BULGAKOV'S NOVEL The Master andMargarita is a confusing combination of different elements: satire, fantasy, serious philosophical and religious questioning.1 The variety of critical commentaries has already shown the impossibility of reducing it to one single interpretation. The action can be stated briefly. Satan, alias Woland, arrives in Moscow with two demonic henchmen, a thug Azazello and a tomcat Behemoth; plus an “interpreter,” Koroviev. Among bureaucrats, petty crooks, and those simply concerned with personal gain they cause havoc.2 But they give aid and protection to a persecuted writer in an asylum, the Master, and to his love, Margarita, after she has agreed to act as hostess for Satan's Ball. A hack poet, Ivan Homeless, is brought to a deeper understanding of life and becomes a “disciple” of the Master. Central to the book is the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate, the chapters of which form part of Bulgakov's text and conclude simultaneously with the story about the Master in an epilogue. A strong connection with the Faust tradition is evident.

Interpretations of Coleridge's Kubla Khan have varied widely. The commonest view has always been that the poem is a beautiful meaningless vision, “delicious nonsense” to be read or heard as pure music. Many ingenious and some over-ingenious explanations have however been published, the most extraordinary being that of Mr. Robert Graves, which Professor Lowes demolished with obvious gusto. According to this theory Mrs. Coleridge is represented in the “Abyssinian maid” whose music the poet could not remember; the “caves of ice” are Dorothy Wordsworth, whose love for Coleridge is thus shown to be purely intellectual; and the closing lines of the poem describe Coleridge's own superego getting after him about his opium. After this pseudo-Freudian flight, a mere literal interpretation will no doubt come as an anti-climax. It seems necessary now, however, to revise certain traditions, most of them outgrowths of Coleridge's own note prefixed to the poem upon its publication in the Christabel volume of 1816. The note is too familiar to require full quotation. The poet says that he had been prescribed an “anodyne, … from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair” while reading Purchas. “The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” “On awaking,” Coleridge continues, with what seemed a complete recollection of the whole, he “instantly and eagerly” wrote down the lines that are preserved. After an interruption by a man from Porlock on business, he was unable to recall the rest.

Grammar Games in the Classroom

It looked like an error of vocabulary. The class was reading a text by the east german author Thomas Brussig, Wasserfarben, and practicing the indirect discourse subjunctive. In the text, an East German school director, Schneider, summons a student to his office to reprimand him on his lack of motivation:

Keats often imagines the poetic process (the way poetry is created or conceived) as a flight from reality to some dreamworld of imagination. At other times it seems an identification with and heightening of the concrete and actual. What mediates between these two apparently contradictory views of aesthetic experience are certain fundamental analogies borrowed from contemporary science, in particular chemistry, that underlie his whole view of the poetic imagination and its operation. Keats's favorite metaphors for poetic creation reveal how the imagination transmutes material phenomena or sensations into poetic or “essential” form in accordance with the principles of ethereal chemistry described by such a writer as Sir Humphry Davy and by a process remarkably akin to that of chemical distillation. The essential forms of poetry derive their reality both from the identity of material phenomena and the transforming power of the mind. Later, however, Keats's attitude toward this process undergoes a notable change. Thus the Hermes episode in Lamia can be read as a parody of his whole earlier sense of the poetic process and its authenticity. Keats's knowledge of and reliance on science becomes an integral part of the more ambivalent view of poetry that characterizes his later career.

The attempt to contribute, however slightly, to the vast volume of writings on Rousseau is a venture which, all will agree, should be undertaken with diffidence. The character, achievements, and influence of the Great Romanticist have been studied, discussed and debated by so many eminent scholars, that, unless one has something new to offer, the careful critic will consider any attempt to reopen the complex subject as tedious as it is presumptuous. In the present instance, however, the writer feels that he has been fortunate enough to discover some material which, though of modest scope, will nevertheless prove of real interest to lovers of Rousseauiana.

“Were i a writer, and dead.” that phrase from the preface to roland barthes's 1971 sade fourier loyola embodies a slightly perverse expression of posthumous longing from the critic who composed “The Death of the Author” a few years earlier. Barthes goes on to say how much he would like it if “through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer,” his life were “to reduce itself to a few details,” to, since he loved neologisms, a handful of “biographemes” (9). These biographical details of taste and tone would somehow transport the writer into space, scatter, touch another body—that body too would be destined to dispersal. The result would be not a whole life but a life full of holes, the way Marcel Proust, Barthes thought, wrote his.

Through the notion of corruption, we come to the third example of bug sb. in Moufet's great pioneer work of entomology, of which the first two had been attached to the dung-beetle. As already described (l, 1037), the Insectorum … Theatrum was finished in 1590, though not printed till 1634.

The orthodox view regarding the introduction of end rime into English verse is succinctly set forth in the following quotations : “ Endrime, being a stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse, under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.” “ Die alliterierende Langzeile war die einzige in der ags. Poesie bekannte Versart und blieb in derselben bis zu ende der ersten ags. oder altenglischen Sprachperiode in Gebrauch.” “ The transformation of the O. E. alliterative line into rhyme verse did not take place before the Middle English period. It was due to the influence of the rhymed French and Latin verse.” “ Alliterative verse was remodelled on Latin and French verse—or foreign verses were directly imitated.” The implication is that there never existed in Anglo-Saxon any verse of a form different from that of the five-type alliterative verse which prevails in the corpus of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Recent critical variations on Du Bois's formulation of the African American double consciousness provide new ways of examining Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in relation to both modernism and the double consciousness itself. Read next to texts like The Art of the Novel and The Waste Land, Invisible Man shows a “signifying” stance toward modernism. At the same time, Ellison's book performs a profound critique of such double-voiced strategies as signifying and the blues.

J. Alfred Prufrock’s pathetic admission—“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”—states a central theme of many of T. S. Eliot’s works, which concern the frustrated struggle to achieve satisfactory expression. The poems are varied “raids on the inarticulate” (“East Coker”) by the inarticulate. Their failure of speech leads, in many poems, to the shifting of verbal action to nonhuman agents—a process epitomized by the thunder’s utterance, “da,” in The Waste Land. Given the weaknesses of language, the poems display a baffling world in which neither principles nor particulars can be expressed, so that poetry fails to work and, ultimately, ceases to matter. Among such inadequate words, Eliot concentrates, ironically or devoutly, on the paradox of the Incarnation expressed as the wordless Word. The end of Eliot’s exploration is a vision of a condition of stillness, which poems can point to but never reach.

Students of Elizabethan drama have practically agreed that James IV is one of Robert Greene's last undoubted plays, if not the very last in point of composition. They have, for the most part, assigned it to a date in or near 1590, and Professor C. M. Gayley has gone far enough to suggest that its composition belongs to the month of July, 1590. Arguments hitherto given for dating the play rest upon certain qualities of its style and structure that indicate the maturity of the dramatist's workmanship, similarities between lines of the play and Peele's The Hunting of Cupid (entered in the Stationers' Register, July 26, 1591), and possible allusions to events which transpired in Ireland and France in or near the year 1590.

In August 2009, when Richard Poirier died, I was mourning the death of Michael Jackson, with an intensity that surprised me. While I had admired Jackson's talent and followed his career with steady interest for decades, my grief was out of proportion to my feeling for him when he was alive. I felt caught up in a psychic complex that had hold of the wrong object but was determined, nonetheless, to play itself out. Puzzled by the intensity of my grief, I began reading everything about Jackson I could find—books, journalism, Web postings—while listening intently to his music, trying to hear something in it that would console me and justify my frenzied mourning. But instead of hearing that, I heard Poirier had also died.

The importance of music in James Joyce's life and art has always been evident. A volume of his poems he called Chamber Music; the title of his last book is that of an Irish-American ballad. Almost the first recollections of young Stephen Dedalus were musical; and one of the most moving passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes Stephen's hungry young brothers and sisters singing “Oft in the Stilly Night,” in which Stephen joins. Music plays an essential part in several stories in Dubliners, notably in “The Dead.” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of references to music and musicians.

Throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, Ethan Allen Greenwood, a rather pedantic young diarist, each day recorded the weather and the title of the book he was reading. He sometimes observed that a particular work was “instructive” or “entertaining” and occasionally noted the library from which the volume was borrowed–the Adelphi Fraternity Library, the Social Friends Library, or the unnamed circulating library he joined in 1806. His meticulous account of his activities and expenses–whether he was living at home in Worcester County, Massachusetts, or at Dartmouth College or later in Boston or traveling around the countryside as an itinerant painter–provides posterity with an unusually comprehensive portrait of “Ethan Allen Greenwood, his life and times.” Looking over the record that he left, we can well imagine that we know this serious and sober, parsimonious and abstemious young man Franklinesquely working his way toward fame and fortune. But then we encounter a curious diary entry: “Rode out with the ladies. Returned and spent the evening agreeably. What I do not write here will not be forgotten.”

As my starting point I shall take a statement about Goethe's relation to science which is both recent and precise, and which was made by Ronold Ring, professor of physics at Harvard University. According to King, Goethe was a true scientist in every respect, except that he limited his inquiry in two ways: he practiced observational science but rejected experimental science; and he formulated scientific insight in terms of fundamental principle, but not in terms of mathematical law. Goethe's aversion to experimental science is explained by King as a fear of analytical processes which do not lead to a subsequent reintegration or synthesis, and this fear, in turn, is attributed to Goethe's failure to understand that the application of mathematics to the findings of experimental science produces precisely such syntheses. King believes that “if Goethe had anticipated that out of analysis and planned experiment might rise the great tower of systematic world-science … he would have met the challenge of mathematics in nature and in life as resolutely and as effectively as he had met the challenge of observational science to the anti-rationalism of his youth.”

In a recent article on “The Sources of the Restoration Heroic Play,” Mr. William S. Clark discusses Elizabethan and French influences on heroic drama and supports the claim made by Sir Walter Scott, a century ago, that the heroic plays must be regarded as “the legitimate offspring” of the French heroic romances. Concerning the English influence, Mr. Clark observes: “In the face of this extensive dependence upon French suggestions the resemblances between the heroic plays and the English drama of earlier periods come to have much less significance.” Indeed, he regards as erroneous the opinion of scholars who have maintained that earlier English drama influenced “to a large degree” the heroic drama of the Restoration.

Gröber, in his history of Romance philology, recognizes Fauchet as the man who founded the study of mediaeval French literature “soweit es die ihm zugänglichen Hss. gestatteten.” England had to wait another two hundred years till Sharon Turner did her a like service with his History of England from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1795-1805). Fauchet was also a political historian of the mediaeval period, but in this field he had an illustrious predecessor, in the person of Jean Dutillet (d. 1570), lawyer and secretary to Henry II of France. This able man was commissioned by his king to investigate the trésor des chartres; the result was a six-volume report, La France ancienne, du gouvernement des trois estats en l'ordre de la justice de France avec les changements qui sont arrivés. This is the first modern history of a mediaeval period (the Capetian dynasty), and Dutillet followed it with treatises on the Albigensian Crusade and the Gallican Church, which were published after his death. Fauchet, following in Dutillet's footsteps, but on his own initiative, took as his province the first two dynasties of France. Before taking up the subject of his library it may be well to summarize what is known of Fauchet's life and work.

A recent critic declares of John Donne: “He had none of that enthusiasm for Greek culture which distinguished More, Colet, and Ascham. He appears to have studied certain Greek authors in Latin translations. . . . . His learning was chiefly of the Mediaeval type.” No evidence, it is true, comes forward to establish Donne's acquaintance at first hand with Greek authors. At the same time, an examination of the allusions to Greek mythology in the poetry of Donne makes it clear that he had part in the all-but-universal interest of the Elizabethans in classical material, and that he uses this material with characteristic independence and originality.

This essay elucidates Ellison's complex relation to Emerson, an issue that has not been adequately addressed in the criticism of the “most read” novel in the African American tradition, Invisible Man. Although in his fiction and critical writings, Ellison consciously claims his namesake's cultural vision, he sees the apparently universalist Emersonianism as circumscribed by an inherent racism that expels the African American from its sphere. Consequently the novelist affirms the promise of Emersonianism while neutralizing its racist aspect, resocializing its spiritualized premises, and reinterpreting its dogmatic implications. Ellison's appropriation and redirection of Emerson are especially manifest in his variations on the Emersonian senses of self-reliance, representativeness, and social organicism. Paradoxically, by “signifying” on Emerson's project, Ellison becomes a truer American scholar in the Emersonian tradition, which, by its internal logic, asks for critique and reinterpretation in each age.

Interpretations of Wuthering Heights often focus upon the grand passions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and the striking bond between them. But full and detailed consideration of the novel discourages the assumption that Emily Brontë is wholeheartedly endorsing their point of view, or any other. She consistently presents all her characters, Heathcliff and Catherine included, as blind to the world as others see it, and consequently as holding views that do not do justice to the fullness of things. Largely because of their myopia, all are ever at odds with one another, often physically, but usually conceptually, engaging in indecisive wars of words, benighted battles of too limited views. The battles occur as well within Catherine and Heathcliff, whose divided hearts reflect the confused divisions in the world at large. And the reader is fully implicated in the inconclusive conflicts, for his formulations and sympathies are repeatedly betrayed. Wuthering Heights provides him with no standard of judgment that comprehends the restricted ones of the characters, no privileged point of view to relieve his uncertainties. Whatever her intentions, Emily Brontë is clearly not just throwing her being vicariously into the lives of Heathcliff and Catherine. She possesses strong critical impulses and many contrary views, only one of them being that of Heathcliff.