As the Nineteenth Century was the Century of Colonization, The Twentieth Century was the Century of Decolonization, THE neologism entered popular usage during the 1950s, gained sudden prestige, and was declared crucial and, indeed, “beautiful” by Aimé Fernand David Césaire (“L'homme” 116). Césaire lived at the center of the global tempest and cultural sea change that characterized the anticolonial, civil rights, independence-movement years from 1932 to 1968. Césaire's rhetorical virtuosity and intellectual genius coincided with a moment of worldwide paradigm shifts and conceptual earthquakes, or tremblements de concepts, as he termed them (“Culture” 453). Césaire embodied what Edward Said called the “sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency” of a man living on the borderline of historical transition (39). On the actors, artists, and intellectuals of this borderline moment, the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ reflected that it was the “[p]rivilège de notre génération, charnière entre deux périodes historiques, l'une de domination, l'autre d'indépendance. Nous … étions porteurs de projets” ‘privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We … were the messengers of a new design’ (Une si longue lettre 40 [So Long a Letter 25]). According to Césaire, the messengers had duties:

Scholars in the Humanities May be Surprised to Learn That There has Been an Outpouring of New Work on HIV/AIDS by Economists and political scientists in the past few years, as it has finally become clear that the pandemic has seriously impacted governmental operations, redirected state resources, and threatened national and even international security around the globe. This upsurge of interest accentuates the decline in scholarly attention to HIV/AIDS in the humanities that has occurred now that the high tide of AIDS activism has receded across much of the global North and West and nearly a generation has passed since the pandemic first appeared. In an effort to jump-start a second-wave approach to the study of HIV/AIDS in the humanities, I show here how new scholarship in the fields of economics and political economy helps to revitalize questions of subjectivity, epistemology, globalization, and representation that have long been central to the study of HIV/AIDS in traditional humanities disciplines. Given the global reach of the pandemic and the vast technological, disciplinary, and governmental expertise required to contain it, a deliberate yet self-reflexive turn to political economy may help humanities scholars find a foothold in responding to HIV/AIDS. The pandemic has been the catalyst for an entirely new set of techniques of governance related to the health and well-being of nations and global populations—a global biopolitics of HIV/AIDS—yet there is virtually no work in the humanities responding to these dramatic changes.

It's Only Normal that Paul Celan was harshly affected by the base slander—accusations of plagiarism—leveled at him by Claire Goll. It's less normal that he should have suffered from this all his life even though these clearly mendacious accusations allowed him to know that most readers spontaneously took his side.

This brief essay tries to grasp the reasons for this irreducible affliction and finds them in the deepest rapport between a poet and his thought of what poetry is.

Today Picaresque is a Catch-All Term, Which Literary Critics and General Readers Use to Characterize Almost any Story of playfulness and mischief. It has been stretched across so many national boundaries that any notion of its historical or geographic referents is often lost. The central character, an antihero, seems to express the author's devilry and wit rather than any social criticism. This view, growing out of readers' preference for pleasant entertainment and critics' focus on language and form, sees no more than an on-the-road plot, with “adventures” ending whenever the author chooses to stop. However, this sense of the picaresque forgets the complex, frequently damning portrayal of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain that the picaresque's original stories provided, as well as the contestation of the genre in postrevolutionary France, where it describes high crimes and suggests their punishment.

Let Me Begin with a Decidedly Non-Jewish Reference, in Order to Both Place and Displace Jewish Studies. In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, an evocation of imaginary places that emerge and recede from memory, all eventually turning out to be the same place, Marco Polo says to Kubla Kahn, in response to the charge that he has not spoken of Venice: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice” (86). The notion of Venice as implicit in every city strikes me as an apt analogy for what I will be claiming as the possible relation between Jewish studies and literary studies. As a faculty member housed in a national literature department (German) at a public research university dominated by a biennial funding battle with the state legislature, I move between reading the minutes of the University Senate and reading Calvino's Invisible Cities in order to imagine the invisible universities or invisible studies beyond the prairie and, indeed, beyond the notion of the university (and the humanities) in ruin.

In 1974 the Yiddish Poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, Born in Russia, Living in California, Published a Small Volume of Poems in Israel. This peripatetic author and text are paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature. The book, by a woman who was at various times a Yiddish teacher, an anarchist, and a writer of Russian poetry and English essays, was entitled ‘Under Your Sign.’ As the title indicates, the politics and poetics of sign systems are central concerns of this volume. I offer a few stanzas from one of its poems— ‘Widowhood’—to suggest the multiplicity of the signs of Jewish identity and literature. What we see in Tussman's poem, and more dramatically when we supplement it with two English translations, is that although it rails against the ways in which the sign (e.g., letter, word, trope) destroys, it also points to the sign's generative powers. And the poem offers a way of understanding the creative tensions that have dominated critical and creative expressions of modern Jewish literature. Under the signs of “Hebraism” and “Yiddishism,” we encounter two conflicting but equally productive views of Jewish literature, one that posits continuity and another that posits adaptation as the defining characteristic of Jewish culture. Tussman's poem, like these different paradigms of Jewish literary history, enables us to use the sign as a way of overcoming the divide between two languages and two views of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) world. My goal in what follows is not to protest against the reign of the sign on behalf of some notion of Jewish authenticity. To the contrary, I propose yet another sign—structured as a binary—to highlight the ambivalence of the sign “Jewish literature” and to stimulate debate about matters Jewish and what matters to Jews.

It' surprising that Stephen E. Severn' article “The Library of Congress Variant of ‘The Shield of Achilles’” (124.5 [2009]: 1761-67), so earnestly devoted to explaining in detail a variant word in a handwritten copy of a poem, should misquote four lines about which there is no dispute. Auden' “unintelligible multitude” in “The Shield of Achilles” is here assembled on a “plane without feature, bare and brown” (1762). How could a million “eyes” and “boots in line” possibly fit, much less stand, on that brown plane–or in it? And why is it “bare”? The line, of course, should read (and does in all editions), “A plain without a feature….”

It' surprising that Stephen E. Severn' article “The Library of Congress Variant of ‘The Shield of Achilles’” (124.5 [2009]: 1761-67), so earnestly devoted to explaining in detail a variant word in a handwritten copy of a poem, should misquote four lines about which there is no dispute. Auden' “unintelligible multitude” in “The Shield of Achilles” is here assembled on a “plane without feature, bare and brown” (1762). How could a million “eyes” and “boots in line” possibly fit, much less stand, on that brown plane–or in it? And why is it “bare”? The line, of course, should read (and does in all editions), “A plain without a feature….”

Hmm! A State-of-the-Art Essay About the Vvhereabouts of Theory Today? Should Such an Essay Be About Anything at all, considering the antirepresentational stance of radical theory? How does one write about theory, except self-reflexively (a question that Butler, Guillory, and Thomas raise)? If I did that, would I be guilty of professional narcissism, or would my rigorous self-reflexivity have a referent, whether the referent is called reality, the world, history, or experience? Would I be successful in combining the nuances and rigors of self-reflexive thinking with the mandate of having to say something about something?