PMLA welcomes essays of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature. As the publication of a large and heterogeneous association, the journal is receptive to a variety of topics, whether general or specific, and to all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives. The ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind; addresses a significant problem; draws out clearly the implications of its findings; and engages the attention of its audience through a concise, readable presentation. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended to the Editorial Board. Articles of fewer than 2,500 words or more than 9,000 words are not considered for publication. The word count includes notes but excludes works-cited lists and translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations. The MLA urges its contributors to be sensitive to the social implications of language and to seek wording free of discriminatory overtones.

Manuscripts and correspondence related to the features described below should be sent to the Managing Editor, PMLA, Modern Language Association, 26 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10004–1789.

In an interview following his 7 may 2004 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense, admitted knowing about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison since they were first exposed in January. He also knew of the existence of photographs documenting the abuses, but he had not studied the images until shortly before they were shown to the public during the first week of May. In asserting that “[i]t is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place” and that “[w]ords don't do it,” Rumsfeld expressed, and even surpassed, one of the prime clichés of our time, that a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the power of visual images, the subject has an uncontrollable emotional response: “you cannot help but be outraged.”

The use of Oscar Wilde's Salome as the ground for the silent-screen star Norma Desmond's film script and character is central to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard but oddly neglected by the film's critics. This essay reads the film through its engagement with Salome, discussing its adoption from the play of a self-consciousness about the conditions of its art, which extend beyond the film's production to cultural history and film aesthetics. Norma asserts the image and ideology of the Hollywood star through her identification with the aestheticist figure of Salome, while Joe Gillis not only writes film scripts but, with his peers Betty Schaefer and Artie Green, also foregrounds narrative conventions in his efforts to organize and control his own life and experience in the film. Through its main characters, Sunset Boulevard presents an allegory of Hollywood cinema in which the complementary filmic principles of image and narrative culminate respectively in madness and death.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in discourses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testimony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide.

While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.

This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan's attempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin's Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dressing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for control over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator's attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan's production of John Vanbrugh's Aesop. Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article illuminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities.

Reading samuel beckett made me want to link literary and visual studies, although when i first began to love his work, I did not understand that these were different disciplines. A graduate student in the English department at Rutgers University, I read Waiting for Godot while sitting on the floor of my dorm room. I remember really squinting at the pages, trying both to read every word of the play and to see it on a stage in my mind. When I finished, I was convinced I had read the dialogue to a painting. What confused me was whether the painting existed before the play or whether Beckett was trying to create it in the play's performance.

Trained and working in literary studies, i began to analyze visual artifacts such as paintings sometime in the late 1980s. My interest in visual aspects has grown out of the realization that subjectivity is formed by a perpetual adjustment of images passing before the subject, who, as focalizer, makes them into a whole that is comprehensible because it is continuous. Having a certain continuity in one's thought depends, at a level more subliminal than conscious, on having a certain continuity in one's images.

But continuity is not the same thing as coherence. This distinction is another source of interest that informs work on visual narrativity. In such historically and sociologically varied texts and images as modern novels, the ancient and incomplete fragments that make up the Hebrew bible, and Rembrandt's paintings, I constantly came up against that which eludes the coherence of these artifacts. My attention was systematically arrested by the detail that seems out of place, the contradiction that tears open the work, the monstrous element that reveals flaws and disparities and, because it provokes astonishment, offers never-ending possibilities for the understanding of these works. Such experiences led me to consider those dimensions of literature that classical narratology has tended to think marginal and that pictorial narratology, unbounded by the presumption of linearity, would promote to the forefront or, at least, deploy as heuristic instruments with which to grasp structure outside linear plots.

Arthur Danto's meditation, in his “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” on a square of red paint and its various possible readings serves as a warning about multiple interpretations. This painting might be a story of the Egyptians and the Red Sea, after the Israelites crossed over. Or, then, a work by a Danish portraitist, labeled “Kierkegaard's Mood.” Or, then, one by a politically active painter, “Red Square.” Or by a disciple of Henri Matisse, “Red Table Cloth”—in this one, the paint would be more thickly applied. In my view, the most appropriate state we can muster is what the surrealists called “availability” (disponibilité)—openness to whatever might, of a sudden, happen in our understanding to achieve a presentness of perception, even as we note the clear risk of boundary crossings between the arts.

The students of the present generation are the first in a long time who will not take their cultural identities from books. Statistics reveal that film, museum, concert, and sports attendances are up but that fewer and fewer people are reading books. Those strange moments in nineteenth-century novels when young heroes strike poses, dress, coif, and woo by the book are gone, perhaps forever. Our students are more likely to take their models from television, films, glossy magazines, video games, or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. My colleagues in the profession report that, thanks to the expansion of visual culture, students now possess an enviable talent for decoding images, often to the detriment of reading ability. To be frank, I am not so convinced: in my experience, the most literate students continue to be the best readers of images. But I agree that we are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of visuality. A new era has dawned, and we are not prepared for it. We need to change our teaching and scholarship to keep up with our students.

This essay explores the layered, ideologically contradictory, and psychologically overdetermined ways national identities take form. The setting is the birth of the new American nation, the opening moments of George Washington's first administration. As European Americans from Benjamin Franklin to D. W. Griffith tell us, this is a white man's story about his “Black … and Tawney …” (br)others (Franklin, qtd. in Ferguson 169).

The man. Harald Weinrich, an honorary member of the modern language association since 1996, may be the quintessential interdisciplinary humanist. Having mastered French as a young internee in France at the end of World War II, he began his academic career as a Romance philologist in the tradition of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, with professorships successively at the universities of Kiel and Cologne. In a second career he became a professor of linguistics at the new University of Bielefeld (which he helped to found and where he served as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research); then he established in Munich the first program for the teaching of German as a foreign language. Following his compulsory retirement, he received the honor (extraordinary for a foreigner) of an appointment as professor of Romance studies at the prestigious Collège de France, from which he is now also retired. He has published writing of great scholarly and public resonance in all these areas. Among his voluminous output (translated into many languages) are Tempus, a wide-ranging and meticulously nuanced study of tense use in the major literatures of Western Europe; a prizewinning short book of cultural linguistics entitled Linguistik der Lüge (Linguistics of Lying); “text grammars” of French and of German that aim to record not just morphology and syntax but also the usage problems that confront speakers and writers of all foreign languages; Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, his first book to appear in English) and much other work on cultural topics, including memory and politeness; and dozens of essays on the teaching and learning of languages and on problems of intercultural understanding.

For the last three years, roger chartier and i have taught an undergraduate seminar called the history of print Culture in Early Modern Europe and America. Although the content of the course has changed, one feature has been persistent: at least half our classes met in the rare-book libraries of Philadelphia. While we have often held the seminar in Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, we have also gone to the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Free Library, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. This would not have been possible without the extraordinary openness and generosity of the Philadelphia libraries and librarians. But the work of those librarians has not only provided an infrastructure for the course; it has also reshaped what we've worked on and how we teach it.

Most of the respondents to Carolyn Heilbrun's “Guest Column: From Rereading to Reading” (119 [2004]: 211–17) seem generally to accept her rather dismal view of what is and is not possible in retirement. I disagree. Two of the fine scholars (and teachers) who were my dear friends and mentors did some of their best work in their eighties and nineties. One of these was John C. Pope, who was nearing ninety when those of us attending the Medieval Academy meeting agreed that his latest article on an Old English poem was the model of what a scholarly article ought to be; he had just mailed off another important contribution when he died, very suddenly, at ninety-three. Another was Ruth J. Dean, whose prizewinning masterwork, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, was published about three years before she died, at the age of one hundred.