What have i learned during my year and a half as editor of PMLA? Now, at the midpoint of my term, I thought I might reflect on some of my hopes and hesitations about the editorship and think about what, from the submissions to PMLA and from the process of its publication, we might glean about important trends in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. Two things have delighted and frustrated me, in particular: the workings of the peer review process, on the one hand, and the disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries that inform our writing and teaching, on the other. On these issues and on their relation, I have some good news and some less good news to report.

Milton's Samson has long been a character about whom readers are irreconcilably divided. Current anxiety over terrorism has made it all the more inviting to see Milton's dramatic poem as a criticism of Samson's slaughter of the Philistines, a sentiment emphatically expressed in John Carey's recent claim that “September 11 has changed Samson Agonistes, because it has changed the readings we can derive from it while still celebrating it as an achievement of the human imagination.” This paper interrogates the association of Milton with present-day antipathy to religious violence and seeks to sophisticate the position of critics who now find terrorism an inescapable presence in the field of literary interpretation. The brand of reading most necessary in current discussion is one that avoids the reactionary temptation to cleanse literary texts of sympathy with religious violence and to view such violence as the province solely of the Other.

We respond in language to catastrophic, or traumatic, shocks to symbolic systems, for which the fall of the Tower of Babel can be seen as a mythic model. One response is an exploration of new uncertainties; another is a fearful rigidity that seeks to return to an imagined Adamic wholeness of language; another is an effort to transcend language altogether. This essay examines two contemporary responses to a perceived “fall” of language—several case studies of Oliver Sacks's and two novels by Don DeLillo—and places them in the context of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences and what I call a “counterlinguistic turn” that is contemporaneous with the linguistic turn and represents developments of some of its key assumptions.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's revolutionary paradigm encounters its greatest crisis to date. As the state's cultural institutions struggle to cope with severe material limitations and strive to square socialist ideology with world events, Cuban writers increasingly publish their work with foreign companies. Not uncommonly these authors reassert the aesthetic priorities that state institutions are said to have repressed or subordinated to political imperatives. It may appear, superficially, that Cuban writers are out to revive some notion of an autonomous literary art. In situating aesthetic discourse in profoundly dialogic, historically specific, and politically charged narrative contexts, however, these writings challenge traditional universalizing formulations of the aesthetic category. Such historico-narrative rearticulation of social practices and theories of art is prerequisite to a more progressive cultural politics than the socialist state has managed to implement and than an uncritical reengagement with the global market can bring about.

Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues is a metafictional novel that comments on literary history. In its three books, Dr. Gregory Revueltas battles a mysterious and ravaging plague, during the 1780s, 1980s, and mid–twenty-first century. In each book he leaves a legacy of writing for the next Gregory to read. By reading and writing this archive, or library of cultural knowledge, the final Gregory develops a historical consciousness that helps him see beyond his episteme's limited science and derive a cure for the recurring plague. His confronting the plague by reading his own writing both intimately and critically is an allegory for the efficacy of literature as a response to historical trauma. Gregory does not gain agency over history, but through the self-conscious reading of his archive he is able to place himself in a cultural trajectory otherwise inaccessible in each book's bracketed historical moment.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, W. H. Auden and the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ask themselves, in independent reflections, why attempts to free thought from oppressive schemata result in more-insidious forms of oppression: as clerical establishments go into decline, modernity creates new forms of mythological consciousness. For all three authors, the emergence of fascism in the early part of the twentieth century is proof of this and gives urgency to their inquiries into enlightenment. For all three, Voltaire is a pivotal figure, for his struggle against the unity of apologetic discourse and ruthless power allows them to discern an element of enlightenment that survives the most rigorous critique of its oppressive tendencies. This essay examines Horkheimer and Adorno's fragment “For Voltaire” alongside Auden's poem “Voltaire at Ferney” and shows how the latter both anticipates and reveals the limits of the former.

In 1614 Lope de Vega, recently ordained, published the Rimas sacras, a confessional canzoniere replete with allusions to his past promiscuity and recent religious conversion. I argue that Lope addressed his collection not only to a public of anonymous readers but also to a specific, private reader: his patron, the duke of Sessa. For the previous eight years, Lope had served as Sessa's erotic amanuensis, writing love letters and poems for the duke's various mistresses. I propose that the collection as a whole and several sonnets in particular constitute an implicit reproach to Sessa. Through his religious poetry, Lope sought to repudiate his degraded masculine identity as the duke's epistolary pimp (and reputed lover) and affirm his status as a priest who served a more exalted and loving patron. In the Rimas sacras, the discourses of clientage and Petrarchan love are imbricated in the dominant religious discourse, rendering it more available for contestatory practices than is often recognized.

Medieval studies are big—in fact, have rarely been livelier … or more controversial. This energy has succeeded in breaching the ramparts that traditionally divided the field into a series of vigorously defended fiefs. In a word, the discipline has gone interdisciplinary. Visual literacy, patristics, modal logic, grammar, rhetoric, onomastics, philosophical anthropology, sociology, historiography, linguistics, codicology, vernacular literature, classical and medieval Latin thought and letters, philology, and myriad other subsets conjugate in dizzying and unexpected configurations to produce exciting views of the period.

I begin with a story: Some never-to-be-untangled amalgamation of history, caricature, and the truer than true that is fiction. A little over a decade ago, at a great and august university, a group of professors met to talk about law and literature. Most of the literature professors had been Vietnam War protesters, staged sit-ins, marched on Washington. Some of the law professors had spent time in Paris listening to Derrida and smoking Gauloises by the Seine. They had all watched the birth and death of deconstruction, critical legal studies, new historicism, various feminisms (though they weren't positively sure all these were dead). The law professors had been reading Adorno and Althusser; Barthes, Benjamin, and Butler; Deleuze and Derrida. The literature professors had been reading the Critical Legal Studies Reader and Amnesty International reports. The law professors were worried that narratology and post-colonial theory might already be passé. The literature professors were concerned, as a matter of principle.

One striking characteristic of commodity histories, a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction, is a certain overkill in their subtitles. A representative sample might include, say, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance (Warman), Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (Gately), The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Zuckerman), The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug (Weinberg and Bealer), Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (Kurlansky), and Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (Garfield). Only slightly less over-the-top than the “changed the world” clause, which also appears in recent histories of vanilla, house cats, Ping-Pong balls, dishwashing liquid, and pocket lint, is the vogue for two-word titles in which an adjective, usually a commodity-identifying color, is paired with the most coveted of precious metals. Some examples are Blue Gold (water [Barlow and Clarke]), White Gold (rubber [Yungjohann]), Black Gold (oil [Woodward]), and Green Gold (tea and marijuana—two books [Bennet; Macfarlane and Macfarlane]). Such titles suggest that all these commodities, even the humblest, have the power to get continents discovered, dynasties toppled, mountains moved. We take some of these commodities for granted, but all of them have changed the world.