with the black radical David Walker, whose fiery 1829 Appeal kindled fears of slave rebellion and was in its third edition when Walker died under suspicious circumstances in August 1830. After James Stewart's own untimely death, in December 1829, his executors swindled Maria Stewart out of her inheritance, and she turned to the church and to writing and lecturing. Revising Walker's combination of jeremiad and Enlightenment-influenced political argument to reflect her own sense of faith, racism and racial uplift, and gender politics, Stewart became one of the first American women to address “promiscuous” audiences. She published a series of probing meditations as well as a set of her lectures—texts still startling for their power and bluntness—in pamphlets and, later, as Productions of Mrs, Maria Stewart (1835).

The narrative turn, the study of the nature and power of story and storytelling, continues to be one of the most significant movements in contemporary thought, influencing work in an ever-growing number of disciplines. Psychologists such as Jerome Bruner explore the “narrative identity thesis,” the idea that the very conception of selfhood depends on having a narrative of one's life. Scholars of the law such as Peter Brooks advance our understanding of the legal system by analyzing the myriad kinds of narrative—from confessions to closings—integral to it. Medical researchers such as Rita Charon find that treatment improves when doctors listen to patients' illness narratives rather than simply seek to identify patients' symptoms.

Orhan Pamuk, born in Istanbul, is the author of My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, and numerous other works. Over his career, Pamuk has investigated questions of identity, cultural representation, and political agency, achieving fame in Turkey for his complex, ambitious prose, which contrasts with the predominantly realist tradition of the Turkish novel. In 2005 he faced charges in Turkey related to statements he made regarding the killings of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia. The charges were eventually dropped.

My title is meant to pose a real question. It's an old question, but it is worth asking why the anxiety betrayed by the question has been around for so long, and especially why it has spiked in recent years. The question expresses a worry that nobody reads much poetry, or that few people do, or that the right people don't at the right times or in the right ways. So it's a real question to which it's difficult to give a real answer, since the sane response to such anxiety tends to be either “You're right to worry, since nobody reads poetry these days” or “Don't worry; lots of people do. You just haven't noticed.” In her 2006 address as outgoing president of the MLA, Marjorie Perloff gave a little of both responses. “Out in the world beyond the academy, individual poets are warmly celebrated …,” Perloff told her audience (654). Don't worry, in other words. On the other hand, do worry, since that “beyond” means that those gathered—that is, literary critics, members of the MLA, all of us in that room or reading this journal—have not noticed such warm popular celebrations because we are the ones who don't read poetry these days or who don't read it in the right ways. “A specter is haunting the academy, the specter of literature,” Perloff warned us, turning worry into revolutionary foreboding (658). We sat back in our seats, reassured. Oh good, we thought, poetry is about to make a comeback.

Marjorie Perloff's 2006 presidential address may be most striking in its call for a return to a conventional definition of the literary as the ground of disciplinary training. If the profession of literary study in the contemporary academy is in a state of crisis, Perloff argues, it is largely a result of the ways literary scholars have undermined and contaminated the core of the discipline, adopting a “governing paradigm” for scholarship and teaching from other fields, including anthropology and history (654). “It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place,” she counsels, “and to recognize that, instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don't really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical, and critical training in our own discipline” (662). One could respond that this position, with its suggestion that the solution is mostly a matter of self-fashioning in the discipline, understates the broader pressures in the university as a social institution. But in what follows I would like to take up a different, smaller concern: Perloff's hostility to interdisciplinarity.

Lyric studies has been new before. Many students of lyric will remember Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker'S 1985 COLlection of essays, Lyric Poetry beyond New Criticism, as a previous occasion for reevaluating the course of lyric studies. Hošek and Parker's ambitious volume measured the distance between New Critical and later theories of interpretation: “structuralist and post-structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response” (7). Features highlighted by then-recent theory—the difference dramatized by intertextuality, for example, or the impossibility, as opposed to transparency, of many putative forms of address in lyric—revealed what had been repressed and implied by Western academic assumptions about poetry earlier in the twentieth century; Hošek and Parker gathered an ambitious representation of such modifications of canonical lyric reading. Familiar units of Western literary vocabulary such as “apostrophe” continued to be used, but observation of their destabilizing causes and effects and reflection on their inner contradictions helped to break the illusion of the verbal icon's centripetal force. Parker notes in her introduction that the question “What would enable future work on the lyric?” remains as open as ever at the end of their project (16). So now that another twenty-two years have passed, how is lyric studies differently new, as gauged by the 2006 MLA convention's focus on lyric?

Poetry is alive in our culture, but in its own world: Never have there been so many poets and poetry readings, books, journals, and online sites. Poetry has certainly seemed threatened, though, in schools and universities, where literary studies focus on prose fiction—narrative has become the norm of literature—or else on other sorts of cultural texts, which can be read symptomatically