The national book award for nonfiction was given in 2010 to Patti Smith for her book just kids. Since Patti Smith is a rock star as well as a poet and “punk icon,” her heartfelt remarks at the awards ceremony did more for the book business than any other tribute could have done. Smith told the assembled guests that as a young woman working at the Scribner Book Store, shelving books emblazoned with the National Book Award logo, she had dreamed of writing such a book herself. She concluded her acceptance speech with an impassioned defense of the printed book: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book” (“National Book Awards—2010”).

In the academic study of cinema, as in other kinds of academic discourses, one of the most commonly encountered questions these days tends to be some version of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be represented in this manner? What does it mean for me and my group to have been made invisible? These questions pertain, of course, to the urgency and prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. This is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nation, class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics thus to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality” (Andrew 348).' Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, currently faces its own “impending dissolution […] in […] transnational theorization” (Introduction 1). How did this state of affairs arise?

During the period covered by the Early Modern English Dictionary, witchcraft occupied the mind of the average man, and became the subject-matter of literature (dramatic, theological, philosophical, legal) to an extent probably not known in any other epoch. It is natural that such a predominating interest should have its effect on the vocabulary. There can now be described, with more detail than has hitherto been available, one instance in which the beliefs and practices of contemporary charlatans, pretending to supernatural connections, made an interesting development of meaning for a common word. This instance will be illustrated at length, for the sake of the analogies which it suggests as to possible starting points for studying other words. The discussion seems to indicate that elements in the problem go back to learned tradition and at the same time to primitive Teutonic folk-lore.

Few readers of Hudibras have escaped the fascination of trying to identify the characters in the poem. Yet after two hundred and fifty years, during which readers have wondered and scholars have pondered, we are little nearer the goal. We do not even know whether Butler intended his titular hero to be the satiric portrait of a particular Puritan or the personified picture of a type.

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:
Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestade
Der reinen wolken unverhofites blau
Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.

Dort nimm das tiefe gelb-das weiche grau
Von birken und von buchs-der wind ist lau-
Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz-
Erlese kiisse sie und flicht den kranz

Vergß auch diese lezten astern nicht-
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben
Und auch was übrig blieb von griinem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

Einsamer nie als im August:
Erfüllungsstunde-im Gelande
die roten und die goldenen Brande,
doch wo ist deiner Garten Lust?

Die Seen hell, die Himmel weich,
die Acker rein und glanzen leise,
doch wo sind Sieg und Siegsbeweise
aus dem von dir vertretenen Reich?

Wo alles sich durch Gluck beweist
und tauscht den Blick und tauscht die Ringe
im Weingeruch, im Rausch der Dinge-:
dienst du dem Gegengliick, dem Geist.

In two public addresses, Gottfried Benn declared himself one of the many admirers of the famous poem by Stefan George which begins: “Komm in den totgesagten park und schau …” Upon both occasions Benn gave his audience a short resume of his reasons for liking the poem. These remarks, whatever they tell us about George, reveal something about Benn also, for the poet—as T. S. Eliot points out—is a very special kind of critic, inasmuch as he, when commenting on the work of another creator, consciously or unconsciously “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.”

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”

German lexicographers are practically unanimous in deriving Kartaune, together with its variant Kartauwe, from an Italian word quartana, interpreted to mean either ‘a gun of the fourth magnitude’ or one ‘which shoots a ball of 25 pounds.‘ Kluge, for example, says:

The close relationship between the spirit and disease in the work of Thomas Mann is well known. Disease, far from being only a medical phenomenon, appears under certain conditions as a spiritual or, better, spiritualizing force which urges man, and above all the artist of genius, to overcome the limitations of common health and to raise himself to a new level of artistic experience and expression inaccessible to healthy-mediocrity. Mann never ignored the element of danger which is present in this adventurous contact with the ambiguity of life, hidden in disease. Following the romantic tradition, however, he shows such a high esteem for the productive impulse of illness that its perils are overshadowed by the positive value it has in the field of thought and art. In certain cases disease is supposed to serve the development of individual culture and literary genius. It may help to bring about another type of man, as superior to the average as the average man is to the animal, a type who represents a higher embodiment of the humanistic ideal.

The history of rime reveals an interesting coincidence. Rime was practically unknown to the ancients. It probably originated in the early mediaeval Latin of the age of Tertullian (155-222) in connection with the choral singing in the Christian churches, and came to prominence in the poetry of troubadours, precisely at the time when the modern European music came into existence. It is well known that the troubadours produced the first learned musicians in Europe. In the thirteenth century Adam de la Halle wrote his celebrated play, “Jeu de Robin et Marion,” which is considered as the first example of pastoral play and comic opera in France, and is—according to Suchier—the oldest musical play in Europe. At the same time it is one of the first dramatic experiments in which rime is extensively used. It was not before the fifteenth century, however, that rime was universally accepted throughout Northern Europe as a powerful device of literary expression. And at the same time, i.e., in the first half of the fifteenth century, John Dunsdale, an Englishman, invented counterpoint, and through his musical compositions acquired an international reputation. Thus our European sense for rime appears to have been trained in the great school of music. The origin of rime coincides with the origin of modern harmony.

One of the minor critical problems with regard to the early quartos and folios of Shakespeare relates to those textual irregularities in which the name of an actor appears in place of that of a character, suddenly transporting the reader from the land of make-believe to the Elizabethan tiring-room, and establishing a direct line of connection between the plays and the companies for which they were written.

In 1814 Mme de Staël published a curious second preface to her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (1788), her first important published work. In this new preface she shuns all discussion of Rousseau and simply restates her own ideas concerning woman. In her youthful work, despite occasional differences with Rousseau on other matters, Mme de Staël had espoused his idea of woman, abandoning all claims to feminine achievement for a Rousseauist enchantment with love. Her conception of woman, basically conservative, derived from a deep need not to diverge from the prejudices of her beloved father, whose notions paralleled Rousseau's. Mme de Staël's life departed radically from the conservative mold, however, and she experienced great difficulty in evolving a personal stand that could reconcile her confidence in her own gifts, emphasized in a passage from De la littérature, and her ideal of marital love, most explicitly stated in a chapter of De l'Allemagne. The second preface recapitulates these conflicts, but as an oblique reply to Rousseau's strictures on the woman of letters it is both an apologia for having lived the literary life and an understated espousal of the principle that the use of one's faculties is a positive good for all women.

It is not a matter of mere chance that the conception of a “calling” or “profession” is meeting with special interest in Germany. Several books have been written on the subject, some with the intention of showing that a better understanding of the idea of a “calling” would contribute considerably toward the building up of a new and improved social order. While thus practical and political interests are debating the problem, an attempt to reach the root of the question has been made by the German sociologist, Max Weber, who in his work Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism,1 undertook to answer the question, Why does Protestantism seem to be particularly congenial to the capitalistic type of civilization? According to him, it is the conception of a “calling” as a God-given task, developed by Luther and incorporated into Calvin's religious system, which is responsible for this fact. The word Beruf, English “calling,” itself in its present meaning, originated, he asserts, in Luther's translation of the Bible, and from that source it spread throughout the Germanic world.

A unque la temática religiosa constituya una de las facetas más ricas de toda la creación galdosiana, no cabe duda que ésta alcanza su apogeo en el autor, como cantera de materia novelable, entre 1876 y 1878. En cuatro Novelas de primera época, publicadas entre los años citados, concentró Galdós toda su extraordinaria capacidad de concreción literaria sobre esa problemática de actualidad insoslayable: Boña Perfecta (abril, 1876), Gloria (diciembre, 1876; mayo, 1877), Marianela (enero, 1878) y La familia de León Roch (junio, octubre y diciembre, 1878).

In a letter from William Taylor of Norwich to Robert Southey, is to be found perhaps the earliest trustworthy clue to the date of Borrow's first acquaintance with the German language. Writing on March 12th, 1821, Taylor, whose name will probably survive because of his relation to Borrow, says:

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”

It seems to be a widely accepted opinion that the words father (<OE fæder) and rather (OE rather <*hrathor) have had an identical historical development since ME. Both words occur in the questionnaire of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Both have been recorded regularly with rather placed in two entirely different contexts—“I'd rather go” and “rather cold.” The more than 400 records of the Atlas reveal conditions in present-day dialect. We shall try to establish, by comparing the vowel qualities as recorded in father and rather, whether the theories of the scholars are confirmed or not.

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.

Browning's “ring” metaphor has remained for seventy-nine years one of the most baffling figures of speech in English poetry His critics do not differ concerning either the formation of a gold ring or the poet's intention in his metaphor, but they differ greatly on the applicability of the metaphor. One group believes Browning to have said that the contribution made by his fancy disappeared at the completion of the poem. Its members therefore insist that Browning, in The Ring and the Book, reproduced faithfully the facts of the Old Yellow Book. They have attempted to explain that he was at once a scientific historian in his treatment of fact and a poet in his treatment of truth. They have been unwilling to discredit his historical accuracy or to admit that he was not first of all a poet.