In the last few years, a growing number of writers and artists have begun to develop a new form of verbal art. They no longer devote themselves to individually writing fixed texts destined to be read in solitude and silence. Instead, they are designing mechanisms that enable large and heterogeneous groups to collaborate on projects that combine the production of discourses, the exploration of knowledge about local circumstances, and the invention of potential socialities. These projects intend to foster forms of cosmopolitan citizenship in a globalized world at a time of expanding digital technologies. The article describes some crucial aspects of this process through a reading of two projects: a platform for collaborative translation on the Internet designed by the American artists Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks and an “open-source narrative” by the Italian collective Wu Ming.

This article discusses the history of Judith Gautier's Le livre de jade (1867), one of the earliest volumes of translations of Chinese poetry published in any European language. It explores the connection between her interest in this project, which Gautier undertook as an amateur student of Chinese, and both the sinological context and the influence of her father, Théophile. Although her command of Chinese was imperfect, Gautier knew more than many have insinuated; her renditions convey important themes of the Chinese poetic tradition and maintain at times an impressive fidelity to the original form. Though she frequently chose to adapt the Chinese verse to an innovative rhythmic prose, her adaptations retain the originals' emotional reticence and imagistic evocativeness–stylistic qualities that resonated with contemporary and succeeding poetic tastes. The collection's remarkable literary and musical afterlife provides an illuminating case in the cultural history of translation, mistranslation, and adaptation.

Shortly into Werner Herzog's South American film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the Peruvian rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy) asks the eponymous protagonist (Klaus Kinski) if he has ever seen a shrunken head. This paper argues that Fitzcarraldo's short, fumbling response (“Yes. I mean, no. Sort of …”) calls into question both the European tradition of representing the New World and the very status and nature of the film image. Close analysis of a single visual from the film also demonstrates the difficulty of constructing images endowed with what the director has called over the years “ecstatic truth.” Though critically praised for his unique vision, Herzog affiliates himself through Fitzcarraldo, however unknowingly, with a constellation of texts and practices having colonialist aims, extending all the way to Warhaftig Historia (1557), the controversial captivity narrative of the would-be German conquistador Hans Staden.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is adolescent in the sense provided by Julia Kristeva–it offers critical insight into the breakdown of categories that support representational and ethical certainties. The ethical stance of its author, Daniel Handler, is complicated–urgent, resonant, distressing–caught in the devious irony endemic to metafictional play and to the sensibility of Generation X. Such irony casts light too on literary criticism's changing treatment of the critical subspecialty of children's literature as well as on its renewed but uneasy interest in ethics as revision of past humanism. A Series offers an ethics of practice, one that recognizes its dependence on the impulses it critiques. Just as the books' postmodern orphans improvise in the face of menace that doesn't stop, Handler's irony pictures a world where ethics can never be more than a provisional entente negotiating impossible ideals.

The study of allusion has been beset by limiting assumptions, conceptual murkiness, and terminological imprecision; moreover, many poststructuralist theorists regard such study as having been superseded by newer conceptions of intertextuality. This essay seeks to clarify the nature of allusion and the terminology by which it is analyzed and to place it on a firmer footing within poststructuralist literary criticism. I distinguish two forms of allusion often conflated-learned reference and phraseological adaptation–and elucidate the elements of a phraseological adaptation. I distinguish diachronic allusion from synchronic intertextuality, as poststructuralist theorists insist should be done, but then suggest how coordinating the two can enrich the analytic power of each way of conceiving textual interrelation.

Writing in bed: I have always loved Edith Wharton's habit of doing just that, as well as Cynthia Ozick's discussion of it (look how neat the desk at which Wharton is photographed in her stays; imagine how much more comfortable she is in bed with her stays undone). I remember learning, during my first studies of philosophy at Bryn Mawr, that René Descartes wrote in bed, by the heat of a stove supplied by Queen Christina, to say nothing of Winston Churchill's similar custom.

This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.