Just how important is “big data” to humanists? is it mostly hype and hot air, as argued by Timothy Brennan in “The Digital Humanities Bust”? Or is it a genuine new beginning, as argued by Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood in response? And what exactly does “big” mean? Is the magnitude necessarily the result of algorithmic computation, a form of digital humanities based on data mining and yielding statistical observations about large corpora? Or could it be nonalgorithmic, coming from collaboration, say, rather than computation? Bond, Long, and Underwood point out that big data projects might look different in the future, transformed by new partnerships with libraries and museums. What might some of these projects be?

Reading The Faerie Queene is like playing. his article develops an account of three relevant tendencies of play—to change through time, to animate its object, and to remain opaque in meaning—and distinguishes this account from other critical understandings of play. It then introduces a historical analogue to Spenser's playfulness—the giving of formerly holy objects to children as toys during the Reformation—and uses it as a lens through which to read the ending of the first book of Spenser's poem, where the vast dragon not only becomes a posthumous plaything but also displays surprisingly playful propensities of its own. Readers respond both to this moment and to their own responses to it, playing in the presence of the poem's opaquely foregrounded meanings.

Beowulf confronts the limits of knowledge in various forms: the unknowability of death, the secretive behavior of the poem's monsters, the epistemological distance of the past, and our inevitably fragmentary understanding of the poem itself. In the process, the poem also tells us something important about the methods and possibilities that it imagines for the work of discovery and literary interpretation more broadly. Scholars commonly address the poem as a text whose secrets need uncovering, but the poem's engagement with the mechanics of secrecy can be a cue for thinking through our own methods as literary critics in encounters with texts of the past. If we take Beowulf's treatment of secrecy as a guide for the poem's hermeneutic potential, then we find that the poem invites a kind of reading that rigorously, yet humbly, acknowledges how little we can actually know.

A family of Shakespearean characters I call “the perverse literalists” takes the figurative language of their interlocutors in the most literal sense. While they make us laugh, these characters' perversely literal interpretations also highlight the physical and experiential grounds of common figures of speech and prod their interlocutors and the reader into a deeper understanding of the conditions of embodiment. his inventive use of the literal is a trope in its own right, one that has already been useful to cognitive linguists, phenomenologists, and new materialists. Metaphors we consider dead are, as others have suggested, merely sleeping, and the act of waking them up can be not merely funny but profoundly insightful. We should reexamine the widespread aversion to the misuse of literally and think instead about what it can tell us about the physicality of such abstract experiences as love and luck, causality and cognition.

Discussions of the relation between drama and performance have been dominated by two symmetrical, emancipatory impulses. Performance scholars have, for the past half-century, sought to liberate performance from the authority of the drama. Literary scholars have, for centuries, if not millennia, sought to distinguish a “literary” dimension of the dramatic text free of the flux of performance. his essay diagnoses in Shakespeare's Hamlet an alternative story about the relation between drama and performance. Paying refreshed attention to the earlier and less famous of Hamlet's statements of dramatic theory—his blurb for the “excellent play” featuring Aeneas's speech to Dido—I find Hamlet bringing drama, especially in its “literary” dimension, crashing back into performance. his collision does not reinstitute the authority of the text; rather, it radically democratizes the scene of dramatic performance by “indigesting” the behaviors of the participants therein.

In the early nineteenth century, the antiquarian James Savage produced a print edition of John Winthrop's seventeenth-century manuscript journal. This transmedial reproduction illustrates the differing affordances of print and manuscript as vehicles for connecting to the past. Manuscripts offer a tangible link to long-dead people, but manuscripts' rarity encourages their sequestration in archives. In contrast, print editions make historical content more broadly accessible but provide a less direct material link to earlier eras. Print facsimiles of manuscript, such as the reproduction of Winthrop's handwriting included in Savage's edition, seek to embody the best of both media. But print facsimiles' promise of access to manuscript materiality elides their nature as temporal hybrids and their tendency to distort and damage their originals. The way that nineteenth-century antiquarians negotiated manuscript's and print's temporal affordances and juggled the competing prerogatives of past, present, and future makes those antiquarians useful models for understanding the stakes of digitization projects today.

The scenario of someone gazing at corpses plays an important role in the work of three authors representing three generations of Holocaust literature: Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Jonathan Littell. Plato and Aristotle used this scenario to address a key question raised by the concept of poetic vividness, which they defined as putting a described scene before the reader's eyes: If literature shows us gruesome sights that we should not desire to see or enjoy seeing, does this make literature a form of voyeurism? Weiss, Sebald, and Littell evoke corpse gazing in the context of the Holocaust to answer this question and to articulate unique poetic philosophies that respond to the challenge to literature's validity constituted by the Holocaust. The diferent ways in which they use corpse gazing reveal how Holocaust literature has changed and continues to change as the era of survivor testimony wanes.

How we read (closely, distantly, symptomatically, against the grain, or on the surface) has been vigorously debated, and PMLA has helped foster the debate. Distant reading as defined by Franco Moretti is the focus of a recent Theories and Methodologies feature in PMLA, and two forthcoming issues will address “cultures of reading.” Whether we define ourselves as English teachers, public intellectuals in the humanities, or literary or cultural studies scholars, this newly energized attention to how we read reminds us that the critical practice of reading is foundational to our work. No matter what else we do (collect interviews, analyze films, pursue ethnographic field-work), attentive reading is our primary method of analysis and assessment. How we do it and to what ends warrant thoughtful discussion.

The rebecca tuvel controversy may not seem like an example of the way we write now. my purpose in this essay is to convince you that it is.

It would be easy to assume that our students write, or aim to write, the way we do. after all, we, their instructors, provide them with models and sustained tutelage. Yet, while many students learn to negotiate the genres and conventions of specific disciplines as they proceed through college, their writing also moves beyond the concepts and practices we offer because they have views and desires of their own. A look at history reveals that students' concepts and practices have, in fact, long shaped the ways writing is approached in the academy, and consideration of a recent longitudinal study demonstrates some of the ways students continue that shaping process. he academy, then, offers a space of mutual influence where the expectations and goals of faculty members intersect with the interests and practices of student writers.

On our frigid first day of class, one week after donald trump's inauguration, my coteacher, christa donner, and I began our course Community Zine Projects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the question, Why zines now? In this era of blogs and Twitter, these tiny-edition handmade paper publications might seem irrelevant. So why take this class? The answers offered by this group of undergraduate and graduate student artists, writers, scholars, and educators were inspiring.

Language and flesh create each other. here you will find three stories, from three ongoing projects, that are each in some way about the metamorphosis between word and body. Each story is an example of my use of fiction writing as a scholarly tool: for understanding a map as a material object, for weaving lives from textual fragments, and for making a little world with little gods as a way of exploring a work of theory. Fiction, here, is an apparatus for paying new kinds of attention, as well as a vehicle for creating stories, worlds, and selves to give to others. Some persistent concerns in my fiction writing have deeply influenced how I pay attention to the documents I work with in my research: concerns with materiality and history, with the legibility of bodies, with fragmentariness and the transformative power of desire, with the nature of selves and flesh as constantly in the process of becoming, with voicing and with fiction as technologies of conversion. (I did not understand, before writing “The Gesture of Smoking a Pipe,” which you'll read below, that there was an important link in Vilém Flusser's work between physical gesture, selfhood, and the calling down of—and metamorphosis of selves into—gods. Now, the connection between movement, identity, and conversion is becoming central to my work as a historian.) Imagining materiality and metamorphoses this way—and practicing the metamorphosis and conversion of documents—has pointed me toward the ways that materiality and material experience emerge out of relations and relationships and the ways that the kind of orientations that relate bodies in space and time leave traces in our documents.

How do we write, now? since i am writing for the pages of the publications of the modern language association of america, I presume the “we” here describes teachers of literature in the United States. I, outside in that “we,” think that most of us write, for a variety of reasons, with the presumed inclusion of “the global South” in our audience; although I also have the feeling that a lot of us, folks that I do not really know, ignore this requirement altogether. Geraldine Heng's important work has made us aware of this absence in the study of the literature of the Middle Ages. From the early modern era on, however, progressive writing does have this cultural requirement.

Class size and teaching load, hierarchical relations between college and high school, mandates from federal and state government as well as school districts and principals, the socioeconomic status of communities in which schools are located, required external assessments, student and faculty retention rates, and literacy levels of English language learners all shape the way writing is taught in secondary school.

I am a clinical psychologist who conducted a thriving private practice for over twenty-five years. At some point, however, I tired of focusing on deep-seated problems and longed to help people make tangible, external changes in their lives.

Once, i needed the perfect time and place to write. i stood in my own way, affecting the dangers of worlds and audiences.