“I Can't Go on, I'll Go On.” Both Parts of This Bleak Acknowledgment By Samuel Beckett's Unnamable (407) seem to me appropriate (if not particularly gracious) responses to the honor of the preceding essays, which grow out of a distinguished 2008 MLA panel on what the program called my “career in writing.” First, there is, inevitably, a finalizing or conclusive connotation inherent in both the event and the reference to a “career,” a career that, at least for the purposes of the event meant to celebrate it, can only be located behind me. So the only way to avoid the entombment, the modest monumentalizing, unintentionally (I assume) accomplished in these essays is to insist, as Beckett does, that I must go on. If, to continue on another Beckettian note, there has been a career in writing, it has perhaps been because, somehow, I have not succeeded in failing, or I have at least (or at most) insufficiently failed. The Beckettian voice's exasperation at never having failed enough has always seemed to me to have something to do with the experience of the energizing effect of failures in language, an energy that prevents a voice from entering, and being locked into, the presumed history of a presumed culture.

As Members of the Penn State English Department, We Share Our Institution's Commitment to Bridging the Gap Between town and gown. As writers and teachers, we believe that reading is a powerful vehicle for community building, for democratic deliberation, and for imaginative reinvention of seeming inevitabilities. As friends who enjoy discussing ideas with one another, we believe that collaboration can allow for both individual voice and shared vision, can offer mutual instruction and delight. In our various ways, we have committed ourselves to reading and writing beyond the boundaries of the university. In this brief essay, we hope to share our experiences of community building, creativity, and democratic negotiation with readers of PMLA.

In the Summer of 2001, on The Heels of a Four-Year Recession, a Number of Ostensible Want Ads Appeared on Large Billboards in downtown Zurich. “Sought for our sales department: team member with an alcohol problem,” read one of them (fig.1); “Wanted: coworker with a drug career,” read another. Each billboard also featured the slogan “Everyone deserves a second chance.” The billboards were one of the first public campaigns mounted by the editors of Surprise, the Swiss street magazine that has supported the homeless and poor by employing them as vendors since 1998. The magazine's declared aim was to attract salespeople from the community, but the billboards did much more than recruit vendors: they intervened in Zurich's upscale business district and challenged the divide separating the haves from the have-nots.

Scholars in the Humanities May be Surprised to Learn That There has Been an Outpouring of New Work on HIV/AIDS by Economists and political scientists in the past few years, as it has finally become clear that the pandemic has seriously impacted governmental operations, redirected state resources, and threatened national and even international security around the globe. This upsurge of interest accentuates the decline in scholarly attention to HIV/AIDS in the humanities that has occurred now that the high tide of AIDS activism has receded across much of the global North and West and nearly a generation has passed since the pandemic first appeared. In an effort to jump-start a second-wave approach to the study of HIV/AIDS in the humanities, I show here how new scholarship in the fields of economics and political economy helps to revitalize questions of subjectivity, epistemology, globalization, and representation that have long been central to the study of HIV/AIDS in traditional humanities disciplines. Given the global reach of the pandemic and the vast technological, disciplinary, and governmental expertise required to contain it, a deliberate yet self-reflexive turn to political economy may help humanities scholars find a foothold in responding to HIV/AIDS. The pandemic has been the catalyst for an entirely new set of techniques of governance related to the health and well-being of nations and global populations—a global biopolitics of HIV/AIDS—yet there is virtually no work in the humanities responding to these dramatic changes.

Today Picaresque is a Catch-All Term, Which Literary Critics and General Readers Use to Characterize Almost any Story of playfulness and mischief. It has been stretched across so many national boundaries that any notion of its historical or geographic referents is often lost. The central character, an antihero, seems to express the author's devilry and wit rather than any social criticism. This view, growing out of readers' preference for pleasant entertainment and critics' focus on language and form, sees no more than an on-the-road plot, with “adventures” ending whenever the author chooses to stop. However, this sense of the picaresque forgets the complex, frequently damning portrayal of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain that the picaresque's original stories provided, as well as the contestation of the genre in postrevolutionary France, where it describes high crimes and suggests their punishment.

It' surprising that Stephen E. Severn' article “The Library of Congress Variant of ‘The Shield of Achilles’” (124.5 [2009]: 1761-67), so earnestly devoted to explaining in detail a variant word in a handwritten copy of a poem, should misquote four lines about which there is no dispute. Auden' “unintelligible multitude” in “The Shield of Achilles” is here assembled on a “plane without feature, bare and brown” (1762). How could a million “eyes” and “boots in line” possibly fit, much less stand, on that brown plane–or in it? And why is it “bare”? The line, of course, should read (and does in all editions), “A plain without a feature….”

It' surprising that Stephen E. Severn' article “The Library of Congress Variant of ‘The Shield of Achilles’” (124.5 [2009]: 1761-67), so earnestly devoted to explaining in detail a variant word in a handwritten copy of a poem, should misquote four lines about which there is no dispute. Auden' “unintelligible multitude” in “The Shield of Achilles” is here assembled on a “plane without feature, bare and brown” (1762). How could a million “eyes” and “boots in line” possibly fit, much less stand, on that brown plane–or in it? And why is it “bare”? The line, of course, should read (and does in all editions), “A plain without a feature….”