As i thought about the subject of this panel, “the future of the humanities in a fragmented world,” the implications of each word proved elusive. What does “future” mean? What aspect of the humanities? When was the world not “fragmented”? Is that a bad or a good thing? And “world,” of course, could reference anything from planet to Disney (between the two of which there may turn out to be no distinction).

The essay argues that Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) grapples with the role of things in the constitution of persons. It is a paradigmatic novel about the fortunes of private, psychological interiority under commodity culture; its immediate context is the empire of things after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Villette represents subjectivity as a cabinet of curiosities, an interior–like a parlor–filled with intensely meaningful, even fetishized, bibelots. Lucy, the novel's narrator, longs to retreat from the public spectacles of commodity culture but, ironically, finds her identity also through relations with things. The novel suggests that bourgeois subjectivity, though it points to a thorough intimacy with objects, is paradoxically defined by the nostalgic notion that true interiority has been beset by or even lost to the pressure of things.

Milton's Samson has long been a character about whom readers are irreconcilably divided. Current anxiety over terrorism has made it all the more inviting to see Milton's dramatic poem as a criticism of Samson's slaughter of the Philistines, a sentiment emphatically expressed in John Carey's recent claim that “September 11 has changed Samson Agonistes, because it has changed the readings we can derive from it while still celebrating it as an achievement of the human imagination.” This paper interrogates the association of Milton with present-day antipathy to religious violence and seeks to sophisticate the position of critics who now find terrorism an inescapable presence in the field of literary interpretation. The brand of reading most necessary in current discussion is one that avoids the reactionary temptation to cleanse literary texts of sympathy with religious violence and to view such violence as the province solely of the Other.

The article considers the tendency among young theorists to forget or repress poetry. As symptom, the aberrant dissociation of poetry from theory reflects an increasing technicization, not to say impoverishment, of critical language. The theoretical elders, on the other hand, clung to poetic insight with the urgency of hunger. Focusing on tropes of greeting, celebration, and sending, I explore an exemplary instance in the encounter between poetry and thought—when Heidegger met Hölderlin. Still, Heidegger's appropriation of poetry leaves a violent residue, a kind of critical warping that has remained largely uninterrogated. I turn to a moment in the unprecedented testimony of Hölderlin's late thought in which the poet names the modern experience of mourning. While Heidegger's later work appears to be characterized by a similar tonality of mourning, Hölderlin's thought of finitude is often more joyous and affirmative. I zero in on the figure of “dark-skinned women” in the poem “Andenken” to show how philosophy is tripped up by the permanent insurrection that poetry conducts.

Are we in a posthumanist world? who knows? clever thinkers from Nietzsche and Henry Adams to Foucault and Lyotard have been giving us this message. And if we are in such a world, how can there be a place for the humanities in it? Plodding along behind those brilliant minds, I shall try to puzzle out the situation of the humanities at a practical or pedagogical level, by looking at what some humanists have been saying about the humanities recently and then considering briefly the history of humanism and humanistic education. After that, I shall make some modest proposals about what is to be done.

Early modern defenses of poetry, such as Philip Sidney's influential Defence of Poesy, respond to long-standing anxieties about the validity of poetry by asserting the primacy of its moral function. Sidney's heroic rhetoric locates poetry's “power” in its capacity to create iconic portraits (“speaking pictures”) of unchanging moral truths. Edmund Spenser departs markedly from Sidney's static moral vision of the function of poetry. Whereas Sidney privileges enargeia, or vividness, The Faerie Queene works consistently to disarm the heroic masculinity that violently produces enargeia as a form of iconic, moral clarity. Spenser's Legend of Temperance finds energeia, or vitality, in moments of suffering and in corresponding moments of sympathy. Through suffering, Spenser highlights the dense networks of affect and obligation that defy moral and visual clarity. For him, poetry resonates with the affective energies of corporeal experience, from which language derives its capacity to move.

In 1772, Gottlieb Stephanie introduced an adaptation of Macbeth to replace a banned Viennese Don Juan scenario. This essay uses Stephanie's “new stone guest” to uncover broader historical and thematic connections between Macbeth and Don Juan literature. Both tales have roots in anti-Machiavellian theater, which describes the psychic wreckage brought about when one suppresses the conscience in attempting to subdue fortune. Stephanie expresses this shared vision most vividly by folding a lamento into his tragedy. A closing lamentation delivered from hell was a fixture in Don Juan lore, and modern scholarship tends to interpret it as a carnivalesque defiance of temporal and divine stricture. Stephanie, however, draws on a different treatment of the episode: the protagonist's plaint represents a quest for immortality that has turned into a desire for annihilation. Instead of offering defiance, Stephanie's Macbeth follows the course of many Don Juans in despairing over the possibility of grace.

We respond in language to catastrophic, or traumatic, shocks to symbolic systems, for which the fall of the Tower of Babel can be seen as a mythic model. One response is an exploration of new uncertainties; another is a fearful rigidity that seeks to return to an imagined Adamic wholeness of language; another is an effort to transcend language altogether. This essay examines two contemporary responses to a perceived “fall” of language—several case studies of Oliver Sacks's and two novels by Don DeLillo—and places them in the context of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences and what I call a “counterlinguistic turn” that is contemporaneous with the linguistic turn and represents developments of some of its key assumptions.

This article investigates how eighteenth-century writers used the figure of the castrato as a privileged metaphor for the negotiation of class conflicts, gender concepts, and the nature of art. A reading of Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse's novel Hildegard von Hohenthal shows that Heinse uses the character of the (fake) castrato to celebrate the artificiality of gender, desire, and art, but his novel leaves class boundaries intact. Friedrich Schiller's poem “Kastraten und Männer” attacks aristocratic supremacy but naturalizes gender codes and equates masculinity and art.

From among the varied American responses to the events we now call the Holocaust, the most notorious of which may well be the United States’ illiberal policy on refugees from 1938 to 1944, there emerged a canon of internationalist-minded literature that included Randall Jarrell's “The Refugees.” In his refugee poem, Jarrell experimented with the form of public elegy, interrogating poetic conventions of mourning in order to consider the ethical and political consequences of our statements of grief. With its extremely economic form, “The Refugees” offers a study of the lyric's investment in an economy of identity all too readily coinciding with nationalistic modes of belonging. As the poem positions itself as an interventionist yet fatalistic response to contemporary refugees, I argue, it helps us articulate a definition of ethics, which necessarily involves the negotiation of cultural boundaries and remains always a matter of eminently political concern.