On 27 February 2009, The Essays for this PMLA issue on war were coming in, against a background of various wars. The Iraq War had claimed over 100,000 civilian lives. The newly elected Obama administration vowed to amp up efforts in Afghanistan. The rubble in Gaza still smoldered from the recent Israeli attacks. The ongoing conflict in Darfur had already left 300,000 people dead, not to mention the 2.5 million displaced. When President George W. Bush left office, his boundless war on terror had exacted more lives, money, civil-liberty concessions, and international goodwill than one could even begin to tally. These were just the newsworthy wars that happened to be featured that month in the New York Times. Other, “low-intensity” wars—the devastating fighting in East Congo, the ongoing Zapatista uprising, Colombia's fifty-year-old armed conflict, Sri Lanka's civil war, and similar struggles—simmered on the back burner. The topic of war seemed as urgent that February morning as it had two years earlier, when the editors proposed this special issue. Ironically, that morning's Times showcased “Weekend at War” in its Escapes section (Sokol). The oversize image showed a crowded ballroom full of happy dancers in World War II outfits swinging to a big band orchestra—the uniforms, insignia, hats, hairdos all conjured up another time. The caption read, “It's winter 2009, but for hundreds of reenactors, it's December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.”

The story of what's what in asian american studies is like the story of the profession at large: no one thinks in a vacuum. But the current drift in literary scholarship toward questions of transnationalism and globalization arrives at shores long explored by scholars who work on Asian America and the Pacific. Much of this familiarity has to do with the material history of their subjects, the ways in which questions of diaspora and integration, relations between the flows of people and the flows of things, and the narratives of international politics and imperialist violence constitute the ground of Asian America and indeed of the concept of the Pacific as an ocean, a sea of islands, a limit to westward expansion, and the lubricated surface of a certain transcultural history. The critical insights that unfold from the labor of Asian Americanist thought, like those gained through the study of African America and the Caribbean, do not add ethnographic detail to some larger and fundamentally established picture of the history of the United States or global modernity: they change the picture. They reframe it.

It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last. the era of sustainability is over. behind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It's been pretty to think so, but it's never been so. In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment. It seldom rains, mud doesn't clog our panpipes, and our sheep never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherdesses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things fit into simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William Empson's “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard's “pastoral ecology” (56–58). This green vision provides, in Gerrard's phrase, a “stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56). That's the dream toward which sustainability entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details. That's not the human experience of the nonhuman world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes constantly, unexpectedly, often painfully.

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.

There are historical grounds for the appearance of the Saracens in Old French literature. Their appearance upon French soil had been intermittent from the eighth to the tenth century, but in later centuries the point of contact between Christian and Infidel had been shifted first to Spain, and later to the eastern end of the Mediterranean. In the time of the Crusades the local memory of the presence of the Saracens preserved in popular tradition and in clerical records was utilized by the clerks and jongleurs for the specific purpose of arousing popular interest in the holy war. To state briefly our conclusions concerning the Saracens in Old French literature, we may say that they serve a distinct purpose in the earliest epic poems reflecting contemporary Crusade zeal, and that through the popularity of the epic poems they gained wide currency as exotic, marvellous, or romantic characters in mediaeval story.

Throughout his life, Jefferson maintained an active but intermittent interest in the study of Old English. He collected a sizable library in the subject and advocated the utility of Old English to the professions, especially law. His major work, the Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, proposed radical simplifications in pedagogy and instituted at the University of Virginia the first college course of Old English ever taught in America. In several important ways Jefferson accurately predicted the future of Old English studies, and he rightly criticized the Latinate bias of contemporary grammars. Nevertheless, his ignorance of Germanic philology undermined many of his ideas on the grammar and phonology of Old English.

The disputes centering about the oratorical value of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation in England have hinged mostly upon a study of printed tests current in Elizabethan times or shortly after. Professor Charles C. Fries, in a monograph surveying the whole of the discussion about Shakespeare's punctuation, notes that “some significance attaches to the fact ”that all of the five Elizabethan and Jacobean grammarians whose theories he adduces to help settle the dispute “refer to the use of these terms, comma, colon, and period, in classical rhetorical theory. ” And yet, in considering the question of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation, no one has investigated the systems of pointing which were associated with classical rhetorical theory and which may have been carried with that theory through the Middle Ages into Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Until an investigation of this matter is made, we are likely to be guilty once more of the pernicious practice of reading history backwards, understanding phenomena in terms of what succeeded them instead of what preceded, and explaining in terms already at hand for us phenomena which are not reducible to these terms.

In time, the Texas-born and California-rooted Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) may be regarded as a key American writer of our late twentieth century. In the interim, she is a foundational figure for the fields, markets, and affects known as Latina/o—studies, literature, theory, and metaphysics. Her most traveled concepts, such as “borderlands,” have also made a good impression in more legitimized areas of intellectual inquiry, including postcolonial theory and cultural studies. This last achievement has led the critic Frances R. Aparicio to note that the notion of “border subject” elaborated by Anzaldúa and others has “been the most important concept that Latino studies has contributed to cultural studies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America” (13).

Over the past decade the critical study of museums has matured, as the number of books, journals, and conferences devoted to all facets of museum studies has dramatically increased. While many approaches to the topic are possible, I would like to examine how museums in Asia function in religious ways and how religious sites, such as temples, have come to function as museums. Pursuing this tack might seem puzzling, or even controversial, to those familiar with Theodor W. Adorno's now well-known essay inveighing against the immuration of objects in museums, in which he emphasizes the unpleasant overtones of the German word museal (“museum-like”), used to describe “objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying…. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art” (175). Adorno's essay articulates a sentiment about museums that was born in the past and has persisted down to the present. We hear echoes of Adorno's disdain and feelings of dehumanization, for example, in James Boon's recent essay “Why Museums Make Me Sad,” which expresses his own melancholic reaction to museums. If museums are merely mausoleums where dead objects are housed, how could they possibly function as religious sites? How could their contents ever provide religious inspiration?

While a strong feminist tradition has virtually revolutionized the reading of Frankenstein, giving the work's feminine subject new visibility and centrality, this approach has simultaneously obscured access to the text's theatrical display of masculinity. Yet an understanding of the deployment of the male body (in the novel and in the cultural construction of Mary Shelley) might challenge current understandings of both the gendering of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's place in the gendering of literary history. The spectacle of masculinity haunts late-nineteenth-century Shelleyan iconography and informs the gendered narratives that shape such influential studies as James Rieger's twentieth-century textual and biographical reconstructions of Frankenstein and its author. Given this history, a feminist critique can profit from a reading of Frankenstein's insistent exhibition of masculinity, for the male spectacle unfixes gender hierarchies, illuminating the fractures and contradictions underlying masculine authority. (BL)

For several years now, at least since the 2000 census, the United States has in one way or another told itself that it needs to come to terms with what it means to live in a country of over forty million Latinos/as. Latina actors grace the covers of People magazine, Latin beats percolate through the earbuds of iPods, and McDonald's serves up breakfast burritos alongside its McMuffins. In the academic world, the increasing consciousness of the Latino/a presence in the United States means that it is now unthinkable for any major university not to have a program of studies focusing on the histories and cultures of this ill-defined population; it means border theory is increasingly present on our syllabi; and it means that we all nod our heads wisely when the name “Gloria Anzaldúa” is mentioned. For years before her untimely death, Anzaldúa complained bitterly about being “repeatedly tokeni[zed]” (“Haciendo Caras” xvi), as one of the same half dozen women continually called on as a resource for academic collaboration. Being a token meant that she saw clearly how she was both overhyped and treated less than seriously; worse, she felt drained of the energy that would allow her to continue her literary and political work.

Wordsworth poetically realizes an ecological ethics grounded on the self's non-assimilative encounter with the otherness of nonhuman things. Engaging the etymological force of the word thing, Stoic and Spinozan philosophy, and a poetic tradition of assigning a “face” to natural things, Wordsworth arrives at a lyric apprehension of the “life of things,” a life that human beings share with other thinking and insentient, substantial and circumstantial things. Instead of anthropomorphizing things, Wordsworth “thingicizes” ethics. This aspect of Wordsworth's poems is illuminated when they are read alongside the “ethics of things” developed by Silvia Benso in philosophical dialogue with two major figures of the continental tradition: Heidegger, who conceives of things without ethics, and Levinas, who advances an ethics without things.

Disability is an inescapable element of human existence and experience. Although it is rarely acknowledged as such, it is also a fundamental aspect of human diversity. It is so, first, in the sense that, worldwide, an enormous number of people are disabled. The proportion of disabled people in different national populations varies significantly with factors such as economic development, quality and availability of health care, and the age distribution of the population. (In the United States, people with disabilities make up the population's largest minority: Census 2000 found nearly twenty percent of the population over five years of age to be affected by some sort of disability [United States, Census Bureau].) Furthermore, because of the way this minority is constituted, it is arguably more diverse than those of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Disabilities may affect one's senses or one's mobility; they may be static or progressive, congenital or acquired, formal (affecting the shape of the body) or functional, visible or invisible.

Since 1978, the population of women prisoners in the united states has increased by four hundred percent. The number of women now living and dying in cells exceeds 200,000 (United States Dept. of Justice). They are without access to proper health care, without the children that many of them will lose permanently: they are without. These are stark details, obscene in their materiality. They are facts, but they are not the picture. The picture is impossible. Indeed, the picture is the problem.

The comic conclusion of Much Ado about Nothing, which ends with the conventional closure provided by multiple marriages, leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated. The language of the play sets up a complex association of the word, the sword, and the phallus and represents the “merry war” between the sexes as a masculine struggle to maintain control of representation. To read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated. Masculine privilege is contingent on the legibility of women, whose ambiguous “seeming” gravely threatens the men of Messina and provokes them to use various defensive strategies against it, from the exchange of tendentious jokes to the symbolic sacrifice of Hero. The play itself is implicated in these strategies insofar as the characters' plot to recuperate Claudio through the fiction of Hero's death is also the plot of the play.

During 1931–33 Michel Leiris took part in an ethnographic expedition across Africa, the highly publicized Dakar-Djibouti mission. This essay examines three documents related to the mission. The first, remarks that Leiris wrote before the trip, reveals his understanding, either conscious or unconscious, that theft would be an essential part of the mission's ethnographic strategy. In the second, a journal kept during the expedition, Leiris recorded specific incidents of theft. I argue that the ethnographers' thieving, portrayed as spontaneous acts, is in fact a political one that allows them to collect objects of great cultural significance while ensuring a European identity distinct from the identity of the colonized. The third document is the published version of the journal, which Leiris titled L'Afrique fantôme. Variants in this version and a photographic illustration prefigure Leiris's rethinking of ethnography's role in decolonization.

There is much divergence of opinion among scholars as to the naming of the main periods of the English language, and hardly any two agree in regard to the limits of each period. But in treating of the absolute participle, an arbitrary division must be made according to the occurrence and development of this form in the language.