Manuscripts and correspondence related to the features described below should be sent to the Managing Editor, PMLA, Modern Language Association, 85 Broad Street, suite 500, New York, NY 10004–2434 ([email protected]).

Translation is often described with opposed terms like loyalty and betrayal, even though the work of translation defies such a description. New research in translation studies argues for the value of mistranslation and untranslatables, especially in recovering Indigenous knowledge production. This study joins these efforts by documenting how technical writers in the colonial Andes used Quechua terms to form a patois called “Quechuañol” (Quechua plus español) and how this hybrid Andean language was obscured in translations of scientific texts in early modern England, Germany, and France. As translators reinterpreted metallic classifications in Quechuañol, including “Pacos, Mulatos y Negrillos” (“paco, mulato, and negrillo metals”), they chose terms that communicated their own, culturally specific ideas about color and categories. Tracing mistranslations in the Atlantic world allows us to document both the Indigenous intellectual contributions to the technical arts and the development of early modern racial classifications.

This essay examines Anishinaabe pictography in contemporary legal contexts, challenging the notion that the law must necessarily inhere in alphabetic isomorphism, let alone in the colonialist inscriptive norms of the nation. Explaining how pictography elicits a loosened relation between sign and signified, this essay develops a semiotic theory of nonisomorphy to analyze uses of pictography in the work of several Anishinaabe scholars and writers: in John Borrows's advocacy of “jurisgenerative multiperspectivalism,” in Gerald Vizenor's conception of social irony and ironic constitutionalism, and in Louise Erdrich's figuration of ecological literacy and reciprocity. Focusing in particular on the trope of metonymy in pictographic writing, this essay elucidates the perspectival shifts and contextual metamorphoses of metonymy in the native poetics of the Americas, forming and transforming historical experience while offering colonial situations ample room to trip themselves up on their own contradictions.

As recent art historical scholarship has demonstrated, the techniques of linear perspective displace narrative (the artwork's content) in favor of the relations between aesthetic objects (the artwork's form). In this regard, perspectival art performs a rhetorical transaction analogous to that of its “sister art,” lyric poetry. The formal features and poetic strategies of lyric parallel the geometric effects of perspectival art: both practices differentiate the aesthetic surface from the transparentizing demands of narrative. Each art form stages the interaction of irreconcilable terms—content and form—and documents the dynamic and incommensurable relation between semantic meaning and meaninglessness. Lyric's dominance in the Renaissance, exemplified here by sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, reflects a wider cultural valorization of the experiential and materializing priorities of the aesthetic, an affirmation of objective, apprehensible elements whose significance is unyoked from the obligation to narrative.

Because most early modern readers did not leave behind traces of their reading practices and thus remain anonymous, a more inclusive history of reading requires a willingness to engage in speculation. In the case of Tudor editions of the romance he Historye of Blanchardine, responsible speculation involves resisting the desire for textual stabilities, including the author's name and the work's status as a reprinted text. Doing so reveals that what appear to be reissued editions of William Caxton's version of this romance, Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489-90), are in fact a network of adapted texts whose representations of gender challenge current understandings of the Elizabethan romance, its producers, and its target audience. More specifically, what seems to be a fragment of the 1597 edition is instead an early example of fan fiction, a modern narrative mode that offers a methodological model for scholars interested in adopting more inspired approaches to material evidence.

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

Otakar Zich (1879–1934) is a striking figure in modern czech aesthetics and art theory. A gifted librettist and opera composer and a professor at Charles University in Prague, his place in the history of aesthetics is still controversial. His Aesthetics of Dramatic Art (Estetika dramatického umění [1931]) came out at a time of paradigmatic change in the humanities (the emergence in the 1930s of functional structuralism through the Prague linguistic circle). Also, it was only in the 1930s that the Czech theatrical avant-garde got into full swing. Zich's work apparently “fell short” both of the new scientific paradigm, imposed by the tandem of Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975), and of the expectations of the students of theater coming from Mukařovský's seminars, some of them already distinguished avant-garde directors (Veltruský 67). Zich's untimely death precluded the development of his project, as well as fruitful debate about it. Mukařovský, as Zich'fs protégé, felt obliged to address the work of his mentor, but his early semiotic reading was avowedly partial and tentative and barely concealed his puzzlement. This marginal inclusion in the new paradigm without real assimilation left Zich's complex and comprehensive undertaking out in the cold.

E. M. Forster's immersion in the thriving community of european writers and artists in alexandria increased his confidence as a writer; it also mitigated the social alienation he had experienced on his arrival in Egypt in 1915 to volunteer with the Red Cross. His theatrical sketch “Pericles in Paradise” (1918), published here for the irst time, is populated by characters modeled on the Alexandrian elite that fostered his sense of belonging. In addition, it bears the mark of a privileged position Forster himself was uneasy about: that of an En glishman navigating a city under British rule and removed from the realities faced by the native Egyptian population.

Jennifer Egan is known for her formal and thematic virtuosity, a constant reinvention that makes each of her novels feel fresh and surprising. “If I've read it or done it before then I'm not interested,” she claims, describing an “aesthetic … guided by curiosity and desire” (Julavitz). But this isn't the whole story; an exacting reader will find familiar threads running through Egan's fiction. Among the most consistent is an interest in siblings (or cousins, in The Keep): how their relationships evolve over time, as they develop horizontal intimacies apart from the world of parents, and how they negotiate various forms of inequality—for instance, how a more typical sibling contends with a beloved other who is ill or disabled. These themes carry over into Egan's most recent novel, Manhattan Beach. Although many reviewers described it as an abrupt departure (Franklin; O'Rourke; Charles), the novel is consistent with Egan's previous work in featuring a disabled sibling and in being concerned with how genre—whether mystery, romance, PowerPoint presentation, or text message—shapes family dynamics. But where earlier projects are marked by unexpected generic combinations, Manhattan Beach hews closely to the contours of two interrelated forms: the historical novel and literary sentimentalism. At the heart of its thick portrait of a particular time and place is a sibling relationship that becomes an occasion for exploring the possibilities and limitations of genre.

As her epigraph to manhattan beach, Jennifer Egan chooses one of ishmael's typically abstract musings in moby-dick: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” Yet more relevant is his observation in the opening paragraphs of Melville's novel:

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses, the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexually blank. Even Eva Peace, the one-legged crone goddess in Toni Morrison's Sula, is done with sex. There is something at least untoward and at most perverse about representing disabled women as erotic. In The Sexual Politics of Disability, the sociologist Tom Shakespeare and his coauthors detail a long history of disability as a sexual disqualifier or as an occasion for perversity for both men and women in narrative representation.

In Jennifer Egan's manhattan beach, certain aspects of american culture—farmland in brooklyn, the ziegfeld follies, Jean Harlow's curls, the “old salts” who sailed in wooden ships (259)—are recalled at the moment of their vanishing. These and other disappearances provide evidence that, in the novel, historical change is treated as an epic trope. At the same time, disappearances mark swerves in an individual character's destiny as novelistic events. In its blending of history with individuals' stories, Manhattan Beach can be called an epic novel, along the lines of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Don DeLillo's Libra. Whereas novels particularize individual experience in an evolving present, epics position individual destinies in a fixed, complete history. Novels differ from epics in the distance that they take from their respective subjects, though the two genres demonstrate “all-inclusiveness” and “expansiveness” (Merchant 71, 93). The epic novel mobilizes at the point where national ambitions overlay personal stories. hrough the trope of disappearance, Manhattan Beach correlates the epic ambition to show historical transformation with the novelistic ambition to represent personal renewal. Disappearances may be escapes, but they also forecast characters' fresh starts and future convergences.

The vortex of the twentieth century, the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s, provides an appropriate setting for Jennifer Egan's experiment in historical fiction. Many popular histories have glorified the bands of brothers and Rosie the Riveters of the so-called greatest generation. The best fiction and poetry of the 1940s offered a different, unflattering view. Journalists from that era—Martha Gellhorn, for one—said they needed fiction to get the history right (313). Literary treatments of the war focus on its incommunicability and on the crisis of meaning it inspired, but they have been vastly overshadowed by popular history books, documentaries, movies, and television shows that depend for their very production and distribution on an appeal to the fantasies that the contemporary war literature contradicts. In a decade when the idea of making America great again seems supercharged by notions of America when it was supposedly great, we can use some diving into the wreck.

During World War II, women were heavily recruited for scientific and technical jobs across the united states. Many assumed roles previously allotted to men, serving as welders, riveters, sheet metal workers, crane operators, ship fitters, and chauffeurs, to name just a few. Between 1941 and 1944, over 6.5 million women joined the workforce; over 10 million were already working outside the home in 1941 (Pidgeon vi). The Brooklyn Naval Yard, featured in Manhattan Beach as the workplace of Anna, Nell, and their friends, also saw an increase in women workers, albeit a somewhat modest one. By 1944, according to The New York Times, women represented 4,000 of the 65,000 workers at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, not counting office workers (“Women Help Build Carrier”). While women represented just 6% of the industrial labor force at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, women represented 11.5% of all shipyard workers in 1944, according to the United States Department of Labor (Hirshfield 481).

In a review for The New York Times, Amor Towles writes that Manhattan Beach “is far less interested in domestic relationships than in those of the workplace.” I would submit that Manhattan Beach is in fact suffused with domestic relations and that many of those relations are structured by disability plots. A few of those plot strands are so clichéd that you can hardly believe their prominence in this contemporary novel. But another cluster of the novel's disability motifs spins a fabric so inventive and rich that you begin to suspect Egan of deploying the other, shopworn plots chiefly to authenticate the novel's mid-century ethos, to evoke a moment when the American public tended to perceive disability as hopeless, or tragic, or repulsive. In what follows I extricate from the novel's broader historical concerns three of these related disability plots. I begin with an account of the disability-as-melodrama plot and then move to an analysis of the plotlines associated with novel's diffuse treatment of disability's generative powers. I close with a reading of the problematic plot that relies on what disability scholars call the “curative imaginary.” My aim here is to illustrate Egan's contrapuntal disability aesthetics.

Forty years ago, the poet and literary critic William Harmon distinguished between two ways in which language can fail. Writing in these pages, Harmon observed that speechlessness and silences can be markers of frustration, incapacity, and failed connections. Think of the disjointed language of William Faulkner's Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury or, more recently, the silences of the ghostly character Given who haunts Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Alternatively, spaces beyond the horizons of language can embody a tranquility so thorough and full of meaning that words would mar the perfection of the moment. In this second sense, inarticulateness is a point of peace and stillness toward which language is at best a clumsy passage. Harmon contended that in the twenty years between the world wars the poetry of T.S. Eliot shifted from the first sense of inarticulateness to the second (450).