Examining the epistemological assumptions governing Calderón's theocentric view of life provides an accessible framework to overcome the many difficulties in reading La vida es sueño as a document of human experience. Segismundo's problems arise from an incomplete understanding of himself and the world. A prisoner since birth, the prince overcompensates intellectually for a life of sensual deprivation. Alienated from both the world and the sensitive centers of his humanity, he thinks to excess because his principal conduit to the world, his imagination, has remained underdeveloped. Through his palace experiences and his three encounters with Rosaura, Segismundo learns to adapt his inappropriate thinking by understanding that he must dialogue with the world rather than construct arguments against it.

Although some readers argue that the Apologia pro vita sua is not true autobiography, Newman in fact draws on models of spiritual autobiography in two traditions—one English and Protestant, the other Augustinian and Catholic. In the early chapters, Newman patterns his account on Thomas Scott's Force of Truth, presenting his own religious development as a series of encounters with theological texts but replacing the typological hermeneutics of Scott (and of most other Protestant autobiographers) with an interpretive method derived from ecclesiastical history. In later chapters, as he narrates his conversion to Catholicism, Newman takes Augustine's Confessions as a model, invoking characteristically Augustinian figures to signal a turn to a Catholic literary tradition. More comprehensively, he adapts the multiple forms of confession that organize Augustine's work to shape his final statement of faith and to integrate the narrative and expository modes that distinguish the Apologia and autobiography as a genre.

This essay explores the dynamics of framed narrative through readings of two Maupassant stories that illustrate the range of potential in the frame. Scrutiny of “La rempailleuse” and “En voyage” reveals, in particular, how a frame modifies the effect of, and reaction to, the narrative it surrounds. The more general principle that emerges is that the seemingly gratuitous border consisting of the “extra” narrator and his addressees operates, paradoxically, against closure, casting the reader into a metacommunicative realm where a second sign system springs from the first. Thus, in “En voyage,” romantic love, the thematic content, serves as the basis for a poetics of narrative and illuminates the larger implications of the interminability of the paratactic structure. Issues addressed are the strategies latent in the frame and the way the form itself calls into question the very nature and function of narrative.

The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin's first collection of essays, is even more “deformed by assumption” than his autobiography admits. Architecture is defined as poetic for genteel tourists, who forget that the buildings whose beauty they admire required human labor and embody distinctions of class. Indeed, architectural poetry expresses a myth of class harmony: buildings blending into the landscape, landowners welcomed by loving tenants. Yet this vision, though apparently sanctified by nature, is threatened—by industrial landscapes, cities, and less appealing aspects of nature itself. Without poetry, architecture might seem little more than the sort of instinctive shelter building we observe in the lower animals, hence suggestive of biological kinship between human beings and “brutes.” At the heart of Ruskin's architectural dreams is a feared disappearance of all distinctions, biological as well as social—a pre-Darwinian nightmare.

An examination of the similarities between the experience of reading and the transference process of psychoanalysis demonstrates that, by activating the mechanisms of projection and identification, reading literature can function to re-form the self. After outlining the general workings of the self, we look at those elements that are called into play by engaged reading, showing how reading can serve to alter both cognitive structures and the deep structures of the self. Like successful psychoanalysis, a literary text often evokes grandiose aspiration and later frustrates the most unrealistic avenues of that aspiration, thereby decommissioning those routes of desire and behavior. And just as psychoanalysis develops more fulfilling patterns of desire and action through the patient's identification with new ego ideals offered by the analyst, so reading can promote such structural changes through identification with characters and personae of literary texts.