The parish and the social systems it sustains are prominent in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. His parochial vision, formulated across the range of his literary, critical, and juridical writings, constitutes an intricate scheme of surveillance, discipline, and care that Fielding hoped to see applied throughout the nation. He combines a plan for reforming oversight of the poor (from the intimate confines of parish management through the supervisory offices of the county and the magistracy) with a heuristics of judgment and discrimination, based on the visible authenticity of poverty and verified by the ridiculousness of affectation, which he exemplifies through the antiromance of Joseph Andrews. Romance, for Fielding, is the literary version of affectation, a transgressive masquerade that belongs to social emulation and that can be unmasked by a “test of truth,” derived from the third earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.

At the end of the twentieth century, the expansion of trauma from a therapeutic concept to a way of theorizing about the ruptures of history and memory had, in Geoffrey Hartman's words, added a “displaced evangelical intensity” to literary studies (293). The literary turn to trauma highlighted an ethical dimension to practices of writing, reading, and interpretation; texts were then freighted by violence, called to witness the horrors of history, challenging claims to the clarity and accessibility of words and narrative. Hartman conveys his hesitations about this turn by invoking a religious term—“evangelical”—which is etymologically related to gospel, or “good news.” His concern about an infusion of religious zeal into the study of literature may enact a critical refutation of the historical erasure of Jewish origins by Christian claims to “good news.”

This essay considers the instability of the typewriter as a writing machine and as an object within the media history of the twentieth century, examining how the typewriter keyboard and the transcriptive protocols of the modern office materially shape writing practice. The standardization of the typewriter system produces a textual aesthetics of error and uncertainty rather than of mechanized circumscription. Andy Warhol's a is a novel whose mode of production explores the limits of the typewriter's transcriptive uncertainty. Written by a distributed network of typists and inundated with errors and ambiguities, a offers a radically defamiliarizing representation of how the typewriter system opens new pathways of authorship, embodiment, and literary production. Drawing on a's aesthetic experimentation, this essay argues that the localized, idiosyncratic, yet often suppressed disruptions produced by the typewriter suggest the possibility of an alternative to linear, teleological conceptions of media history. (PB)

In Paradise Lost Milton introduces Adam and Eve by lingering on their appearance, but instead of presenting a detailed catalog of the couple's physical attributes, he focuses on their hair. This essay challenges earlier readings of Adam and Eve's locks by examining Milton's imagery in the context of hair's cultural and spiritual value. Comparing depictions of hair in sixteenth-century sonnets and cavalier seduction poetry reveals how Milton appropriates the early modern aesthetic of sprezzatura to convey Adam and Eve's unique innocence. The essay shows that Milton's description is not merely superficial, nor even merely symbolic. Rather, when read in relation to early modern theories of hair's etiology and to Milton's own animist materialism, hair in Paradise Lost literally embodies Adam and Eve's prelapsarian love. Their clustering and curling locks enact the couple's amorous reciprocity and signify the paradoxical strength and fragility of their Edenic marriage.

This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)

In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines a cosmos at odds with orthodox theology, making a heretical departure that parallels his reluctance to dwell on the Crucifixion and his Arian Christology. Belief in a plurality of worlds threatens the integrity of the Trinity: it exalts the omnipotence of the creator, while it limits the significance of the redeemer. In effect, it produces a tension best resolved by Milton's position that the Father and the Son are two distinct beings—the former uncreated, infinite, and immutable and the latter created, finite, and changeable. This distinction enables Milton to fashion a theory of salvation that transforms Christ's sacrifice from a singular, traumatic event to an ethical decision that other created beings can emulate. These heterodox views constitute the theological underpinnings of his radical republicanism, which embraces an idea of human dignity and agency antithetical to the tyrannical politics of torture and blood sacrifice.

In August 2009, when Richard Poirier died, I was mourning the death of Michael Jackson, with an intensity that surprised me. While I had admired Jackson's talent and followed his career with steady interest for decades, my grief was out of proportion to my feeling for him when he was alive. I felt caught up in a psychic complex that had hold of the wrong object but was determined, nonetheless, to play itself out. Puzzled by the intensity of my grief, I began reading everything about Jackson I could find—books, journalism, Web postings—while listening intently to his music, trying to hear something in it that would console me and justify my frenzied mourning. But instead of hearing that, I heard Poirier had also died.

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.

Over the past decade the critical study of museums has matured, as the number of books, journals, and conferences devoted to all facets of museum studies has dramatically increased. While many approaches to the topic are possible, I would like to examine how museums in Asia function in religious ways and how religious sites, such as temples, have come to function as museums. Pursuing this tack might seem puzzling, or even controversial, to those familiar with Theodor W. Adorno's now well-known essay inveighing against the immuration of objects in museums, in which he emphasizes the unpleasant overtones of the German word museal (“museum-like”), used to describe “objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying…. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art” (175). Adorno's essay articulates a sentiment about museums that was born in the past and has persisted down to the present. We hear echoes of Adorno's disdain and feelings of dehumanization, for example, in James Boon's recent essay “Why Museums Make Me Sad,” which expresses his own melancholic reaction to museums. If museums are merely mausoleums where dead objects are housed, how could they possibly function as religious sites? How could their contents ever provide religious inspiration?

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy, particularly his notions of transcendence and the “face of the other,” illuminates Eileen Chang's short story Lust, Caution (Se, jie) and, to a lesser extent, Ang Lee's film adaptation. Lust, Caution tells of an assassination plot against a collaborator with the Japanese during the second Sino–Japanese War in which the heroine's fatal decision to let go of her enemy results in the deaths of herself and her comrades. The story problematizes the status of the personal and ethical in times of war, occupation, and resistance through the heroine's path from the collective anonymity of national salvation to the theatrical solitude of underground activism and the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Also relevant is Hannah Arendt's theory of the (bourgeois) social, which in conjunction with its feminist revision prompts reflections on women's space of action in “dark times.”

The recent turn to aesthetics in literary studies has been embraced by some of its advocates as a polemical riposte to critique: a practice increasingly attacked from multiple directions but here specifically for doing artworks the disservice of reducing them to encryptions of history or ideology. But while the new or revived focus on pleasure (and, to a much lesser extent, displeasure)1 has been vaunted for the way in which it seems to circumvent the reduction of artworks to historical or ideological concepts, our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of aesthetic categories. Any literary or cultural criticism purportedly engaged with aesthetics needs to pay attention to these categories, which are by definition conceptual as well as affective and tied to historically specific forms of communication and collective life. But how does one read an aesthetic category? What kind of object is it, and what methodological difficulties and satisfactions does its analysis pose?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was not a historian of sexuality, but she was keenly aware of the historicity of sexuality and erotic desire in ways unlike other major figures in queer theory. This fact has gone largely unnoticed in queer studies, a field dominated by literary and cultural critics that has an uneasy relation with academic history. An example of the historicity of Sedgwick's theories of sexuality can be seen in her famous critique of Foucault's Great Paradigm Shift—that imaginary moment in the late nineteenth century when the category of the modern homosexual was thought to displace the category of the sodomite (Epistemology 44). The formulation of axiom 5 in Epistemology of the Closet—“the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity” (44)—reveals a deep consciousness of the “irreducible historicity of all things … discerning the time-and-place specificity of a thing, identifying the ways in which it relates to its context or milieu, and determining the extent to which it is both enabled and hamstrung by this relationship,” to cite the historian Hayden White's description of history as critique (224). If Foucauldian genealogy (or a “history of the present”) “begins with an analysis of blind spots in our current understanding, or with a problematization of what passes for ‘given’ in contemporary thought” (Halperin 13), it is vital, as Sedgwick puts it, to “denaturalize the present, rather than the past” (Epistemology 48). Sedgwick's vantage point on a queer past pivots around “homosexuality as we conceive of it today” (45), a phrase as resonant now in sexuality studies as was Foucault's reference to the homosexual as a species (Foucault 43). So entrenched are the modern categories of identity that Sedgwick repeats the phrase over and over in her cogent analysis of our current conceptions of sexuality. Such insistent differentiation between an alien past and an equally—if not more—alien present, the distinction between “them” and “us,” reverberates across the history of homosexuality. Consider, for instance, Matt Houlbrook's discussion of men who refrain from using “‘gay’ in the way we would use the term today” (xiii) or Jonathan Ned Katz's understanding of the presentness of our present standpoint—“what we today recognize as erotic feelings and acts” (6).

At the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, the Philosopher Francis Bacon Cited the Nautical Compass, Enabling Cross-Ocean travel, as one of three technologies that had changed “the whole face and state of things throughout the world,” more influential than any “empire … sect… or star” (the others were gunpowder and the printing press [118]). Bacon was not overstating the importance of saltwater transport networks in the forging of global modernity. Across an era spanning from Columbus and Vasco da Gama to the twentieth century, the maritime world was a frontier of capitalism and colonial expansion. Goods, people, and information moved across the oceans of the globe, exploiting what was called “the freedom of the seas,” even as nations warred on each other's ships for control of trade routes and coastal access. The immense wealth and power at stake in maritime transport led governments and companies to pour resources into research and development, making the maritime world one of modernity's ongoing frontiers of science and technology. It was also a great reservoir of books, narratives, and fantasy. Occurring in an environment that few could access yet that affected the lives of so many, sea voyages piqued the curiosity of stay-at-home audiences. As global ocean travel grew up together with the printing press, armchair sailors combed sea voyage literature, factual and fictional, for strange, surprising adventures as well as for information about world-altering developments and events recounted in what was called “news from the sea.”

Just a few days after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's death last April 12, I received an e-mail from Lee Edelman. “I sometimes think,” he wrote, “that Eve was the only person who really thought this day would come.” Lee's “really” resonates with a talk Eve gave a decade ago. I don't recall that she shared it with me at the time she wrote it, or I may have forgotten, not wanting to take in what she was saying. The piece was made available to me as Eve's literary executor, a task I agreed to several years ago in something of the same state of mind: not wanting to accept what I knew I was agreeing to, not wanting to believe what Eve realized would come. I'm aiming now to put together a volume of Eve's writing that represents her work since Touching Feeling appeared in 2003. Thanks to David Kosofsky, I have on one of those mass storage devices the contents of Eve's computers; there I found “Reality and Realization,” the 1999 talk to which I refer. It was “learning that a cancer I had thought was in remission had in fact become incurable,” Eve wrote, that made “inescapably vivid in repeated mental shuttle-passes the considerable distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it.” Just this shuttle, I would suggest, colors much of the work Eve was doing toward the book on Proust she was writing in the last several years.

This essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:

I am often asked how a Victorianist came to write a book about museum exhibitions and the British quest for and Traffic in pre-Columbian antiquities. When I began, I had no formal training in these subjects and thus little that would count as a theory or method. Of course, as my interest grew I read as much of the scholarly literature as I could: critical studies of important collectors; analyses of exhibitionary practice and museum administration; the history of the museum from cabinets of curiosity to the virtual collections of the present. Yet much of what I learned in writing my own book, Informal Empire, was pieced together, often haltingly, one fragment at a time through a deep immersion in a rich archive. Sensing I was on new ground, I rejected any overarching schema, adhering to the perhaps counterintuitive notion that the best way to make the archive speak was to resist imposing a theory on it and instead to allow the shape of the materials themselves to suggest ways of proceeding. To illustrate both the advantages and the liabilities of this method, which I employed while working on nineteenth-century ethnography collections, I have chosen here to reconstruct the key steps of the scholarly journey that took me from the library to the world of museums and archives. I offer this reflection on critical practice first as an exercise in demystification and second as an encouragement to anyone, but especially students, who might wish to travel similar paths.