This essay begins by differentiating between narratively organized sequences of events and nonnarrative sequences associated with deductive reasoning, conversational exchanges, descriptions, and recipes. After reviewing classical accounts of narrative sequences, the essay sketches developments in language theory and cognitive science that have occurred after the heyday of structuralist narrative poetics and that throw further light on two interlinked questions: what is necessary to make a sequence of events a narrative, and what makes some narrative sequences more readily processed as stories than others? Both questions can be addressed by the concept, drawn from artificial-intelligence research, of “scripts”—knowledge representations storing finite, sequentially ordered groups of actions required for the accomplishment of particular tasks. Exploring some literary applications of a theoretical model based on scripts, the final section of the text outlines research strategies for a postclassical narratology that encompasses cognitive approaches to stories. By examining different modalities of the script-story interface, theorists of narrative may be able to rethink the historical development of narrative techniques and to understand better the differences among narrative genres at any given time.

The recent controversial transformation of the humanities is due partly to the institutional acknowledgment of diversity and partly to critics' efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the categories of identity on which programs devoted to the study of diversity are founded. This double agenda creates anxiety over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university. My essay offers a means of working through this tension: a performative pedagogy based on a descriptive theory of the dynamics of passing. I exemplify this dynamic by reading debates on white feminists' appropriation of black women's writing, comparing student responses to the 1934 film Imitation of Life, and discussing Fannie Hurst's novel on which the film is based. I posit the pedagogical relation as the privileged site where passing, which is inevitable in any subject position, can be enacted and made explicit.

Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary studies, makes some meanings unrecoverable and others newly possible. A text endures as a nonintegral survivor, an echo of what it was and of what it might become, its resonance changing with shifts in interpretive contexts. Since this resonance cannot be addressed by synchronic historicism, I propose an alternative, diachronic historicism, inspired especially by scientific theories on background noise, by Einstein's account of the relativity of simultaneity, and by critiques of the visual bias in Western epistemology. I try to theorize the text as a temporal continuum, thick with receding and incipient nuances, exercising the ears of readers in divergent ways and yielding its words to contrary claims. Literature thus encourages a semantic democracy that honors disagreement as a crucial fact of civil society.

Cultural studies has tended to neglect poetic texts, but poetry is in fact well suited to provoke classroom debates concerning the cultural construction of the aesthetic object, as Blaise Cendrars's Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems) confirms. Bakhtin's notion of the heteroglossic helps to demonstrate that Cendrars's poems are also “rejoinders” in a dialogue with their institutional other: advertising. But Cendrars does not merely claim advertising as poetic material; he identifies poetry as a form of advertisement. Cendrars suggests that the symbolic capital of poetry cannot exist unless the poem brings attention to itself by means of a practice that it posits, paradoxically, as its other. However, the fact that poetry is constructed by advertising its difference does not make poetry equivalent to advertising. Cultural studies reveals the institutional construction of poetry, but only close textual analysis can highlight the semiotic distinctions between poetry and advertising that institutional boundaries engender.

A number of critics suggest that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature femininity is portrayed as both similar to and different from colonial otherness in ways that destabilize the English woman's relation to empire. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) presents an opportunity to enrich this discussion because of the novel's synchronization of domestic and colonial authority, sustained attention to the sexual, national, and racial ambiguities posed by transvestites and Creoles, and chaotic variety of events that prohibits political fixity. Following the multiple allusions to “home” and “abroad” in Belinda, I argue that female homoeroticism and miscegenation become analogous dangers and reflect eighteenth-century concerns about the mutability of bodily and colonial boundaries.

Every aspect of organic life, including sexuality and death, is comprehended in Ulysses as a moment or aspect of a general circulation whose primary figure is eating and the digestive process. But the digestive process is a form of decomposition, and in one sense Ulysses is a stomach or tomb in which language breaks down into its constituent units—ultimately, letters, the elements of an onomatopoeic notation for human speech. Ulysses works between the figure of onomatopoeia (as the limit of mimesis) and that of infidelity (as an image for the undermining of all ontological security at the sexual-gastronomic level) to reconceive mimesis as the isomorphism between two decompositional series, one involving language and the other the body.

During 1931–33 Michel Leiris took part in an ethnographic expedition across Africa, the highly publicized Dakar-Djibouti mission. This essay examines three documents related to the mission. The first, remarks that Leiris wrote before the trip, reveals his understanding, either conscious or unconscious, that theft would be an essential part of the mission's ethnographic strategy. In the second, a journal kept during the expedition, Leiris recorded specific incidents of theft. I argue that the ethnographers' thieving, portrayed as spontaneous acts, is in fact a political one that allows them to collect objects of great cultural significance while ensuring a European identity distinct from the identity of the colonized. The third document is the published version of the journal, which Leiris titled L'Afrique fantôme. Variants in this version and a photographic illustration prefigure Leiris's rethinking of ethnography's role in decolonization.

Critics who work at the intersection of psychoanalysis and narratology frequently examine Freud's “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). A close reading of the anecdotes interpolated in Freud's essay suggests that while narrative is often motivated by an effort to contain charged material, something always escapes that control, threatening to proliferate without stopping. The dual containing and dispersing effect of narrative is reflected in Freud's doubling of himself as narrator and protagonist; in his ambivalence toward women, the maternal, and creativity; and in his attraction and resistance to literature. Although Freud often appears to reduce literature to an illustration of psychoanalytic laws, the subversive literariness of language and the instability of the subject emerge dramatically in the uncanniness of his own narratives.

This essay questions the relation between national affiliation and other elements of identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality. Citing British newspaper stories and editorials of the 1920s that sexualized and pathologized the black man, I connect the fear these articles reflect to the fear of the white flapper. Joan Riviere's 1929 psychoanalytic study of femininity and masquerade, which explores the psychic parameters of gendered national belonging, frames my reading of Woolf's use of racial tropes in Orlando (1928), where they function within strategies for granting national belonging to the queerly gendered white Englishwoman. These strategies, which are part of the masquerade, include the narrator's satiric stance and the deployment of secret codes. Despite the text's ambivalences and ambiguities, Orlando's sexuality is finally domesticated by the racial and sexual terms of national belonging.

There are many disparities in literary competence between teachers and students. It is emblematic of these differences that students in introductory college literature courses usually read assigned texts only once, while the teacher's normative experience involves multiple rereadings. For inexperienced readers in these classes, the task of acquiring literary competence may seem as difficult as learning a foreign language. Research in the study of foreign languages and literatures contains valuable insights for the teaching of first-language literature. The traditional lecture-and-discussion format fails to address the individual student's background knowledge, motivation for literary study, and personal response to texts. Prereading activities, tasks to accompany at-home reading, and collaborative strategies in class discussion can lead readers to engage texts more meaningfully in the introductory literature classroom.

Although the pivotal role of the Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky (1892-1945) in the development of modern linguistics and literary theory has been repeatedly stated by prominent scholars, he has remained virtually unknown outside Russia. Yakubinsky was educated at Petersburg University in 1909–15 during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, a field that hitherto had been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarians' positivist and historicist concerns were contested by a range of scholars interested in the functional diversity of language and concomitantly in the processuality of language as an individual and a collective activity. In this heated atmosphere of reevaluation and change Yakubinsky, with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Viktor B. Shklovsky, initiated the movement that later came to be called Russian formalism. In fact, the functional distinction between “poetic” and “practical” language that Yakubinsky introduced in his groundbreaking study “On the Sounds in Poetic Language” (“O ”; Jakubinskij 163-76) became the cornerstone of formalist criticism and “served as the activating principle for the Formalists' treatment of the fundamental problems of poetics” (Èjchenbaum 8). Yakubinsky thus laid the foundation for structuralism. However, he soon moved away from the formalists' preoccupation with poetic and literary texts and devoted himself to the social dimension of the functions and forms of language.

This essay discusses the origins of the literary canon in mid-eighteenth-century England, looking in particular at the changing reputations of Shakespeare and Spenser. Situating the writing of English literary history within the context of the cultural market, print culture, and nationalism, I argue that the mid-century model of literary history both represents the dialectical outcome of previous decades of thinking through the problem of cultural change and puts in place the terms for the modern narrative of the literary canon. An earlier aesthetics of gendered and sociable refinement separated itself from a Gothic past later recovered as the singular moment of literary achievement. The Gothic account was then challenged by a rethinking of consumption as reading abstracted over time. Together, Gothic historicism and abstract reading formed the antithetical basis on which critics established the modern canonical account of English literary history.