Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his “audience” to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point. All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers. In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real—not imagined—fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.

In our introduction to bad modernisms, we traced the emergence of the new modernist studies, which was born on or about 1999 with the invention of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its annual conferences; with the provision of exciting new forums for exchange in the journals Modernism/Modernity and (later) Modernist Cultures; and with the publication of books, anthologies, and articles that took modernist scholarship in new methodological directions. When we offered that survey, one of our principal interests was to situate these events in a longer critical history of modernism in the arts. In the present report, we want to attend more closely to one or two recent developments that may be suggestive about the present and the immediate future of the study of modernist literature. Part of the empirical, though certainly far from scientific, basis of our considerations lies in our recent service on the MSA Book Prize committee (Walkowitz in 2005, Mao in 2006), through which we became acquainted with dozens of recent contributions to the field.

Trying to give an overview of the burgeoning area known as animal studies is, if you'll permit me the expression, a bit like herding cats. My recourse to that analogy is meant to suggest that “the animal,” when you think about it, is everywhere (including in the metaphors, similes, proverbs, and narratives we have relied on for centuries—millennia, even). Teach a course or write an article on the subject, and well-intentioned suggestions about interesting material pour in from all quarters. In my field alone, there's not just, say, the starring role of bear, deer, and dog at the heart of William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and the futility of trying to imagine Ernest Hemingway without his fraternity of bulls, lions, and fish or Marianne Moore without her menagerie of pangolins and jellyfish. There's also King Kong, Babe, Charlotte's Web, Seabiscuit, The Silence of the Lambs, The Horse Whisperer, and The Fly. There's the art of Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe, William Wegman, Bill Viola, Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Randolph, and Patricia Piccinini. And all those bird poems, from Percy Shelley's skylark and John Keats's nightingale to Edgar Allan Poe's raven and Wallace Stevens's blackbird. As any medievalist or early modern scholar will tell you, the question of the animal assumes, if anything, even more centrality in earlier periods; indeed, recent and emerging scholarship suggests a picture in which the idea of the animal that we have inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Descartes and Kant is better seen as marking a brief period (if the formative one for our prevailing intellectual, political, and juridical institutions) bookended by a pre- and posthumanism that think the human/animal distinction quite otherwise. So there's also William Hogarth and Hieronymus Bosch, The Faerie Queene and Beowulf. And, of course, there is the central place of the animal in non-Western literature and culture, written and oral, which would require another essay altogether.

Ecological criticism and queer theory seem incompatible, but if they met, there would be a fantastic explosion. How shall we accomplish this perverse, Frankensteinian meme splice? I'll propose some hypothetical methods and frameworks for a field that doesn't quite exist—queer ecology. (The pathbreaking work of Catriona Sandilands, Greta Gaard, and the journal Undercurrents must be acknowledged here.) This exercise in hubris is bound to rattle nerves and raise hackles, but please bear with me on this test flight. Start with the basics. Let's not create this field by comparing literary-critical apples and oranges. Let's do it the hard way, up from foundations (or unfoundations). Let's do it in the name of ecology itself, which demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also demands, in another key. Let's do it because our era requires it—we are losing touch with a fantasy Nature that never really existed (I capitalize Nature to make it look less natural), while we actively and passively destroy life-forms inhabiting and constituting the biosphere, in Earth's sixth mass extinction event. Giving up a fantasy is even harder than giving up a reality.

When my first daughter was born a few years ago, I entered a celebrity news blackout, a somewhat discomfiting condition for a sociologist of celebrity. When she entered preschool, though, I resubscribed to Us Weekly and devoured its morsels like a starving man at McDonald's: Kim Kardashian and her then-boyfriend ate at Chipotle on their first date! Ashton Kutcher was mad about his neighbor's noisy construction! Lindsay Lohan is back in rehab! I felt less disconnected from others, comforted by the familiar company, a little dirtier and a little lighter.

The Sea is Not a Metaphor. Figurative Language has its Place in Analyses of the Maritime World, Certainly, But Oceanic studies could be more invested in the uses, and problems, of what is literal in the face of the sea's abyss of representation. The appeal that figures of oscillation and circulation have had is easy to understand, since the sea, in William Boelhower's formulation, “leaves no traces, and has no place names, towns or dwelling places; it cannot be possessed.” Boelhower's description of the Atlantic world is representative of characterizations of the ocean in recent critical work: it is “fundamentally a space of dispersion, conjunction, distribution, contingency, heterogeneity, and of intersecting and stratified lines and images—in short, a field of strategic possibilities in which the Oceanic order holds all together in a common but highly fluid space” (92-93). The ready availability—and undeniable utility—of fluidity as an oceanic figure means that the actual sea has often been rendered immaterial in transnational work, however usefully such work formulates the ethos of transnationalism and oceanic studies alike. In this essay I advocate a practice of oceanic studies that is attentive to the material conditions and praxis of the maritime world, one that draws from the epistemological structures provided by the lives and writings of those for whom the sea was simultaneously workplace, home, passage, penitentiary, and promise. This would allow for a galvanization of the erasure, elision, and fluidity at work in the metaphorics of the sea that would better enable us to see and to study the work of oceanic literature.

Liberalism is globally triumphant, the dominant political ideology of the modern age. In recent decades, it increasingly has been based on the social contract tradition of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, which has been spectacularly revived by John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of Justice. Debates about the justice or injustice of the existing social order overwhelmingly use a liberal framework, typically centering on the comparative defensibility of social democratic or welfarist conceptions of liberalism versus free market, neoliberal conceptions. But there is a debate orthogonal to these familiar left-right disputes that tends to remain unacknowledged. Liberalism, I suggest, has historically been predominantly a racial liberalism, based on what has in effect been a “racial contract” among whites that denies equal personhood to people of color. White political philosophers have generally ignored this history, but only by recognizing it can we dismantle the structures of white racial privilege established by racial liberalism.

Recent interest in globalizing literary studies has largely involved attempts to locate conjunctures between contemporary literature and the economic formation of global capitalism and thereby to name a new literary structure of feeling—structure in terms of the organization of various literatures into a world system and feeling in terms of the literary production of new affects in new forms, styles, and genres. Its precedent is the idea of “world literature,” first articulated by Goethe in 1827 and recently recuperated. While many scholars resuscitating this concept offer a nominal apology for its Eurocentric origins, this Eurocentrism's constitutive hierarchies and asymmetries are seldom analyzed. Twenty-five years after Edward Said's Orientalism and the book's specific criticism of Goethe, it appears that the critique of Eurocentrism in general has exhausted itself, that one only needs to show awareness of it because it is predictable. Instead of working through the problem, one gives recognition to it, which serves as an expedient and efficient strategy of displacement, a tropological caveat, able to push aside obstacles on the path to globalist literary studies of global literature.

This essay theorizes an aspect of colonial discourse omitted from most critiques of orientalism by focusing on an array of Western male writers whose representations of an eroticized Arabic Orient cannot be disentangled from their imagined and real encounters abroad with male homosexuality. Suggesting that the historical possibility of sexual contact with and between Near Eastern men has often covertly underwritten the appeal of orientalism as a Western mode of perception and control. I examine three homoeroticizing strands of colonialist discourse: depictions of Egypt as a symbol of polymorphous desire, accounts of masquerading as the foreign other, and narratives of the colonial trade in boys. The contingency of Western conceptions of “homosexuality”—as identity category, sexual practice, and site of theoretical speculation—becomes apparent when they are brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures and crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.

Within or alongside the larger field of print culture, a new area for scholarship is emerging in the humanities and the more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies. This development is being driven by the cultural turn in departments of language and literature, by the development of digital archives that allow for such studies on a broader scale than ever before, and by what the producers of the Spectator Project have called “the special capabilities of the digital environment” (Center). Literary and historical disciplines engaged with the study of modern culture are finding in periodicals both a new resource and a pressing challenge to existing paradigms for the investigation of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and modern cultures. The forms of this new engagement range from Cary Nelson's suggestion, in Repression and Recovery, that periodicals should be read as texts that have a unity different from but comparable with that of individual books (219) to the organization of groups like the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, founded in 1968, and the more recently established Research Society for American Periodicals. Every year new books are appearing that emphasize peri–odicals and investigate the ways in which modern literature and the arts are connected to the culture of commerce and advertising and to the social, political, and scientific issues of the time.

In Black Skin. White Masks, Frantz Fanon transposes psychoanalysis from its gender-based framework of subject formation in order to interrogate racial subjectivity in the colonial context. Though the work inaugurates a psychoanalytic discourse of racial identity, Fanon—like Freud—takes the male as the norm. Women are implicitly present, nonetheless, in Fanon's conception of colonial identity—a mirroring relationship between white men and black men that is mediated through the bodies of women. This colonial dynamic suggests a sex-gender economy circulating women among men to construct and maintain racial categories. Though Fanon's analysis of black women's sexual desire has been dismissed as obviously sexist, the terms of his critique reveal norms of gender, class, and sexuality by which black women are bound and against which he formulates black masculinity. Analyzing gender in Fanon's text works to broaden the outline of black women's subjectivity and to delineate the interdependence of race and gender.

This essay begins by differentiating between narratively organized sequences of events and nonnarrative sequences associated with deductive reasoning, conversational exchanges, descriptions, and recipes. After reviewing classical accounts of narrative sequences, the essay sketches developments in language theory and cognitive science that have occurred after the heyday of structuralist narrative poetics and that throw further light on two interlinked questions: what is necessary to make a sequence of events a narrative, and what makes some narrative sequences more readily processed as stories than others? Both questions can be addressed by the concept, drawn from artificial-intelligence research, of “scripts”—knowledge representations storing finite, sequentially ordered groups of actions required for the accomplishment of particular tasks. Exploring some literary applications of a theoretical model based on scripts, the final section of the text outlines research strategies for a postclassical narratology that encompasses cognitive approaches to stories. By examining different modalities of the script-story interface, theorists of narrative may be able to rethink the historical development of narrative techniques and to understand better the differences among narrative genres at any given time.

Published to critical acclaim in 1928 and praised by W. E. B. Du Bois as the “best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt,” Larsen's Quicksand has since been criticized for its focus on the narrow world of the black bourgeoisie. But her treatment of race, gender, and culture is far more complex than these pronouncements suggest. This essay shows how Larsen's emphasis on the aesthetic—objets d'art, clothing, fabrics, decor—highlights problems of cultural constructs and self-representation. Often compared with her prolific contemporary Jessie Fauset, Larsen goes beyond Fauset in both stylistic experimentation and psychological insight, daring to explore the failure of her protagonist to transcend cultural concepts of race and gender at a time when one-dimensional success stories were the rule in black women's novels of racial uplift.

Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary studies, makes some meanings unrecoverable and others newly possible. A text endures as a nonintegral survivor, an echo of what it was and of what it might become, its resonance changing with shifts in interpretive contexts. Since this resonance cannot be addressed by synchronic historicism, I propose an alternative, diachronic historicism, inspired especially by scientific theories on background noise, by Einstein's account of the relativity of simultaneity, and by critiques of the visual bias in Western epistemology. I try to theorize the text as a temporal continuum, thick with receding and incipient nuances, exercising the ears of readers in divergent ways and yielding its words to contrary claims. Literature thus encourages a semantic democracy that honors disagreement as a crucial fact of civil society.

The spectacular rise of China as a superpower perhaps only now compels us to recalibrate existing discourses of empire and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid–eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.” This history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. The rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic (i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which present-day China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unreflective nationalism, whose flip side may be a new imperialism.