I attended my first MLA convention in Chicago, in 1973. A frugal graduate student, I stayed at a nearby YMCA but huddled in the evenings with a friend from graduate school in the Palmer House lobby where we shared, surreptitiously, a flask of bourbon and laments about the awful job market. I could never have imagined that forty-five years later I would be delivering the presidential address. During the years since that Chicago convention, I have worked with the executive director Phyllis Franklin, who invited me and a few others to think with her about how the MLA might accommodate what we then called composition and rhetoric. I have worked with Rosemary Feal, who became the executive director as I joined the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and who left the MLA shortly after persuading me to stand for election to the office of second vice president. In my participation on task forces, division committees, the Publications Committee, the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, the Executive Council, and most recently as an officer, I have been continually impressed by the talent, commitment, and resourcefulness of those who work for the MLA. I am grateful to belong to an association with such an excellent staff, and I want to offer special thanks to my friend Paula Krebs, whose first full year as executive director coincided with my term as president. Her keen intelligence, administrative skill, and fierce advocacy for our profession convince me that the MLA is in very good hands.

This essay addresses the recent reception of Frank O’Hara's poem “Having a Coke with You” to examine the much-maligned concept of relatability as a potentially useful aesthetic category. If the reactions to it on Twitter and YouTube are any indication, O’Hara's Coke poem has become his most famous piece, immensely popular both online and, in a strikingly different way, in the work of contemporary queer theorists. Whatever the context—queer utopian criticism, an anarchist journal, a wedding ceremony, or even an official Coca-Cola public-relations campaign—readers tend to respond to the poem's general mood rather than to its specific content. This reception speaks to the fact that O’Hara pursues what I would label a poetics of relatability: “Having a Coke with You,” like many other O’Hara poems, models ways of valuing art by relating it to other things and people. O’Hara explores this relational aesthetic by constantly negotiating between modes of reception that are self-reflective and modes that are social and intersubjective.

Translation is often described with opposed terms like loyalty and betrayal, even though the work of translation defies such a description. New research in translation studies argues for the value of mistranslation and untranslatables, especially in recovering Indigenous knowledge production. This study joins these efforts by documenting how technical writers in the colonial Andes used Quechua terms to form a patois called “Quechuañol” (Quechua plus español) and how this hybrid Andean language was obscured in translations of scientific texts in early modern England, Germany, and France. As translators reinterpreted metallic classifications in Quechuañol, including “Pacos, Mulatos y Negrillos” (“paco, mulato, and negrillo metals”), they chose terms that communicated their own, culturally specific ideas about color and categories. Tracing mistranslations in the Atlantic world allows us to document both the Indigenous intellectual contributions to the technical arts and the development of early modern racial classifications.

Reading pictures means first digesting the words that inhabit or surround them: words in pictures, words framing pictures by way of titles or wall captions, and words of the texts to which pictures allude. But while pictures almost always come to us embedded in language, they are not the same as texts. Even though many elements of pictures may be construed as signs, a pictorial sign is not the same as a verbal sign or a textualized image, nor is it anything like a noun or verb, as Louis Marin proposed. To read pictures, we must reckon with these differences as well as with their subsemiotic attributes—their marks. We must be willing to read whatever remains illegible in a textual sense, whatever in a painting resists being verbalized or turned into a sign. In so doing, we challenge and stretch our conception of what it means to read anything at all.

The postcritique debate tends to presuppose that reading suspiciously or restoratively is largely a matter of choosing to do so and that texts themselves do not incline us to read them one way or another. Drawing on works by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, this essay contests these presumptions. Both authors regarded distrust as a state of mind to which we are ineluctably condemned; only by reading artworks designed to allay our suspicion can we hope to be briefly relieved of it. Tolstoy's famous Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov's little-known variation on it, “Pozdnyshev's Address,” explore strategies for disarming readerly distrust. If these authors are right that suspicion is our existential condition rather than a freely chosen interpretive stance, the project of prescribing the ways that readers ought to relate to texts is unlikely to succeed—or cease. We might instead set ourselves the task of investigating how particular texts shape the ways they are read.

This essay examines Anishinaabe pictography in contemporary legal contexts, challenging the notion that the law must necessarily inhere in alphabetic isomorphism, let alone in the colonialist inscriptive norms of the nation. Explaining how pictography elicits a loosened relation between sign and signified, this essay develops a semiotic theory of nonisomorphy to analyze uses of pictography in the work of several Anishinaabe scholars and writers: in John Borrows's advocacy of “jurisgenerative multiperspectivalism,” in Gerald Vizenor's conception of social irony and ironic constitutionalism, and in Louise Erdrich's figuration of ecological literacy and reciprocity. Focusing in particular on the trope of metonymy in pictographic writing, this essay elucidates the perspectival shifts and contextual metamorphoses of metonymy in the native poetics of the Americas, forming and transforming historical experience while offering colonial situations ample room to trip themselves up on their own contradictions.

Ecocritical thought presents serious challenges for political readings of crime fiction and noir, notably in French and American cultural contexts, and these challenges merit a broad examination. How does the Anthropocene change our relation to the frames of intelligibility and the definitions of violence found in crime fictions? The scalar problems introduced by the cosmological perspectives of ecological awareness suggest the need to redraw the frontiers of noir, to imagine new green-black readings that transform our understanding of what counts in and as a noir novel.

This article argues that Machiavelli's description of reading Dante and Ovid, in his letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December 1513, illuminates some of the most surprising and scandalous sections of The Prince. Beginning with Machiavelli's quotation of Paradiso 5 in the letter to Vettori, this study investigates how Machiavelli uses the literary works of Dante and Ovid to craft several of his most distinctive arguments on the problem of vows, value of violence, and legitimacy of deception. It argues that the reading of these literary works constitutes a crucial, but often overlooked, component of intellectual history.

As recent art historical scholarship has demonstrated, the techniques of linear perspective displace narrative (the artwork's content) in favor of the relations between aesthetic objects (the artwork's form). In this regard, perspectival art performs a rhetorical transaction analogous to that of its “sister art,” lyric poetry. The formal features and poetic strategies of lyric parallel the geometric effects of perspectival art: both practices differentiate the aesthetic surface from the transparentizing demands of narrative. Each art form stages the interaction of irreconcilable terms—content and form—and documents the dynamic and incommensurable relation between semantic meaning and meaninglessness. Lyric's dominance in the Renaissance, exemplified here by sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, reflects a wider cultural valorization of the experiential and materializing priorities of the aesthetic, an affirmation of objective, apprehensible elements whose significance is unyoked from the obligation to narrative.

Thomas Hardy strategically exposes what he calls the “groundwork” of his fictional worlds in scenes depicting blizzards or total darkness that scrub away all points of orientation. When Hardy reveals the empty field—”forms without features”—within which the details of the novel take shape, he aims to investigate the ontological, rather than epistemological or aesthetic, questions raised by novelistic realism. By tracing Hardy's groundwork through several novels, primarily Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the essay shows that Hardy's vexed relation to the realist tradition arises out of the metaphysical paradoxes endemic to novelistic mimesis.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine discovers new forms of lyric subjectivity by rerouting the expressive lyric's investment in the singular self, recognized in well-established lines of American genealogy, into a sustained and historicizing attention to dispersed networks of black kinship. She does so in a revisionary allusion to Robert Lowell's Life Studies and thereby lays bare the fact that his landmark book, which she treats as a paradigm of the expressive lyric tradition, relies on the (usually unspoken) whiteness of its lyric subject for the force of its autobiographical disclosures. Rankine's Citizen thus not only helps us see confessional poetry—and the expressive lyric tradition for which it serves as apotheosis—in a radically new way but also develops an introspective lyric mode that remains alert, dispersed, and open to the political, social, and racialized formations that govern the lived experience of contemporary American life.

By giving a brief history of emotivism in close reading, this article offers a new context for understanding the contemporary uneasiness about close reading and about the proliferating array of alternative kinds of reading it has prompted. Emotivism refers to the subcurrent of linguistic thought that shaped the institutional formation of New Critical closeness by distinguishing propositional from emotive meaning. Instead of amending our closeness to texts by dispensing with critique, or focusing on surfaces and description to the exclusion of textual depth, either of which might inadvertently encourage new kinds of emotivism, this article suggests we bear in mind—as the conversation goes on—the mid-century counteremotivist critics, such as Kenneth Burke, who advocated a kind of reading attuned to the interactive processes held in apparent stasis by literary form.

This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson's novels. It places Alex Woloch's literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.

This essay, a reading of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), seeks to reconcile the promise of global environmental aesthetics with postcolonial theories of difference. While the Anthropocene is often framed as universal and unprecedented, Gordimer's ironic presentation of an earlier discourse—centered on resource limits and population bombs—demonstrates that certain themes have existed in the global environmental imagination for decades. Read alongside the history of South African conservation and Judith Butler's theory of precarity, he Conservationist develops an alternative green aesthetic, one that considers environmental problems to be produced by diverse and unequal social relations. Gordimer's dialectical response to apartheid-era conservation (an emphasis on utopianism and haunting) offers insight into South Africa's contemporary environmental politics and into ongoing debates in the environmental humanities about the value of the central analytic strategies of postcolonialism.

Reading Percival Everett's novel Erasure through the musical techniques of 1940s bebop jazz shows how experimental and improvisational musical performances structure and animate this literary work. By mixing genres, and by creating a sensibility of what I call disharmonious harmony—a dissonance that deconstructs notions of paradigmatic identities—Erasure destabilizes the idea of literary category and prompts critical inquiry into the legitimacy of racial representation, provoking the reader to confront the racial discourse that supplements processes of reading and interpretation. Everett's bebop sensibility is a device of radical blackness because it incites the reader to question the viability of categorization in all its forms, but particularly in the groupings through which the racial episteme of the modern period makes legible the idea of African American identity and experience.

Because most early modern readers did not leave behind traces of their reading practices and thus remain anonymous, a more inclusive history of reading requires a willingness to engage in speculation. In the case of Tudor editions of the romance he Historye of Blanchardine, responsible speculation involves resisting the desire for textual stabilities, including the author's name and the work's status as a reprinted text. Doing so reveals that what appear to be reissued editions of William Caxton's version of this romance, Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489-90), are in fact a network of adapted texts whose representations of gender challenge current understandings of the Elizabethan romance, its producers, and its target audience. More specifically, what seems to be a fragment of the 1597 edition is instead an early example of fan fiction, a modern narrative mode that offers a methodological model for scholars interested in adopting more inspired approaches to material evidence.