After showing that nine percent of William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects of Running, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just as Running prolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another.

Imported material forms were central to the settlement of Australia as a penal colony, beginning with the “discovery” of the continent by James Cook, who took possession of New South Wales in 1770 by naming Possession Island. The first part of this article traces the intersection in early journals and legal records between material instability and naming, arguing that as Aboriginal peoples and convicts challenged the social meaning of objects, the ability to refer to those objects became essential. The second part explores failed naming in David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon (1993), set on the early-nineteenth-century frontier, whose central character calls himself a “B-b-british object,” stuttered words that evoke the historical importance and the vulnerability of imported goods during colonization and settlement in Australia.

Because most early modern readers did not leave behind traces of their reading practices and thus remain anonymous, a more inclusive history of reading requires a willingness to engage in speculation. In the case of Tudor editions of the romance he Historye of Blanchardine, responsible speculation involves resisting the desire for textual stabilities, including the author's name and the work's status as a reprinted text. Doing so reveals that what appear to be reissued editions of William Caxton's version of this romance, Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489-90), are in fact a network of adapted texts whose representations of gender challenge current understandings of the Elizabethan romance, its producers, and its target audience. More specifically, what seems to be a fragment of the 1597 edition is instead an early example of fan fiction, a modern narrative mode that offers a methodological model for scholars interested in adopting more inspired approaches to material evidence.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is adolescent in the sense provided by Julia Kristeva–it offers critical insight into the breakdown of categories that support representational and ethical certainties. The ethical stance of its author, Daniel Handler, is complicated–urgent, resonant, distressing–caught in the devious irony endemic to metafictional play and to the sensibility of Generation X. Such irony casts light too on literary criticism's changing treatment of the critical subspecialty of children's literature as well as on its renewed but uneasy interest in ethics as revision of past humanism. A Series offers an ethics of practice, one that recognizes its dependence on the impulses it critiques. Just as the books' postmodern orphans improvise in the face of menace that doesn't stop, Handler's irony pictures a world where ethics can never be more than a provisional entente negotiating impossible ideals.

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.

By giving a brief history of emotivism in close reading, this article offers a new context for understanding the contemporary uneasiness about close reading and about the proliferating array of alternative kinds of reading it has prompted. Emotivism refers to the subcurrent of linguistic thought that shaped the institutional formation of New Critical closeness by distinguishing propositional from emotive meaning. Instead of amending our closeness to texts by dispensing with critique, or focusing on surfaces and description to the exclusion of textual depth, either of which might inadvertently encourage new kinds of emotivism, this article suggests we bear in mind—as the conversation goes on—the mid-century counteremotivist critics, such as Kenneth Burke, who advocated a kind of reading attuned to the interactive processes held in apparent stasis by literary form.

In 1958 Marcel Duchamp and a friend gained access to the modernist poet Mina Loy's apartment on stanton street near the Bowery in New York, so that they could display the art she was storing there in a one-woman show of her assemblage artwork (Burke, Becoming 433–34). The show, which Loy herself couldn't attend since she was unwell and living with family in Aspen, Colorado, was known as the Bodley Gallery Exhibition and generated considerable interest, even drawing the increasingly reclusive Djuna Barnes to its lively opening (434). The show was described by Stuart Preston in a New York Times review as a boxing match between the popular art of the time and “Mina Loy's shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery” (qtd. in Burke, Becoming 434). Loy's dadaist assemblages, Preston's review made clear, were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: the “alliance” they reflected “between Dada and social comment,” he wrote, was “downright sinister,” and they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique. Loy's artwork incorporated discarded objects, such as bottles and pieces of cardboard, from New York City's liminal spaces—especially the Bowery's alleys and abandoned buildings, places where the homeless and unemployed gathered in desperate conditions. Transporting the gutter to the gallery, this body of work depended on her close relationship to the city's so-called refuse, the homeless people she befriended who helped her collect the objects she recycled as art. It has been almost impossible to know what Loy's body of assemblage artwork—carefully dusted off and hung up by Duchamp—looked like at the Bodley Gallery show. But one fellow Bowery artist, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, had photographed Loy's assemblages. Abbott and Loy had been friends since the 1920s, when they frequented the same art scene in Paris, where Abbott was Man Ray's assistant. Abbott photographed Loy's children, and the two artists are pictured together, along with Tristan Tzara, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson, in a famous photograph taken at a party in Constantin Brancusi's studio in 1920.1 In this image, Loy and Abbott fill the center of the frame; Abbott's eyes confront the camera, as if to say, “I know what you're up to,” her confident head emerging over Loy's right shoulder—Loy looking as ethereal as she does glamorous. Their friendship picked up again in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was defined by Abbott's interest in Loy's success and well-being.

“I Can't Go on, I'll Go On.” Both Parts of This Bleak Acknowledgment By Samuel Beckett's Unnamable (407) seem to me appropriate (if not particularly gracious) responses to the honor of the preceding essays, which grow out of a distinguished 2008 MLA panel on what the program called my “career in writing.” First, there is, inevitably, a finalizing or conclusive connotation inherent in both the event and the reference to a “career,” a career that, at least for the purposes of the event meant to celebrate it, can only be located behind me. So the only way to avoid the entombment, the modest monumentalizing, unintentionally (I assume) accomplished in these essays is to insist, as Beckett does, that I must go on. If, to continue on another Beckettian note, there has been a career in writing, it has perhaps been because, somehow, I have not succeeded in failing, or I have at least (or at most) insufficiently failed. The Beckettian voice's exasperation at never having failed enough has always seemed to me to have something to do with the experience of the energizing effect of failures in language, an energy that prevents a voice from entering, and being locked into, the presumed history of a presumed culture.

I chose the title of this essay in part because I will be discussing Leo Bersani's work on painting and cinema, and Doing so as a friend rather than a rival or adversary. But the three words in my title also describe how Bersani himself approaches the visible world: when he sees something, he looks with it, not at it. He is drawn to artists who look in the same way—artists who challenge the notion that seeing is a one-way action, which a seer performs on a visual object. Terrence Malick is a particularly good example of this type of artist, since he not only looks with the world but also makes this action the center of his films. As Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit put it in their discussion of The Thin Red Line, Malick shows us both “the world his characters are registering” and “the imprint of the act of looking on the subject of the looking” (Forms 146).

In 2005 Emer O'Sullivan published the most comprehensive outline to date of a comparative approach to the study of literature and other cultural productions for the young. She presents nine constituent areas of comparative study in relation to children's literature (theory of children's literature, contact and transfer studies, comparative poetics, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies, image studies, comparative genre studies, comparative historiography of children's literature, comparative history of children's literature studies), which she illustrates with examples from around the world. But, although extensive, O'Sullivan's proposal is not without its blind spots, and she acknowledges that it “can only be enhanced by future discussion and modification” (12). With the aim of bolstering the field of children's literature, I here propose an area of comparative research overlooked by O'Sullivan. I also suggest extensions to her conception of comparative literature and to her handling of reception or reader response.

In “Tomida femina” (“A swollen woman”), a tenth-century charm written in Occitan, the vernacular of the south of France, a birthing woman and her helpers intone magical language during the most intense moments of childbirth. The poem permits us, with brief but uncommon intimacy, to imagine the lives of women long ago. It takes its place in a European tradition of birthing charms, including others written in Latin, German, and English. These charms, and in particular “Tomida femina,” provide an image of vigorous medieval women in childbirth that precedes the images of women in other secular Romance lyrics—young girls in love in the Mozarabic kharjas, idealized ladies in troubadour songs, and passionate aristocratic women in the poetry of the Occitan trobairitz.

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.

If the value of the study of literature were self-evident, there would be no need to pose this question. That such is not the case is clear from the virulence of the debates about higher education in the humanities that have roiled the profession and areas beyond. Professors of literature have had a lot to say to one another about this question but not, perhaps, as much to say to their students. Yet faculty members implicitly answer this question all the time, in the courses they teach, especially in introductory, or “gateway,” courses. I will address the question, then, as concretely as possible, by way of the introductory course for the English major my colleagues and I have designed together and discussed repeatedly over the past two decades at Wesleyan University. In so doing, I will argue that the value of studying literature is precisely that it poses value as a question, not an answer.

In 1923 the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky returned to the USSR after a year of exile. Tike his entire cohort of “fellow travelers,” he accommodated himself to the new Soviet regime. He did so in the language of travel and other kinds of movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, nomadism—a prominent motif in works by Shklovsky from A Sentimental Journey through Marco Polo—emerges as his central figure for accommodation to official culture. This association occurs through the submerged double meaning of his signature term ostranenie—at once defamiliarization and reterritorialization. This duality of ostranenie has implications for our broader understanding of the way mobility is active in cultural production and intertwined with structures of power. In the Soviet case, ostranenie underscores that nomadic movement is essential to the operation of cultural agents, whose relative freedom becomes a mechanism of state authority and control.

Virginia Woolf's “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40) develops her most radical ontological and pedagogical insights, which are inseparably connected by her concept “moments of being”—redefined in this essay as pedagogical accidents. This redefinition opens readers to an unexplored dimension of Woolf's late thought: namely, the reorientation of learning and teaching around the creative function of accidents, the unhinged temporality of “sudden violent shock[s]” that repeat their difference across one's lifespan, and the prioritization of feeling. The nonlinear, nonrealist, and nonsequential temporality of these events serves Woolf as a model not only for the memoir but for the double task of learning how to write her life otherwise and of teaching her potential readers the shapes and intensities of their own selves and lives. My reading of Woolf's memoir as a work of “sensuous pedagogy” attempts to account for the importance of feeling to this task.