In her introduction to the english institute's e-book on periodization, the editor, virginia jackson, remarks on the ability of its “digital format” to invite innovative ways of interacting with texts. Marshall Brown's article in the book, for example, allows readers to hear Joseph Haydn's music while they read nineteenth-century literature, giving them an immediate understanding of the musical metaphors Brown uses for describing literary history. Our contemporary presence and capabilities in the digital world, Brown suggests, may help us to understand periods as “linked episodes within the rolling flood of time,” enabling what Jackson describes as “a literary historical process” that “is not progress but wave, not transcendence” but, as Brown writes, “the metrics and bar lines shaping the pulse of history'” (Jackson, par. 4). The authors of On Periodization suggest a practice of periodization that allows for simultaneities: “a new plane of historicity on which several temporalities unfold at once” (Jackson, par. 4). This conception of time is made possible by the present moment, the (relatively) new technologies we have in our midst, through which this e-book is expressed. This “new plane” of simultaneities reflects the primacy of the present in that the technologies we use are actively shaping how we experience literature and literary history (Martin 153–56). Furthermore, while chronological periodization can dis-embed events from their places, our process of reading rhizomically in the digital world may move us to reconsider the primacy of place.

There is a surprising coherence between the human self-understanding and worldview that underpin the theoretical program of the Austrian marginalist economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), first articulated in his 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Economics), and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic project. Both are grounded in a Hobbesian-Darwinian emphasis on monadic individuals guided by egoistic drives, self-interest, and a competitive struggle for individual advantage (Birken, Consuming Desire 1–39). Both, moreover, are steeped in a kind of Malthusian pessimism that invokes increasing scarcity of resources as the underlying cause of human existential anxiety and as the defining feature of human interactions with the “real” world of commodities (Riesman 3). For the Mengerian marginalist as for the Freudian psychoanalyst, the driving forces behind human life are existential need, the instinct for self-preservation and self-improvement, and the development of successful strategies for managing and satisfying needs.

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future

takes shape

too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving

—Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”

Conserving This, Conserving That

Just a few lines from jorie graham's poem “sea change” evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living “sustainable.” Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as “manufacturing plants for wood,” epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader “municipal housekeeping” movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as “turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash.” Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer's wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground 63–70).

This essay argues that the georgic poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar offer his most incisive representations of the hardships faced by African Americans after Reconstruction. Written in the context of Jim Crow laws, vagrancy statutes, and other coercive means of restricting the mobility of southern blacks and extracting compulsory labor from them, these poems present the hard agrarian work characteristic of the rural Black Belt. They confront the pervasive rhetoric of racial uplift through labor, popularized by Booker T. Washington, that dominates American social discourse on race in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries, by revealing the negative freedom of black agrarian labor. At the same time, these poems assert the humanity and blamelessness of African Americans in the face of institutional racism. The essay aims to recast Dunbar's legacy by turning attention from his dialect poetry toward his georgic analyses of the uneven modernization of racialized labor.

When i agreed to contribute to this issue, i wanted to focus a debate about periodization for once solely on foreign languages and not, as is usually the case, on a single foreign language in comparison with English. To do this, I intended to take a new look at one of the most successful examples of the new periodization: the long eighteenth century. The concept first came to the fore and gained wide critical currency in English studies and in history. In these fields, a number of differently long eighteenth centuries have been proposed and practiced—an eighteenth century that begins as early as 1660, for example, and one that ends as late as 1832. Among the many consequences of the various choices of chronological limits for the long eighteenth century, probably the most significant is the way in which the Enlightenment's role is heightened or diminished in each version of the period. Since in intellectual and literary terms the Enlightenment's impact was felt all over western Europe in the 1700s, I decided that this should be one issue of periodization whose presence would be by now visible in most if not all modern foreign languages. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong. And what I learned on the way to that realization caused me to shift course radically.

When the subject is the relation between capitalism and American literature, few novels come more readily to mind than William Dean Howells's 1885 The Rise of Silas Lapham. “Published at the height of America's industrial expansion,” writes Wayne Westbrook in a typical assessment, it “pictures an era and personifies a type. The Era is the Gilded Age. The type is the American businessman” (59). But for a novel self-consciously focused on business, The Rise of Silas Lapham is surprisingly interested in the gift. Counter to Howells's famous later assertion that “[a]t present business is the only human solidarity,” the gift turns out to be the sole “chain” uniting Howells's characters against whatever interests, tastes, and principles separate them. Hidden in plain sight, the main plot of the novel delineates the awkward yet ultimately binding relations between the Brahmin Coreys and the rising Lapham family, which come about not because the Laphams “buy their way into society” (Michaels 40) but because they give the Coreys a gift so true and so large that it must be recognized and reciprocated. When the women of both families happen to be staying at a Canadian resort, Mrs. Lapham spontaneously comes to Mrs. Corey's rescue and, as a French doctor later makes uncomfortably explicit, saves Mrs. Corey's life. “A certain intimacy inevitably followed,” Howells writes, as the Coreys are “gratefully recognizant” of the gift and their “singular obligation” to the Laphams (24–25). This gift has received no critical attention even though it engenders the main plot of the novel as the initial “helplessly contracted” (172) obligation leads to further contact between the families, from dinner to business dealings to marriage. None of these consequences are comfortable; indeed, each of them is excruciating and poses one of the text's central questions: how does one reciprocate such an impossibly large gift when one shares no interests or tastes with the people to whom one is now bound by gratitude and debt? Mrs. Lapham's gift to Mrs. Corey not only transforms the Coreys' life forever (in a way, they pay with their son for the mother's life), but it also transforms Howells's novel from a novel about business to a narrative about gifts. This is far from incidental. Howells doubles the Corey-Lapham plot as Silas Lapham, in turn, believes that he owes his life to Jim Millon, who, during the Civil War, took a bullet for Lapham and died. The Laphams equally struggle with their own uncomfortable obligation to the working-class Deweys. While neither the Coreys nor the Laphams can figure out how to respond to impossibly large gifts given to them by people with whom they share nothing else, they do know instinctively that they must do so and reciprocate in one way or another. Howells's novel tells the story of these gifts and their confusing, maddening, and binding obligations. Indeed, Howells's supposed business novel can only spin itself out on these gifts, given and recognized as such.

ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's 350.org, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.1 So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.

Martin scorsese's big-budget, 3-d extravaganza hugo, which opens with images of Paris as a huge timekeeping mechanism, undertakes a dual rescue mission. It reclaims Georges Méliès's early cinematic fantasies from the violence of time and progress and saves a young, industrious boy from the violence of a society that has no room for children who fend for themselves outside a family. In doing so, Hugo assures the viewer that the technological wonder of future filmmaking is rooted in a romanticized image of a thoroughly bourgeois past. The movie's threats are embedded in a mise-en-scène full of iconic imagery of modern industry made fantastic. The giant clocks and gears located above and in the walls of Paris's largest train station, which are voluntarily tended by a lone child laborer, evoke neither wonder nor laughter as much as a sense of menace in connection with the young protagonist scurrying around in them. While Scorsese's film situates the origins of movies in fin-de-siècle Paris as the modern industrial city, it also takes pains to make Méliès's products seem like dreams, cultivated in a greenhouse of industrial activity to become larger-than-life projections obscuring modern industry. Tater I will consider the consequences of the film's arc taking this precocious lad from the world dominated by fanciful dangers into a home: for the moment it will suffice to remember that Hugo evokes work as the source from which humans and an automaton derive their purpose and that the film means this to be self-evident to the audience. At the same time it sets in motion a narrative that aims to remove the protagonist from the world dominated by signs of modern industrial work and from the labor that seems such a distressing burden on him at the film's outset. This essay explores that apparent contradiction in the broader history of cinema.

Contemporary accounts of professionalism often gloss over a crucial ambiguity. On one hand, professional has long denoted a privileged class position, distinguishing the trained specialist from the interchangeable wage laborer. On the other hand, it has come to convey an existential pursuit of fulfillment through one's work, which extends in principle to all workers regardless of class. This essay shows how J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) puts pressure on this contradictory logic by situating it in the crisis of a biopolitical state, late-apartheid South Africa. In this state, with its dual mandate of welfare and security, character is impoverished, caught between the search for professional fulfillment and the barbaric violence that conditions every economic relation in the state structure. This tension generates alternative possibilities for the portrayal of character, however, as we see in the enigmatic persona of Michael K.

In a scene in the novel Los Bandidos de río Frío (the bandits of RíO Frío [1888–91]), by the Mexican writer manuel payno, one of the characters, a businessman named Manuel Escandón, tells his friends that he gained four hundred pesos from being robbed by a group of bandits led by Mariano Evaristo, an artisan turned murderer. Bernardo Couto, a victim of the same robbery, tells Escandón he doesn't believe the claim. Escandón shows him a piece of paper where he has scribbled some numbers and tells him, “In these double entries there is no mistake” (415). Joaquín Pesado, another friend, sides with Escandón and compares the results of double-entry bookkeeping to theological truths.

Any discussion of how the humanities can contribute to sustainability or how the humanities are sustainable must begin with what critics of the sustainability concept have called its cultural deficit: academic humanists and artists have not been central to discussions of what sustainability is and might be. Sustainability is most commonly understood in economic terms, as production that respects ecological carrying capacities. Because the sustainability concept is “squishy,” in Bill McKibben's words, it invariably drifts toward the more pragmatic project of sustainable development, the goal of which is keeping modernization viable—a goal dubious to many environmentalists as well as to cultural critics (102). In an era when the rhetoric of crisis dominates public conversation about political, social, educational, and environmental affairs, the term sustainability can seem anemic. Its emphasis on long-term planning and stewarding of resources has none of the dramatic appeal of apocalyptic visions of a world in which all human and natural ecologies are in collapse. For many environmental critics, it is a term that in some sense fails to account for the necessity of drastic changes in how resources are protected, much less distributed, and it relies too heavily on protecting the very state of affairs that got us into trouble in the first place. For its critics, and even for its reluctant supporters, it is a term about managing anxieties that shuttle between local and global concerns, individual and corporate responsibilities.

The unevenness of periodization across different national traditions provides the perfect opportunity for a comparative and transnational inquiry. While the initial temptation is to deem literatures demarcated by national tradition incommensurate or simply to juxtapose them as disparate objects, the more compelling project, particularly for the early modern period, is to show how literary periodization itself becomes part of the project of national distinction. In this essay, which I want to place in dialogue with Margaret Greer's and Alison Weber's contributions to PMLA's January 2011 “Theories and Methodologies” forum on the Spanish Golden Age, I argue that periodization must be considered in a transnational framework, for our conception of significant literary epochs is closely tied to the relative value that literatures are assigned, especially when national traditions are coalescing.

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages they who received slave or serf rents or in modern times rents from shares or bonds or similar sources—these are rentiers.

—Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

On a long plane ride home on 1 january 2012, i saw the movie I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), a romantic comedy in which Sarah Jessica Parker plays a harried financial executive with two small children. The central issue is a common one: the conflict between work and family. And as is commonly true when this conflict is put at the center, the movie manages to be ambivalent about work without being very critical of it. It's not quite as uncritical as Mike Nichols's film Working Girl (1988), where we root for Melanie Griffith to make her spectacular rise despite the fact that the ladder she climbs is located in “Mergers and Acquisitions,” an activity then imagined as a sort of innocent corporate matchmaking. Three decades later and in an era when Occupy Wall Street has changed any number of conversations, I would like to think that studio heads have been obliged to consider possible adverse reactions to a heroine working in a financial investment firm. At any rate, I Don't Know How She Does It throws in one brief and unconvincing scene in which the upwardly mobile female exec unveils a new financial instrument that, she claims, will protect Americans' retirement income. This is, of course, an allusion, though perhaps a misguided one, to the widespread belief that if Americans today cannot retire when they had planned, it's precisely because of highly profitable trafficking in new financial instruments by companies like Sarah Jessica Parker's. But this belief (which I share) is not alluded to more directly. The only social consequences of work that seem to register are consequences for the heroine's family life. This means the movie can offer a simple solution to the work-family dilemma (no spoiler alerts: this film is already spoiled): if you're really good at your job, an appreciative boss will stop demanding that you pretend you don't also have a family. You can fly off to meet the big investors on Monday instead of leaving right now.

Particularly because the mla lacks a division on environmental literature, it is gratifying that the organization is turning attention to environmental studies through forums such as this one. Many more in the profession than the fourteen hundred members of the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment take some interest in environmental literature and would like to foster sustainability through their teaching or research. Yet the term is problematic: a popular buzzword, its parameters are vague, and consequently the more difficult questions underlying the concept are too easily evaded. Sustainability of what and for whom? we might ask. Are people talking about sustaining complicated, interwoven biotic communities, sustaining humankind, or sustaining a comfortable lifestyle currently enjoyed by the privileged classes around the globe? What are the term's qualitative implications? What constitute appropriate standards for sustainability, and who decides? What political and economic policies will be necessary? Where will we get the motivation, the will to institute them? Where does sustainability intersect with issues of environmental and social justice, and how will we address the many ethical questions it raises?

For three months in the spring and summer of 2010, almost five million gallons of crude oil gushed uncontrollably from a broken BP well into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is thus far the worst petroleum spill in history. At the moment the spill occurred, the world was still reeling from the largest international financial disaster the world has yet known, one that reverberated from Iceland to the United States to the outer edges of the European Union in Greece and Spain. If the financial crisis was characterized by the sudden disappearance of intangible and invisible financial value, the horrific spectacle of oil-drenched seascapes, birds, fish, and coastlines resulting from the BP spill was a tangible reminder that capitalism had still not been able to emancipate itself from its material body. Even more troubling was the fact that the first several attempts by the multi-billion-dollar company to stanch the broken well were stunning failures: daily news broadcasts brought into public consciousness terms like top kill and kill mud, as hydraulic engineers armed with golf balls and sundry varieties of foam tried to kill the sea monster created by BP.

Anyone in literary studies who has looked recently at titles of books, conferences, research clusters, and even syllabi across the field cannot have missed two key words, borrowed from historical studies, that are doing substantial periodizing duty for literary and cultural criticism: one a chronological unit, the longue durée, and the other nominally a geographic unit, the Atlantic world. While it may not be obvious, each of these terms has spatial as well as temporal dimensions that reflect their shared origins with Ferdinand Braudel. Braudel first developed an application of the concept of the longue durée (pioneered by Marc Bloch) during the 1940s when, as a German prisoner of war, he wrote the initial draft of his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; later, in 1958, he published his famous conceptual piece on the longue durée in Annales. Braudel posits that time moves at different speeds, defined as geographic, social, and individual, each corresponding to a different durée (literally, a duration of time). The longue durée (usually translated as “long perspective” or “long term”) is the slowest-moving, operating on the scale of centuries, in which historical changes are humanly imperceptible. Braudel's Mediterranean constructs a geography commensurate with his theory of time, the methodological and conceptual frameworks of his book-its geohistorical plan, its comparative approach, its macrohistorical, multidimensional perspective, shifting from the longue durée to the courte durée of political events, embodied in its tripartite division into structures, conjunctures, and events, each section proposing a different mode of periodization and time scale. Braudel's Mediterranean thus consists spatially of multiple seas unfolding temporally over the longue durée and as such simultaneously provides literary studies with a flexible tool for revisionist periodization and Atlantic studies, both historical and literary, with the powerful model of a region as a unit of geographic and chronological analysis.