The publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments in 1995 and the subsequent controversy over its authenticity can be seen as an object lesson in the vexed relation of history and memory. The book's status as an authentic memoir of the Holocaust has been impeached, yet Fragments may nonetheless be a useful vehicle for memory Cathy Caruth's and Shoshana Felman's work on trauma and on its relation to testimony indicates that testimony bears at best a tenuous relation to the events that form its core, particularly when the events are traumatic. An examination of Wilkomirski's language, read alongside (other) survivor testimony, suggests that Fragments may testify to a disaster other than the Holocaust. This conclusion, however, has controversial implications: that we need to reevaluate seriously how we treat testimony as historical evidence, including testimony of the Holocaust, and that the injunctions attached to Holocaust memory—never forget, never again—may be difficult if not impossible to heed.

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

Critics of Sandra Cisneros have not paid much attention to her career-long advocacy of private enjoyment, possibly because it seems incompatible with the political commitment that is an equally prominent feature of her work. This essay argues that we cannot name Cisneros's politics without first coming to terms with her representation of the pleasures of withdrawing from face-to-face sociality. In the central chapters of her most famous work, The House on Mango Street, Cisneros maps the political salience of private enjoyment by means of a complex evocation and transformation of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Private enjoyment becomes in Cisneros's hands democratically accessible—the technologies of privacy range from writing to self-talk to masturbation—and constitutively insecure. Because privacy signifies not a space into which one might retreat but a point from which one must depart, it is for Cisneros the precondition of new collective formations.

Charged with having plagiarized Stephen Spender's 1948 autobiography World within World in his 1993 novel While England Sleeps, David Leavitt responds through his novella “The Term Paper Artist” and his coedited anthology of gay writers Pages Passed from Hand to Hand by defending the place of copying and imitation in the transmission of gay culture. Echoing the preoccupation with mimicry in contemporary gay-lesbian cultural theory, Leavitt's novella fictionalizes his accused self and presents a parable of how literary inspiration, like desire, derives from inhabiting identities not one's own. “The Term Paper Artist” invites a detective game of source study that leads to figures as diverse as Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Jack the Ripper, as well as to less mentionable icons of contemporary popular culture, all of whom are used to authorize a version of gay writing and gay literary genealogy that finds generative and regenerative power in the copy.

At the risk of sounding like a parody of a conversation about opera and illness in the 1987 movie Moonstruck, we would like to relate a postperformance dialogue about Richard Wagner's last opera. Parsifal (not Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, as in the film). While descending the same staircase at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Loretta and Ronny, the film characters played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, a man turned to his wife and said, not “You know, I didn't think she was going to die! I knew she was sick,” but “Do you think audiences today understand that Amfortas had syphilis?” Since this man is a physician, his wife was used to his medical observations, though this time he took her by surprise: “Syphilis? He was wounded by a spear when caught in the arms of the seductress Kundry!” “Yes,” he replied, “but that might just be Wagner's indirect or allegorical way of invoking nineteenth-century obsessive worries about venereal disease. Did you notice that this is a wound (one inflicted in a moment of amatory indiscretion) that won't heal, whose pain is worse at night and is eased only slightly by baths and balsams? To any nineteenth-century audience these symptoms and signals would have meant only one thing: syphilis.” “If that's the case.” his wife suggested, “then people must have written about this and we can find out.” “Not necessarily. People didn't talk openly about this kind of disease; it was secret and shameful, remember. And today, thanks to the discovery of penicillin, we luckily don't have to know about such things anymore,” said he.

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke, Death 19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke, Death 16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion of écriture “has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke, Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.

In the academic study of cinema, as in other kinds of academic discourses, one of the most commonly encountered questions these days tends to be some version of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be represented in this manner? What does it mean for me and my group to have been made invisible? These questions pertain, of course, to the urgency and prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. This is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nation, class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics thus to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality” (Andrew 348).' Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, currently faces its own “impending dissolution […] in […] transnational theorization” (Introduction 1). How did this state of affairs arise?

Imagine that you are a young sociologist working around 1907. On your daily ride to the university, you witness an explosion of nickelodeons along the trolley route. They seem to operate continuously, day and night, and it is rare not to see a queue outside their doors. Because your children spend an extravagant amount of time and money unsupervised within their walls and exhibit an extraordinary and sometimes incomprehensible fascination with the characters presented there and the people who play them, perhaps you have gone inside to see a photoplay or two. How can you comprehend, despite the breadth and depth of your knowledge, that an entirely new medium and an important industry are being created that, in many respects, will come to define the visual culture of the twentieth century?

Along with many other aspects of north american culture, literary studies is being swept into the digital age. In considering what this might mean, I examine in particular how the Internet, with its many and protean conveniences for literature, is beginning to supplant the library, that traditional bastion of the text. The prospects for literature are not necessarily favorable. While libraries have been attempting to adapt to the Internet, the nature of the digital medium and some of the rhetoric that has attended it invoke troubling questions, raising the possibility that central features of literary studies may be in danger of being disregarded or marginalized. The digitizing of literature affects how we read and what we read, methods of study, the preservation of the archive, and the forms taken by new writing, some of which is specifically designed to exploit the electronic medium. In this paper I offer a sketch of the problems, possibilities, and paradoxes that we face as literary scholars.

The Passage I've Placed at the Head of this Essay should be Committed to Memory and Taken to Heart Taken to heart. It says in brief nearly everything that needs to be said, not only on the question that rubricates this essay—the question put to me by the editor—but on the larger implications of that question.

At one Minute to Midnight on New Year's EVE 1999, my Wife and I Were Eating Goat Curry on South Andaman island, in the Bay of Bengal. Our motel had set up card tables for buffet diners—Americans, Europeans, and Indians—on a dilapidated tennis court. Nearby stood a large glittering display that read, “Feel 2000 Very Happy New Year.” We had come to India the week before to visit my son, Adam, in the Himalayan village of Dharamsala, home to the Tibetan government in exile. Adam was studying the recent emergence of a Tibetan secular literature, the New Writing that had sprung up in response to Tibet's dual encounter with Maoist China and the exigencies of deracination. He discovered on arrival that, since his last visit, several New Writers had left for places like London and Indianapolis. In serendipitous coincidence with the new millennium, New Writing had just completed its first period of growth and was beginning its diaspora.

It's almost too convenient that carve evolves, via middle high german (kerben), from the greek graphein: “TO scratch, to write.” Ham-fisted or artful, the verb is the mark of desire, of a craving to inscribe. Given a century, carvings display cravings of the mind, motivated assignments in a march of years all beginning 18—. Figuring out how to carve one's shape in history, or how to carve history into shape, was a perplexity, a founding question even, at the dawn of the century:

Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
[………]
Hard task to analyse a soul in which
Not only general habits and desires
But each most obvious and particular thought,
Not in a mystical and idle sense,
But in the words of reason deeply weigh'd
Hath no beginning.