The Essay that Follows was Prompted by a Session at the 2004 MLA Annual Convention, “Ten Years Since Queering The Renaissance,” organized by Madhavi Menon and chaired by Jonathan Goldberg. The other panelists were Jeffrey Masten and Richard Rambuss, two of the contributors to the 1994 volume, and Laurie Shannon. The papers ranged widely from theoretical questions about the activity of queering to the practices of glossing texts, from relations between queering and gendering to the ways in which queering might also throw into question the human-animal divide. The essay below picks up on some of the broadest theoretical questions raised by the panel, emphasizing the need to continue the work begun a decade ago and suggesting some methodological problems and challenges to be faced.

Medieval studies are big—in fact, have rarely been livelier … or more controversial. This energy has succeeded in breaching the ramparts that traditionally divided the field into a series of vigorously defended fiefs. In a word, the discipline has gone interdisciplinary. Visual literacy, patristics, modal logic, grammar, rhetoric, onomastics, philosophical anthropology, sociology, historiography, linguistics, codicology, vernacular literature, classical and medieval Latin thought and letters, philology, and myriad other subsets conjugate in dizzying and unexpected configurations to produce exciting views of the period.

This article underscores the need to reconstruct Mexican American literary historiography by locating and analyzing pre–Chicano/a movement critical sources. Consideration of how Mexican Americans saw their literature at different junctures in the past will ensure that we do not impose our own aesthetic and political criteria as we reinterpret older texts. I analyze a 1959 literary history of New Mexico and Colorado in order to explore how a recovery of this particular text would intervene in current debates in the field of Chicana/o studies, most prominently the tension between nationalism and regional studies, on the one hand, and transnationalism, on the other. My analysis demonstrates that Mexican Americans and Chicanos/as have shared literary tastes and cultural capital with other Latinas/os and Latin Americans and that consequently Chicano/a literary history should be a discipline that goes beyond borders.

This essay recounts my attempt to teach poetry through theory and theory through poetry by juxtaposing Bernard Heidsieck's sound poem Canal Street with Julia Kristeva's La révolution du langage poétique. The psychoanalytic model Kristeva applies to her exegesis of Mallarmé's “Prose” proves insufficient to account for Heidsieck's materialist poetics. However, by reading Kristeva beside Heidsieck, we can gain a glimpse of the resources held in reserve by both texts. Kristeva's attention to poetry's phonematic material facilitates a sound-sensitive approach to Heidsieck's poem. Heidsieck's poem, in turn, suggests that such material reveals not the libidinal drives of a subject but the nonlibidinal, impersonal, acoustico-physiological instrument undergirding the expressive potential of the human voice. The juxtaposition of theoretical and poetic texts demonstrates that poetry possesses an analytic force that can be applied to the theory meant to explicate it.

Between 1893 and his death in 1898, Stéphane Mallarmé experimented with a poetics permeated by the emerging technology of cinema. Close to technicians and journalists of early film, Mallarmé developed what might be called a cinepoetics, especially in Un coup de dés (1897)—the ur-modernist visual poem whose preface recoups the single declaration he made on cinema—and in the unrealized project known as Le Livre (1893–98), a poetic performance involving electrical lighting and image projection. Close readings make explicit Mallarmé's cinepoetic aesthetics. Its epistemology of déroulement ‘unfolding’ is compared with that of other 1890s figures: Étienne-Jules Marey, Henri Bergson, and Loïe Fuller. Cinepoetry has not been recognized as the distinct practice it was, although Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida came close to theorizing Mallarmé's interest in cinema. Cinepoetic experimentation has shadowed the whole French vanguard. The study of its genealogy should reshape our understanding of the intersection of modernist lyricism and new media.

This essay examines Chester Himes's transformation, in 1957, from a writer of African American social protest fiction into a “French” writer of Harlem crime thrillers. Instead of representing the exhaustion of his political commitment, Himes's transformation from a “serious” writer of didactic fiction into an exiled crime novelist represents a radical change in political and literary tactics. In dialogue with the editor and former surrealist Marcel Duhamel, Himes's crime fiction, beginning with La reine des pommes (now A Rage in Harlem), invents a darkly comic fictional universe that shares an affinity with the surrealist notion of black humor in its vehement denial of epistemological and ethical certainty. Rejecting the efforts of Richard Wright and the existentialists to adopt an engaged form of political writing, Himes's crime fiction instead forges a kind of vernacular surrealism, one independent of the surrealist movement but nevertheless sharing surrealism's insistence on the volatility of written and political expression.

I begin with a story: Some never-to-be-untangled amalgamation of history, caricature, and the truer than true that is fiction. A little over a decade ago, at a great and august university, a group of professors met to talk about law and literature. Most of the literature professors had been Vietnam War protesters, staged sit-ins, marched on Washington. Some of the law professors had spent time in Paris listening to Derrida and smoking Gauloises by the Seine. They had all watched the birth and death of deconstruction, critical legal studies, new historicism, various feminisms (though they weren't positively sure all these were dead). The law professors had been reading Adorno and Althusser; Barthes, Benjamin, and Butler; Deleuze and Derrida. The literature professors had been reading the Critical Legal Studies Reader and Amnesty International reports. The law professors were worried that narratology and post-colonial theory might already be passé. The literature professors were concerned, as a matter of principle.

In a Panel Entitled “American (Indian) Studies: Can the Asa be an Intellectual Home?” at the 2002 Meeting of the American Studies Association, three Native Americanists—Robert Warrior, Philip Deloria, and Jean O'Brien—addressed the relation of their field to the broader terrain of American studies. Each remarked on the tenuous place of Native American studies in the academy, manifested by the underrepresentation of Indian faculty members, the existence of only two institutions granting PhDs in the field, the small number of scholarly journals devoted to Native issues, and neglect by other scholars, even those working in American and ethnic studies. Together, these problems create an institutional situation that Warrior labeled “intellectual homelessness,” in which “Native scholars … don't really belong anywhere” (“Room” 683). Yet these problems also suggest disparities between the questions that define Native studies and those that underlie scholarship in American studies as well as in conventional disciplines. If the marginalization of American Indian studies in academia, as these scholars suggested, reflects the place of Native peoples in United States society, so too does Native politics shape intellectual work in the field.

This paper considers the significance of the memorized poem in Victorian schools across the English social spectrum. I use Felicia Hemans's culturally ubiquitous “Casabianca” as a lens to examine the processes by which compulsory recitation forged short-term and long-term bodily relations between individuals and measured language. I argue that the denigration of regular poetic form prominent in the twentieth century's rejection of works like Hemans's poem is an inevitable, if disavowed, response to their institutional histories in the lowest-status echelons of the educational system. The fragmented survival of “Casabianca” in English popular consciousness today is the last remaining trace of its pedagogical past, of a time when the iamb connected to the heartbeat in a manner that we no longer appreciate and cannot feel.

One striking characteristic of commodity histories, a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction, is a certain overkill in their subtitles. A representative sample might include, say, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance (Warman), Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (Gately), The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Zuckerman), The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug (Weinberg and Bealer), Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (Kurlansky), and Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (Garfield). Only slightly less over-the-top than the “changed the world” clause, which also appears in recent histories of vanilla, house cats, Ping-Pong balls, dishwashing liquid, and pocket lint, is the vogue for two-word titles in which an adjective, usually a commodity-identifying color, is paired with the most coveted of precious metals. Some examples are Blue Gold (water [Barlow and Clarke]), White Gold (rubber [Yungjohann]), Black Gold (oil [Woodward]), and Green Gold (tea and marijuana—two books [Bennet; Macfarlane and Macfarlane]). Such titles suggest that all these commodities, even the humblest, have the power to get continents discovered, dynasties toppled, mountains moved. We take some of these commodities for granted, but all of them have changed the world.

The phenomenon of “embedded reporting” seemed to emerge with the invasion of iraq in march 2003. it is defined as the situation in which journalists agree to report only from the perspective established by military and governmental authorities. They traveled only on certain trucks, looked only at certain scenes, and relayed home only images and narratives of certain kinds of action. Embedded reporting implies that this mandated perspective would not itself become the topic of reporters who were offered access to the war on the condition that their gaze remained restricted to the established parameters of designated action. I want to suggest that embedded reporting has taken place in less explicit ways as well: one example is the agreement of the media not to show pictures of the war dead, our own or their own, on the grounds that that would be anti-American. Journalists and newspapers were denounced for showing coffins of the American war dead shrouded in flags. Such images should not be seen because they might arouse certain kinds of sentiments; the mandating of what could be seen—a concern with regulating content—was supplemented by control over the perspective from which the action and destruction of war could be seen. Another implicit occurrence of embedded reporting is in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The camera angle, the frame, the posed subjects all suggest that those who took the photographs were actively involved in the perspective of the war, elaborating that perspective and even giving it further validity.

“The Greatest Mistake Made in Judging Southern Literature, Even by its Friends, is That We are Apt to Speak of it By Itself as if it were a thing apart and a country apart.” John Bell Henneman made this assessment a century ago, in 1903 (347). Fifty-one years later, Jay B. Hubbell observed, “The literature of the South … cannot be understood and appraised if one neglects its many and complicated relations with the literature of the rest of the nation” ('x“). Not long after Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs published The Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (1953), a collection of essays by distinguished United States scholars in and beyond the South, the study of southern literature, conceived in the spirit of Henneman and Hubbell, became an academic specialty, with its centers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where Rubin taught); at Vanderbilt University (the home of Thomas Daniel Young, the New Critics, and, a generation earlier, the Agrarians); and at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (where Lewis P. Simpson edited the Southern Review). There were outriders: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren infiltrated Yale. They made such an impression that, today, when people from the Northeast are asked to define southern United States literature, they are likely to channel Brooks in his emphasis on the importance of family, kinship, community, history, and memory in the imagined South. None of this is meant to imply that the literature of the southern United States was not studied before the mid-fifties; it was. Its departures from the broader national tradition were noted, but it did not constitute an academic specialty as it does today. The publication of The Southern Renascence and subsequent work by Rubin, Hubbell, Brooks and Warren, C. Hugh Holman, and many others not only institutionalized southern literature as a specialization in the United States academy but also defined the field in terms of the South's relations with the rest of the nation.