For Jorge Luis Borges, local color was overrated. In “the argentine writer and tradition” (1951), borges responded to the charges of critics who valued indigenous traditions and themes above all else; for Borges, just as Shakespeare could draw on Scandinavian history and Racine from the memories of the ancient world, so the Argentine writer should be permitted to mine the veins of the Western European tradition for the rich ore of literary art (Frisch 43). When the national writer does wish to produce a “truly native” text, he suggests, this should be accomplished with great subtlety, even to the extent of obscuring altogether the indigenous hues of local color in favor of an unspoken affiliation with the authorial homeland. A prime example of this technique, he avows, can be found in the Koran:

A few days ago, I discovered a curious confirmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there ever were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist, or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; he knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color. (181)

Vampire sexuality, as represented in Bram Stoker's Dracula, reveals itself both as a phenomenon that is terrifyingly foreign to typical experience and, paradoxically, as a distorted mirror of human behavior. On the one hand, the vampire inspires a xenophobic response because his needs violate the normal limits of exogamy: he is physiologically dependent on women who are foreign to him. On the other hand, the novel undermines the very idea of the “foreign” by suggesting that even the most bizarre aspects of a vampire's sex life are strangely familiar—usually because they parody or literalize human sexuality.

Focusing on the prolific mid-Victorian writing of Anthony Trollope, this essay takes present-day theoretical interest in “actually existing cosmopolitanism” for its cue. Trollope's works remind us that from a Victorian perspective, the word cosmopolitan was more likely to evoke the impersonal structures of capitalism and imperialism than an ethos of tolerance, world citizenship, or multiculturalism. Trollope wrote novels eulogizing England's rootedness alongside first-person accounts of colonial travel, making him the arch exemplar of a two-party foreign policy discourse. Whereas Barsetshire novels such as The Warden are archetypes of autoethnographic fiction, Trollope's travel writings construct a transportable mode of racialized Anglo-Saxonness. Evoking the asymmetrical play between two notions of property—heirloom “rootedness” and capitalist “cosmopolitanism”—Trollope's foreign policy imaginary illuminates the difficulties of a genuinely negotiated rooted cosmopolitanism. Exploration of the nineteenth century's actually existing cosmopolitanisms offers the opportunity to historicize the transnational contexts and experiences of an era in which capitalist and imperial expansion was as dynamic as the globalizing processes of our own day.

Narrative theorists generally assume that narratees in novels are distinct from actual readers, as narrators are from authors. In early novels by Stowe, Gaskell, and Eliot, however, “engaging narrators” encourage actual readers to identify with the “you” that appears in narrative interventions. These novelists explicitly hoped to stir actual readers' sympathy for real-world sufferers, possibly even to move readers to action. An engaging narrator, unlike a “distancing” one, calls the narratee “you” (not “the reader”); assumes that the narratee sympathizes with the story; claims that the characters are “real”; and consistently directs the actual reader to consider the parallels between the fiction and “real life.” Since these strategies seem to originate in certain nineteenth-century women's texts, narrative theory's omission of them may have implications for gender criticism.

“The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound” resonated as Marjorie Perloff's theme for the 2006 MLA Convention, where one could hear about this topic at panels, poetry readings, and the Presidential Forum. Addressing a large audience at the forum, Charles Bernstein tapped the microphone and loudly intoned, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” The moment was a self-conscious performance, perhaps parody, of lyric utterance addressed to “you” from “me”: even before beginning his speech, Bernstein called our attention to the amplification of voice. Instead of addressing any particular you, singular or plural, he seemed to address the microphone, a mediating apparatus that makes possible but also interrupts the intimacy of address that lyric poetry (after John Stuart Mill) invites us to overhear. Through the microphone, Bernstein gave new overtones to Mill's definition of poetry as “overheard,” which could also mean hearing it too much, making it too loud, overworking the metaphor of the voice that we think is speaking directly to us. Although we tend to think of sound as immediate (is it?), the sound of poetry is never heard without mediation, and we should attend to the medium.

Taking issue with associations between American literature and identity politics, this essay argues that to remap the culture of the United States in global terms is to problematize its exemplary and exceptionalist qualities and recognize inherent transnational frictions. As an example of this, the writings of Emerson and Thoreau in the 1840s are situated in relation to conflicts over the Oregon Territory, so that their textual designs come to seem less abstract or Neoplatonic than aggressively nationalistic. To restore a sense of the spatial problematic to American literature is to interrogate its more traditional integration within a temporal dimension of prophetic destiny. The essay concludes by suggesting that reexamining American allegories of interiority through pre-Romantic theories of spatial formation effectively produces a different perspective on texts that have become naturalized as examples of liberal self-reliance and institutionalized as types of classic American literature.

Ironic readings of Moll Flanders have illuminated the novel's psychological comedy at the expense of its social criticism and have elevated Defoe's art by lowering the moral status of its heroine. This essay defends and celebrates Moll as a character who co-opts the essentially criminal practices of a burgeoning capitalist patriarchy, thereby escaping the eternal feminine cycle of reproduction and entering the historical social cycle of production. Moll's anomie and anonymity reflect back on a disintegrating social order. Marriage, rendered newly insecure by the contradictions of waning patriarchal authority and of a market economy, proves a false haven for Moll; the novel's real quest is matriarchal—a search among three maternal figures for a viable economic model. Defoe eschews the myth of female purity, although Moll's finally successful but realistically compromised woman's estate is, by the standards of the myth, unacceptable to patriarchal critics.

In all his plays Shakespeare uses the Vergilian figure hendiadys some three hundred times, most frequently in his middle plays and most of all in Hamlet. Rare in English speech or other English poetry, hendiadys joins nouns, or sometimes adjectives, in a false or specious union (e.g., “sound and fury” for “furious sound”). Its effect in Hamlet, where it appears perhaps sixty-six times, is often to elevate, estrange, and baffle; and this stylistic use of conjoined terms that are neither parallel nor complementary mirrors the play's deepest themes—especially the suspect character of personal unions and metaphysical connections. Once aware that Shakespeare frequently combines terms this way, we can understand better many puzzling phrases, including some celebrated ones. Three appendixes list instances of hendiadys in Hamlet, tabulate its incidence in all the plays, and discuss some misleading definitions in the OED.

Historical statements about Tristram Shandy have in the past generally been hampered by critical misconceptions about the book. As long as it was taken to be a farrago, the value of which depended on a few lucky strokes on an otherwise haphazard and worthless canvas, efforts to see it in its historical context were doomed to failure. In effect, such a hodgepodge could have no important context. It was, as critics and historians repeated endlessly, a mad, inexplicable thing, unreasoned and unreasonable, having real kinship in literature only with other mad books, most of them long since wisely forgotten. As a whole it was really nothing, and consequently as a whole it could not be related to other wholes. Thus, with the exception of such matters as the peculiar sentence structure, the minute delineation of gesture, and the depiction of humor and sentiment, there were really no artistic devices to be placed in a historical context; all one could do was to place Sterne in the historical stream of those who were delightfully inartistic.

Translators' note. The first few pages of this essay are not printed here. In this omitted portion Yury Lotman distinguishes between two major functions of texts. The first function is the adequate transmission of information, and the second is the generation of new meanings. The most desirable condition for the first function is the complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages. Since this situation is virtually impossible, an intermediary is developed, which Lotman terms the “text-code.” The text-code, of which the Bible is the most obvious example, serves an interpretive and prescriptive role in the transmission of texts. The traditional linguistic, structural approach to analyzing texts, exemplified by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, often results in the construction of a text-code. The linguistic, structural approach presupposes a closed set or system whose elements can produce an infinite series of texts. In contrast, the second function of texts suggests an immanent, literary approach that attempts to situate texts within the confluence of their contexts, antecedents, and descendants. A text analyzed in its second function will be noted for the heterogeneity of its constituent elements, some of which form “texts within texts.” In the remainder of this essay, presented here in its entirety except for one elision, Lotman develops this approach, which he associates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

The replacement of the mechanical philosophy by an organic view of the cosmos is one of the most significant features of Romanticism. My article explains why the Romantics felt compelled to attack the mechanical philosophy and confirms Peckham's findings that the new organicism accounts for a large part of Romantic theory. This theory led to substantial progress in our understanding of the humanities. The Romantic world view is, however, no less flawed than the view it temporarily superseded: it is incompatible with the foundations of modern science.

It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.

During the African American literary renaissance of the 1850s, the act of narrating was novelized in many slave narratives. But Frederick Douglass's Hemic Slave (1853) and William Wells Brown's Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter (1853) are particularly noteworthy because they assert the importance of the fictive to the representation of facts in ways that empower these texts as novels, not as autobiographies. Brown and Douglass problematize the relative status of the factual and the fictive in their texts in order to raise questions about the nature and source of authority in narrative. These texts suggest that authority is not an inherent part of narrative discourse (whether factual or fictive) but rather a function of discourses as facilitated by the narrating voice.

The conceptual dominance of the “heterosexual” in modern thinking has conditioned us, when we consider the Canterbury Tales, to think about the Pardoner and his audience in essentialist terms. The Pardoner and the Host's kiss, however, stills and defers attempts by the masculine gaze of Harry and the “redeemed” pilgrims to control what the Pardoner means. By returning meaning to circulation, the kiss provides an instance in which the Pardoner's body can do more than simply deconstruct categories or gesture elsewhere for meaning. Offering an alternative view of the Pardoner's supposed “destructive otherness,” this essay suggests that his true import lies not in his alterity but in his similarity to the other pilgrims and ultimately to us as readers—in short, that the Pardoner constitutes the “open secret” of the Canterbury project.

This article claims that much of the contemporary scholarship on Nella Larsen's Passing attempts to correct the delusional apprehensions of the novel's main character, Irene Redfield. I suggest that this corrective effort ultimately places critics in the paranoid orbit they aim to diagnose. Critics are unable to escape the logic of paranoia primarily because they read Irene's paranoia according to a conventional tropology of paranoia, homosexuality, and delusional jealousy. The paranoid gesture tries to prove that Passing is “really about” homosexuality and simply passing itself off as a novel about racial passing. I work through the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and paranoia to show how the novel incessantly thematizes the processes by which race and sexuality are substantialized in the scholarship. Ultimately, it is because Passing rigorously drains identitarian categories of substance that the novel is available to the paranoid substantializing of critics.

Theories of grief based on Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia“ typically portray mourning as a disembodied process. This essay investigates the literary portrayal of grief in the context of phantom limb pain, a literally embodied, neurological response to loss. By comparing Derrida's image-based discussion of mourning with theories of embodied habit by Merleau-Ponty and of disability by Lennard Davis, this essay investigates the physical apprehension of loss caused by our habitual engagements with the bodies of our loved ones. Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty, Alfred Tennyson, and Donald Hall portray the physical confusions and discomforts of grief that occur when the griever takes up a habitual position in relation to a lost body. Embodied grief emerges in tangible illusions that, like the phantom limb, memorialize the lost beloved through misperceptions of material presence.

In an interview following his 7 may 2004 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense, admitted knowing about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison since they were first exposed in January. He also knew of the existence of photographs documenting the abuses, but he had not studied the images until shortly before they were shown to the public during the first week of May. In asserting that “[i]t is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place” and that “[w]ords don't do it,” Rumsfeld expressed, and even surpassed, one of the prime clichés of our time, that a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the power of visual images, the subject has an uncontrollable emotional response: “you cannot help but be outraged.”

The categories of art and nature organize both elite defenses of poetry and popular discussions of women's use of cosmetics in early modern England. The two discourses, for all their diversity, can be seen to constitute a single debate that complexly associates the limits on creativity with the feminine. By tracing the shifting evaluations and interrelations of nature and art in the relevant texts and the changing ways in which the categories are gendered, I show how the identification of either as feminine often accompanies an insistence on constraint and impairment. When these discourses —whether they privilege art or nature—cast doubt on human creativity, they do so by allying it with female agency, which, while granted a role, is invariably constructed negatively. (FED)