In 1988, in the midst of the often acrimonious debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement, a button began to appear on Canadian lapels. It featured a section of the Stars and Stripes with a red maple leaf in the place of one star, and a caption read, “No, eh.” Through this image, the anti-free-trade side offered parodic resistance to what it saw as the assimilation—not to say wholesale economic engulfing—of Canada by the United States. Typically self-deprecatory, Canadian humor demanded that the rejection be couched in a gentle mocking of the national verbal tic: eh? is the terser but less elegant Canadian version of the French n'est-ce pas? and the German nicht wahr? In some ways the intellectual equivalent of NAFTA, the MLA is much older than the economic institution and somewhat less controversial. Nevertheless, it too is not unproblematic for Canadians, and to see why and how, one needs to understand something of the political and cultural relations between a very small and a very large nation when they adjoin.

With “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,” of 1897 (“Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”)—a meditation on how to set up a mental dice game that would visually inscribe the fatal play of human thought shipwrecked against unbeatable chance—Stéphane Mallarmé announced modernism. As his celebrated white sonnet about a swan stuck in the glacier of the blank page (“The new, lively, and lovely today”) had established the image of writing as a near-to-death experience, his equally celebrated understatement about how the ultimate presence of the rose depends on its absence “from any bouquet” had set up symbolism as the art of suggestion. Had any French poet ever had such influence on writers to come? such resonance for readers and artists? With Mallarmé modern poetry begins.

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition. The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” relates details of the philosopher's life and diet that corroborate this critique. Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality. From the opium eater's perspective, the beautiful and the sublime occur as effects, not of representation, but of incorporation, giving rise to the possibility of material thought. A specialized diet also challenges the norms of public medicine, such as those expressed in Thomas Beddoes's Hygiea, which grounds public health in private reflection and responsibility. De Quincey's Confessions affirms a subjectivity that is the effect of daily dosing.

At the conclusion of “Benito Cereno” Herman Melville “elucidate[s]” a curious “item or two,” including Cereno's ultragentlemanly apparel. This return to the issue of Cereno's clothes reiterates the Yankee Delano's preoccupation with Cereno as a dandy, restaging Delano's tendency to focus unswervingly on the apparently complex markers of class superiority signaled by such genteel refinement—and, within the logic of that preoccupation, to ignore the seemingly transparent truth presented by the naked black body. Melville mobilizes the figure of the dandy. I suggest, to interrogate the Yankee's veneration of social form, a veneration at odds with the North's smug self-figuration in 1855 as homogeneously democratic and classless, as morally superior to a South reviled for its social inequalities and slaveholding. By orchestrating the encounter between Yankee and dandy, Melville maps a peculiarly northern political field, pointing to an obfuscatory rhetoric of “apparent symbol[s]” that articulates the slave only polemically and ignores him otherwise.

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novel Arabesques. A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed in Arabesque and suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.