Focusing on several classic works of children's literature in English (such as The Wizard of Oz, the Alice books, and Peter Pan), this study examines the self-reflexive and metaliterary thrust of the genre's characteristic fantasy-framing device, the return-to-reality ending, and suggests a tripartite taxonomy of closural effects: therapeutic-socializing, fantasy-rejecting, and tragic. The familiarity of the return serves to screen conflicting adult agendas in literature for children. The traditional role of the adult as regulator of transitional states (i.e., of childhood itself) consorts oddly with the Romantic reversal of the adult-child hierarchy and with post-Romantic anxiety regarding both traditional and Romantic models of the relation between adult and child. While the return works to restore the conventional orders of significance temporarily neutralized by the fantasy plot, it also tends to ironize such conventions, including the convention of narrative closure.

When seen through the lens of the African American freedom struggle, the seemingly minor spaces and places federated by Gérard Genette under the term paratext take on a major role. Entangled throughout the margins and fringes of books and other kinds of texts (especially visual ones), the paratext (e.g., citations, prefaces, typeface) has served as a field through which white supremacy has been transacted indirectly: white-written prefaces to fugitive slave narratives are vivid examples. At the same time, the paratext has also served as a vector through which white power has been resisted. Examining the paratextual issues surrounding Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Without Sanctuary, James Allen's exhibition of lynching photography, this essay explores what is gained and lost when the paratext is used as a means of resisting racialized domination. (BAMcC)

Despite the fact that the stream of consciousness technique occupies an important position in twentieth-century fiction, there is no general agreement as to where the method originated or what it really is. As Frederick J. Hoffman observes, “Writers and critics are both confused by the idea of ‘interior monologue,’ or the ‘stream of consciousness,’ as it is more familiarly known.”1 Elizabeth Drew says that the stream of consciousness technique was “invented by Dorothy Richardson.”2 Katharine F. Gerould remarks that Henry James “introduced the method into English fiction.”3 In an editorial note appended to the English edition of Edouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés, James Laughlin holds that Dujardin invented interior monologue.4 In making this statement, he is following the position taken by Dujardin in Le Monologue intérieur, in which he attempts to describe and define the method first used by him, he says, in Les Lauriers.

Renaissance courtesy theory helped organize the pursuit and repression of social mobility in Elizabethan England; the letters of supplication written by courtiers seeking preferment record the practice of this aristocratic ideology. Such letters were governed by codified epistolary theory and by the oppressive exigencies of political connection and distance in a newly centralized nation-state. A sample set of these letters, from Toby Mathew to Sir Christopher Hatton, reveals an implicit rhetoric. Mathew presents conspicuously little “objective” argument in support of his technical qualifications for the post he seeks. Instead, the letters focus on depicting the suitor's personal and political graces and the patron's magnanimous power. Though these persuasions embody coherent arts of modest ostentation and flattery, they also reveal anxiety, and we cannot easily assess the reception their depictive products met. The congruent forms of erotic seduction, prayer, and self-enticement may offer important parallels.

Jean-François Lyotard has argued that the master narratives sustaining Western civilization in the past have been delegitimated and can no longer be presented. Although a sense of loss for these “missing contents” marks modernist and postmodernist literature, this sense seems more evident in texts written by men than in texts written by women. Women's texts that convey these missing contents do not look backward toward past master narratives. Rather, what is missing is the “not yet presented,” that which has not yet come into range. This pattern of bifurcation in modernism and postmodernism suggests that male texts are more readily adopted into the canon than female texts are because their nostalgic stance toward the past binds them, as female texts generally are not bound, to the long reach of the male Western narrative tradition. (EGF)

The idiom of a language is the atmosphere of thought which pervades the signification of all its words and governs the architecture of all its sentences. Idiom appears in the structure of the language as an effect; as a cause, it resides in the experiences and predilections of the speakers of the language. Arising in the domain of ideas, belonging to the content communicated rather than to the communicating instrument, idiom is the attitude of mind common to all members of a linguistic community and inherent in all their thinking. This common attitude creates the master pattern, the cardinal orientation of cognition, to which all the phrases of the language must conform.

The field of neurodiversity offers new ways to think about the history of the book and the history of reading. Because autistic individuals—especially those marked by “classical” symptoms—often report a strong reliance on physical objects and a pronounced tendency toward sensory engagement, their interests coincide with those of book historians and reception critics who investigate the embodied reading experience and the material aspects of the book. Indeed, the textual practices of autistic individuals can resemble those of bibliophiles, who often enjoy touching and smelling books. But autistic textual engagement occasionally takes singular forms, thereby pushing historians of the book into surprising new territory. For example, many classical autists attest to an intense intimacy and intercorporeity with the material book. In so doing they create opportunities for reflecting on the interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds.

This essay explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Don DeLillo in his essay on 9/11. What distinguishes the essay is less what it says about 9/11 than how, in responding to the event, it puts the question of response at stake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what 9/11 means, he instead shows that response is always a question of response-ability, or the ethical “how.” To image 9/11, DeLillo rhetorically activates a neorealist mode of seeing that differs ethically from other accounts of perception, such as those of (neo)phenomenology. Whereas the latter locate the perceiving subject's perspective outside an event, DeLillo insists that point of view—the act of seeing—is immanent in the event. Responding to this immanence, DeLillo's rhetoric of seeing suspends and questions any representational judgment of 9/11.

Critics of sex and gender in Tudor-Stuart theater generally subordinate the polymorphic eroticism of Jonson' plays to the rigor of his finales. But his meantimes and endings are dialectically intervolved. Delay, embodied in boy actors, is vital to his dramaturgy. For example, wooing Celia, Volpone imagines that he is playing young Antinous, retarding phallic threat with feminized display. In Volpone's deferrals and sartorial excitements, early modern spectators beheld a pattern of their own pleasures, in which sexual and social lusts commingled. Proposing that Jonson was more flexible than many have supposed, I analyze the convergence of homo- and heteroerotic desire on the figure of the pretty youth. Arguing that Epicoene's versatile appeal illuminates the charms of boy actors, I suggest that female spectators may have enjoyed boys, and the female roles the boys performed, without disturbing men's territorial enjoyments. In this way boy actors were crucial to the construction of an erotic community in the playhouse.

The failure to distinguish between Iser's “implied” reader (analogous to Booth's implied author and referring to the reading behavior a text demands of us) and the “characterized” reader (referred to directly or indirectly in the text) has promoted a good deal of critical confusion. Although the work of Wolff, Iser, Ong, Link, and Prince, among others, is crucial to our understanding of how fictional readers function in texts, it generates certain misleading conceptual categories. In part this confusion is due to a gap between continental and American reader-response theory. The “implied reader” is not a philosopher's stone that will objectify criticism, but it can be a useful concept to the newer communicationoriented theories of criticism.

Walking Through an Exhibit Takes Time: Time to Navigate the Museum Building, Time to Encounter Objects on Display That Witnessed times long past, or time to reflect on the relations among the presented past, the experienced present, and an imaginative future. Eliciting historical and aesthetic affect, museums are ineluctably bound up with temporalities—of viewing, of display, and of representation.

A collaboration between poetry and nationalism, exemplified by the tutelary border guard or “genius of the shore,” accounts for the interest of many Renaissance poems; redrawing the map, poets express the myths and grievances that hold their nations together. In “Lycidas,” Milton tries to redeem the fatal voyage of Edward King, his Anglo-Irish friend, by renewing the ideal of a missionary spirit, joining poet, saint, and soldier in a protectorate to bridge Ireland and England. In The Lusiads, Camões personifies the Cape of Storms as the titan Adamastor (“Unconquerable”), who curses the audacity of da Gama's voyagers and predicts their future calamities; hence the figure represents both the glory and the self-pity of Portugal and of its national poet. Though Milton and Camões hope for a bright colonial future, they turn their faces, like Benjamin's Angel of History, toward memories of shipwreck in the past.

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.

On saturdays we sometimes drive across the city to buy fish. We stand at the counter and try to choose fresh fish in a land-locked city—pink salmon, gray sole, yellow kabeljou, silver red roman. Delicious fish, at least six hours from the nearest coast. After that, we're back in the car, on the road. If we take the highway around the city, we see the mine dumps, man-made hills of gold dust, yellow in the winter sun, relics of the old gold mines on which this city was founded, heaving earth to the surface, the debris of wealth extraction. From all around, among and beyond the gold dumps, the city rises.

Recent readings of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which have been concerned primarily with the play's representation of difference, especially that of gender, religion, or race, often leave Jessica out of their analyses. Yet Jessica, as both a Jew and a willing Christian convert, enables the play to resolve the problem posed by the equations of white Christianity and national identity in the emerging discourse of English imperialism: how to render the Jew's difference as a difference of nature and as a difference of faith involving the act of will implicit in Christian baptism? Only by taking Shylock's measure in the light of the gender, racial, and religious ideologies that integrate his daughter into Venetian society can we account for the play's early modern representations of racialized Jews and of the Christians who imagined them.

Although the pivotal role of the Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky (1892-1945) in the development of modern linguistics and literary theory has been repeatedly stated by prominent scholars, he has remained virtually unknown outside Russia. Yakubinsky was educated at Petersburg University in 1909–15 during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, a field that hitherto had been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarians' positivist and historicist concerns were contested by a range of scholars interested in the functional diversity of language and concomitantly in the processuality of language as an individual and a collective activity. In this heated atmosphere of reevaluation and change Yakubinsky, with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Viktor B. Shklovsky, initiated the movement that later came to be called Russian formalism. In fact, the functional distinction between “poetic” and “practical” language that Yakubinsky introduced in his groundbreaking study “On the Sounds in Poetic Language” (“O ”; Jakubinskij 163-76) became the cornerstone of formalist criticism and “served as the activating principle for the Formalists' treatment of the fundamental problems of poetics” (Èjchenbaum 8). Yakubinsky thus laid the foundation for structuralism. However, he soon moved away from the formalists' preoccupation with poetic and literary texts and devoted himself to the social dimension of the functions and forms of language.

Stockhausen aside, how can anyone call the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers a work of art? Of what value is such a designation? What does calling the destruction of the Twin Towers a work of art assert about (performance) art, the authenticity of “what really happened,” and social morality during and after the first decade of the twenty-first century? To even begin to address these questions, I need to refer to the history of the avant-garde—because it has been avant-garde artists who for more than a century have called for the violent destruction of existing aesthetic, social, and political systems.

The sociocultural forms of accra, whose population is now an estimated 2.5 million people, grew form interactions with Europeans from the fifteenth century onward. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were three major European trading outposts on the coast—Ussher Fort (Dutch), James Fort (British), and Christiansborg Castle (Danish). Each European post imparted a particular character to its neighborhood and, more importantly, triggered specific dynamics of social struggle both between the locals and the Europeans and within each local group. Traces of the European influence can also be discerned in some of the street names—Bannerman Road, Hansen Road, Bruce Road, Lokko Road, Rev Richter Road, Joel Sonne Street—which evoke the Euro-African families that formed the earliest local elites. The postmodern maxims that reality is a product of language and that language is essentially unstable and contradictory are by now standard views in critical theory. But I sometimes wonder what conclusion the postmodernists would have come to if for their reflections they had taken not the history of Western philosophy but rather the evolution of the polyglot and hybrid forms of language, ideas, society, and culture that are abundant in the non-Western societies that make up the bulk of the world's population. Accra might have provided a rich site for such reflections.