The miniature portrait in Molière's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire is a memento the romantic heroine preserves in token of her absent love. Fainting under the strain of resisting her tyrannical father's efforts to compel her to marry another man, she loses the miniature, which falls into the hands of Sganarelle's wife. Mme Sganarelle's possession of the portrait provokes jealous suspicions in Sganarelle, and the comic fallout challenges the classical theory of images and the theory of signs to which classical culture assigns images. More specifically, in subjecting the portrait to the thingly logic of comic theater, the miniature's circulation explodes the dualist premises on which French classicism depends. Analysis of the farce's plot mechanics thus occasions critical meditations on classical semiotics (in Pascal's Pensées and Arnauld and Nicole's Logique de Port-Royal), classical aesthetics (in the writings of Piles), royal portraiture, and classical theology.

Imported material forms were central to the settlement of Australia as a penal colony, beginning with the “discovery” of the continent by James Cook, who took possession of New South Wales in 1770 by naming Possession Island. The first part of this article traces the intersection in early journals and legal records between material instability and naming, arguing that as Aboriginal peoples and convicts challenged the social meaning of objects, the ability to refer to those objects became essential. The second part explores failed naming in David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon (1993), set on the early-nineteenth-century frontier, whose central character calls himself a “B-b-british object,” stuttered words that evoke the historical importance and the vulnerability of imported goods during colonization and settlement in Australia.

What is the relation between Marian lament and the distinctively modern, autobiographical complaints of Thomas Hoccleve? What, moreover, is the relation between Hoccleve's performances of private misery and his ability to offer advice and counsel to princes? This article argues that Hoccleve's “Complaint of the Virgin” can teach us to recognize the complex interweaving of gender, genre, ideality, and excess that informs Hocclevean complaints more generally. “The Complaint of the Virgin” explores a woman's exemplary transition from subversive investment in private connection and private suffering to self-abnegation and participation in public power. In doing so, the poem provides a model for Hoccleve's own movements between marginalized interiority and public rhetoric—and for his meditation between Lancastrian subjects and their sovereign. The Virgin offers a lesson in the 1364 Abstracts [PMLA pleasures and power of complaint, the disciplining of interiority, and the production of social relations through spectacle and sacrifice.

This essay analyzes the articulation of transgressive desires in Reinaldo Arenas's “El Cometa Halley,” a parodic continuation of Federico García Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba. I argue that by moving the Alba sisters from Spain to Cuba and liberating their repressed sexualities, Arenas pursues his fantasies of sexual freedom. Linking his rewriting of García Lorca to the historically significant arrival of Halley's comet in 1910, Arenas relies on the comet's phallic tail to set the story in motion. More specifically, “El Cometa Halley” sketches a preoedipal fantasy of mother-son incest that recurs in Arenas's life and work.

Declaring Psychoanalysis “Finally Dead and buried” is “one of the seasonal rituals of our intellectual life” (Žižek 7). In the latest salvo of this battle, Lee Patterson rehearses the argument that debunking the scientific base of Freudianism renders the theory useless to the humanities, and he objects particularly to the application of psychoanalytic models to medieval texts—an exercise, for him, in anachronistic reasoning. Patterson's claim recalls earlier rounds led by Stephen Greenblatt and, a decade before that, in a more totalizing vein, by Frederick Crews. My title indicates my interest in the dispute: where Patterson calls psychoanalysis an “ambulance” or “hearse” (656), I argue that the theory is less a vehicle to be abandoned or replaced and more something organic and renewable—an evolving body of ideas that provides techniques for reading. However, in this short essay I will not construct an apologia for psychoanalytic theory generally but take on the more limited task of characterizing recent uses of the theory in critical engagements with early modern texts. Salient qualities of this work have been overlooked by those who demonize psychoanalysis (a habit suggested by Žižek's image) or are allergic to anything linked to Freud.

At the risk of seeming peevish, i should begin by noting that the title “what is a text today?” is not mine. this point strikes me as important, perhaps even urgent, but not because the title must be discarded. On the contrary, it has become all the more important to retain because it contains today, a word that in denoting the interval between yesterday and tomorrow used to call up that which is simply now but which in the wake of 11 September 2001 has come to connote the rupture that separates “America” from the world it thought it had been contracted to police. Thus, if one were to rephrase “my” title, would it not make sense to write, “Is there a text after 11 September 2001?” (to evoke yet again Theodor Adorno's still-haunting question concerning the link between poetry and the Holocaust)? Put this way—and why not begin by raising the stakes as high as possible?—the query tempts one to reply, “Even if there is a text that belongs to this state of exception, who could possibly care?” Are there not more pressing matters? If there are, if the matter at hand is as clear as all that, then neither you nor I have any business persisting beyond this point.

Lindsay waters's “rescue tenure from the tyranny of the monograph“ in the 20 april 2001 chronicle of higher Education complements his “Modest Proposal […]” in PMLA. The longer Chronicle piece insistently deploys the concept of crisis that presided over a 1997 conference of humanities scholars, librarians, and editors, The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis (Case). According to Waters, the overproduction of monographs required of tenure candidates “conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past thirty years […]” (B7). “Above all,” he avers, “the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership” that implicates the university: “the problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the problem of the university […],” an institution “increasingly committed to business values” (B8). In this university in which “the humanities have grown to be beside the point,” Waters submits, the increased stress on the tenure monograph during the eighties and nineties is the most evident symptom of an ill-conceived professionalization of the humanities.

martin cohen's “developments in foreign approval buying,” in the march 2001 issue of pmla, lists some of “the foreign language bibliographer's […] tricks” (393) for stocking collections. Acquiring African literature, however, is largely a different matter. The approval plans Cohen mentions, whereby “the vendor allows you to see the book [or a description of it] before you decide whether or not to add it to the collection,” would be applicable to the presses in England and France specializing in Third World literature (e.g., Heinemann in England, L'Harmattan in France), which publish primarily the most established African writers (see Maja-Pearce; Ruppert). But when it comes to publishing on the continent of Africa, even books by well-known writers (like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o), when written in the national languages, can only be obtained locally. And certainly all other literature has to be bought in the country of origin.

My title came to me as a way of suggesting immediately both the exciting and the troublesome potentials of collaborations between foreign language and English departments. No one can take Disney's banal lyrics at all seriously, and the tune is both insidious and annoying. So why invoke it in a serious discussion?