This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

Julia Kristeva's recent interest in the work of Simone De Beauvoir stems from a concern to identify transformative possibilities in the “society of the spectacle”—a term Kristeva appropriates from Guy Debord to diagnose contemporary society's reduction of personal identity, sociality, and meaning to the status of mere representation. Over the last fifteen years, the spectacle constitutes one of the central notions employed by Kristeva to measure the significance of twentieth-century figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes (discussed in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt), as well as the three women she addresses in her biographical trilogy on female genius—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. In 1996, in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva promised to return to the work of Beauvoir in the light of her analyses of Sartrean revolt. The past several years have begun to fulfill that promise. In 2002 Kristeva dedicated the conclusion to her trilogy on female genius to Beauvoir, and in 2003 she presented a lecture entitled “Beauvoir présente,” subsequently included in La haine et le pardon in 2005. The essay published here was presented in January 2008 as the keynote lecture at a conference in celebration of Beauvoir's centenary, which was initiated by a committee from the University of Paris 7 chaired by Kristeva.

In advocating a biocultural approach to literature, one is claiming an ineluctable relation between science and culture. Biology, for example, is as intrinsic to the embodied state of readers and writers as history and culture are intrinsic to the professional bodies of knowledge known as science and biology. To think of science without including a historical and cultural analysis would be like thinking of the literary text without the surrounding weave of active or dormant discursive knowledges. It is similarly limited to think of literature—or to debate its properties or existence—without considering the network of meanings we might learn from a scientific perspective. Combined, these propositions link with a more synthetic argument: that the biological without the cultural, or the cultural without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst.

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

Jeanette Winterson's beautiful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is a biography of a reader, a book about reading—reading for your life. In addition to the Bible, there are six books in the Plymouth Brethren Winterson household, and they are all nonfiction. Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Winterson, bans the reading of fiction, so young Jeanette reads in secret, in the outside lavatory or under covers at night, carefully depositing each read book under her mattress until it floats so dangerously high that it threatens to reveal the habit considered so vicious by her mother but that is sustaining Jeanette. Mrs. Winterson reads the Bible; young Jeanette has a memory of Jane Eyre read aloud in her mother's good reading voice, but Mrs. Winterson doctors it (with the skill of a clever reader, an astute stylist) so that Jane marries St. John Rivers and goes off to the mission with him. T. S. Eliot makes her cry in Accrington Public Library because his lines “This is one moment / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy” (from Murder in the Cathedral; qtd. in Winterson 39) give her hope that she will survive the moment she is in, and so does Gertrude Stein saying to Alice B. Toklas: “Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it” (from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; qtd. in Winterson 130). Jeanette Winterson claims that she “puts herself inside books for safe-keeping” and that “a tough life needs a tough language” (36, 40). The people around her have that tough language. She hears lines that she later locates in Shakespeare, a writer she regards as “not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour” (115). When she is homeless and living in her Mini, supporting herself at the local sixth-form college by working at the weekend market and the local library, she reads “English Literature A-Z,” in the order in which it is shelved at the Accrington Public Library (115–30). Books are home when she is homeless (61); they are doses of medicine (42), saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of human.

In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

A friend, long deceased, once told me how he had decided to specialize in Japanese literature. In the early 1970s, he heard a talk by a well-known Japanologist, who contrasted China study and Japan study by citing the opening lines of two primers for foreign students. The Chinese primer began with the line “I am hungry”; the Japanese one began with the line “The cherry blossoms are falling from the sky.” My friend chose to go the way of the cherry blossoms.

The United States looms large in the Latin American literary imagination. From Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí in the nineteenth century to Octavio Paz and Alberto Fuguet in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many Latin American writers have depicted the United States in their writings and pondered the cultural and historical significance of their powerful neighbor to the north. But perhaps no Latin American writer has had as close—and complicated—a relationship with the United States as Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes was a fierce critic of American culture and United States foreign policy; at the same time, there was much that he admired about the United States, and it was clear that he was eager to have his voice heard here.

Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).