Hanover, New Hampshire. Another frigid winter day. I am walking to lunch. The dartmouth college green is covered in snow, and temperatures are dropping. It is January 1991, the day after Operation Desert Storm was launched in the Persian Gulf. “stop the war!!” A few people carrying large and small signs stand on the corner closest to Main Street; you can see their breath as they chant. “US out of Kuwait!” The war is so new that no lectures or teach-ins have been scheduled on campus yet, and I see that the protesters are neither students nor faculty members: they are people, many of them older, from surrounding New Hampshire and Vermont towns. Ahead of the academics, once again, I'm thinking. As on other such occasions, Grace Paley is here, wearing her blue parka, purple wool hat, snow boots, and mittens, holding her sign. The protests will continue every Friday at noon, in snow and ice, until the United States starts moving troops out of the Gulf in early March; I join when I can, but I often have conflicts on campus. Paley drives in from her home in nearby Thetford, Vermont, every time, without fail.

The Taking of captives was a common practice in crusade warfare. Although men were more easily ransomed, many women were also taken captive. Women were not combatants on the battlefield, but when the fighting overran crusader camps, women in the camps were likely to be taken. Women were also captured when cities were taken or besieged cities were abandoned by their defenders. Albert of Aachen notes that in 1101 when the crusaders lost the battle at Paphlagonia, they left the undefended women to be captured by their enemies:

Jorge Luis Borges claimed to be “the first hispanic adventurer to have arrived at Joyce's [Ulysses]” (3) when he published a translation of the novel's final page in the Argentine journal Proa in January 1925; in fact, the Spaniard Antonio Marichalar was the first to translate passages of Ulysses into Spanish—just two months earlier, in the Revista de Occidente in Madrid. One of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 1920s and 1930s, Marichalar (1893–1973) was largely responsible for circulating the works and poetics of a number of anglophone writers, including Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Liam O'Flaherty, Hart Crane, and D. H. Lawrence, among hispanophone audiences. Prior to 1924, Joyce had been mentioned briefly in the Spanish press by Marichalar, by the English travel writer Douglas Goldring, and by several others, but no one yet had substantially treated the Irish author whose work was at the center of a revolution in European literary aesthetics. Marichalar's groundbreaking article/review/translation “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” was a remarkable introduction to and adaptation of Joyce's modernist cosmopolitanism in Spain, where the author's influence remains profound.

How should literary historians aiming to describe literary traditions that predated the modern nation use the methodological tool kit developed contemporaneously with the European nationalisms? Can philology be separated from the logic of the nation and from the teleological vanishing point—the languages and literatures of (for instance) modern France, Spain, or Italy—that has traditionally provided a rationale for readings of medieval literature (and jobs for philologists)? Medieval literary historians have known for some time that we must get out of the habit of thinking in terms of the national literatures that would emerge centuries after the texts we study were written. And we have absorbed the lesson that the nineteenth-century philologists on whose shoulders we stand worked (frequently, if not systematically) under the influence of the nationalizing movements emerging as they wrote, so that their pronouncements on medieval texts must be read with appropriate caution. We have not, however, yet produced new geographic and historical formulations to replace the narrative that traces the origin of the modern European nations to a medieval Latin Christian crucible.

My Title, a variation on Susan Sontag's regarding the pain of others, is meant as an homage to sontag and as an extension of her searing critique of war photography and its reflexive objectification of suffering, its conversion of victims into objets d'art. But why, in particular, the pain of women Holocaust victims here? Because we have finally begun to amass a large and profound critical literature on gender and the Holocaust, which, alongside Sontag's work on photography, might help us look at how and why the public gaze of photographers, curators, historians, and museumgoers continues to turn women into objects of memory, idealized casts of perfect suffering and victimization, and even emblems of larger Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

When, in 1990, Gustavo Pérez Firmat asked, “Do the Americas have a common literature?” He was responding to a fledgling critical endeavor that had been pioneered during the previous decade in only a handful of studies, by such Latin Americanists and literary comparatists as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón, Bell Gale Chevigny, Gari Laguardia, Vera Kutzinski, Alfred Owen Aldridge, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (“Cheek” 2). Although “inter-American literary studies”—the comparative investigation of the “literatures and cultures of this hemisphere” as one unit of study—seemed to Pérez Firmat “something of a terra incognita” in 1990 (“Cheek” 1–2), the hemispheric conception of American studies had originated in the United States some sixty years earlier with the Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953), who argued, in his seminal 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, for an “essential unity” in the history of the Western hemisphere (472). Although the contributing historians in Lewis Hanke's 1964 collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common History? gave this “Bolton Thesis” a decidedly mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Pérez Firmat's landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship. Meanwhile, inter-American studies has had a strong tradition in Europe that is, in fact, older than Pérez Firmat's or Hanke's collection. As early as the 1950s, the eminent Italian Americanist Antonello Gerbi was publishing his groundbreaking works in comparative hemispheric and Atlantic history, which studied the early modern polemic about the degenerative influences the New World environments had on plants, animals, and humans. Also, Hans Galinsky, at the University of Mainz, was exploring the literature of the European discovery and aesthetic forms such as the baroque in the early Americas from a comparative perspective in the 1960s.

Utopia has always been about place, the Greek roots of this word squinting wryly at the dual possibilities of a “happy place” and “no place.” Even generically, the term utopia implies its own place, not as ambiguously poised between the ideal and “the not at all” but as a point of origin—a sign of incipient modernity—to which the medieval becomes “no place for utopia.” Utopia thus marks both the geographic space of possibility and difference and the genealogical space of transition from premodernity to modernity, so the historical narrative goes. Like most historical narratives with a fondness for originary designs, this one has the effect of provincializing the Middle Ages as that time before modernity when utopianism was not possible, or alternatively when it was possible only as a religious ideal that differed fundamentally from early modern secular utopianism and Thomas More's seminal text. The Middle Ages is relegated in histories of utopia to the realm of “the before”—before secularism, before modernity, before geography. Medieval antecedents of early modern utopianism are shunted off into that “inert, sealed off space before the movement of history.” The Middle Ages is out of step with modernity to the same extent that it is out of place in utopian studies. The irony of the “middleness” of the Middle Ages is that, contra Aristotle, it is marked not by excellence but by the inertia of premodernity—it is the “excluded middle,” if you will.

Western Literature's most magnificent object stages an intimacy between struggle and tranquillity. A gift to no soldier, but to his mother, requiting her ancient kindness, the shield of Achilles proffers a drama of war and of peace. The city of peace vibrates with the sound of flute and lyre, a wedding celebration, deliberations at assembly; the city of war quivers with well-armored soldiers, women and children perched atop the walls, beyond the walls an ambush laid along the river just where flocks of cattle come to drink (Il. 18.478–608). Homer teaches this truth about the object world: in the moment of their manufacture, weapons already manifest both prosperity and pain, technology and ceremony. Sweating, and longing, and grieving; springing, and whirling, and tumbling. The worlds inscribed on the shield figure those worlds out of which weaponry as such is forged. Could some new ekphrastic pedagogy disclose such worlds in the Hummer, the Abrams tank, the M-16, the B-52—revealing the quotidian histories they both congeal and obscure? If not, must we settle for Auden's lament, the mother pained now by what, for modernity, the god has wrought: “there on the shining shield / His hands had set no dancing-floor / But a weed-choked field” (294 [“The Shield of Achilles”]). Is the modern artifact so bereft of people?

The rain stops; the last drop falls on the rue de l'Odéon. Across the slick, shimmering atmosphere purrs a low, faint rumble. Suddenly, a glimmering light flows, slicing the gray glaze: in solemn silence a splendid Rolls arrives. It approaches, weightless, and dims the crystal mirage of its astonishing headlights. Like an endless sigh, it glides, seeping, stealthy, gentle. Quickly, a murmur [rumor] softly unglues the wheels from the damp pavement, and they take off smoothly. Cutting through the street along the stream of houses, the car moves on until it chances upon a banner that, feinting from a façade, obliges it to stop. It is detained before a bookstore whose sign reads, “Shakespeare and Company.” On the poster hanging above, perpendicular and stylized, appears the sketched silhouette of Old Will.

Russian studies are still in love with their fascinating and unpredictable subject, despite radically changing geopolitical realities and shifts in the academic climate. We in the field have been through something resembling the free-market shock therapy prescribed for newly non-Soviet Russia, a major shake-up in intellectual orientation and logistics. Our methodologies, perspectives, and projects are always in this sense a reflection of our present-day subject, but they are also a self-portrait, the latest in a series.

The last decade or so has seen an explosion of interest in “mediterranean studies.” a half century after the original publication of Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949), scholars in a number of disciplines have once again found the Mediterranean a productive category of analysis, as evidenced in a proliferation of conferences, edited volumes, journals, and study centers. This renewal of Mediterranean studies is part of an upsurge of interest in “oceanic studies,” or, alternatively, “the new thalassology” In recent years, as Kären Wigen writes,

[h]istorians of science have documented the discovery of longitude and the plumbing of underwater depths; historians of ideas have mapped the conceptual geographies of beaches, oceans, and islands; historians of labor and radical politics have drawn arresting new portraits of maritime workers and pirates; historians of business have tracked maritime commerce; historians of the environment have probed marine and island ecologies; and historians of colonial regimes and anticolonial movements alike have asserted the importance of maritime arenas of interaction. (717)

In the field of medieval literature, on the other hand, “Mediterranean studies” has found much less purchase. An MLA database search for the keywords “Mediterranean” and “medieval” or “Middle Ages” yields a total of thirty-two entries, over half of which treat topics in intellectual or art history. Taking that asymmetry as a point of departure, this essay explores the different ways “medieval Mediterranean literature” might be conceived; how it would relate to the study of the medieval Mediterranean in other disciplines; and what linguistic, thematic, and theoretical modifications or challenges it would offer to the field of literature as currently configured.

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is remembered primarily for the two feats of which she was proudest, publishing Ulysses and “STEERing a little bookshop for about twenty-two years between the two wars,” as she puts it in the text reprinted here. Her “little bookshop,” Shakespeare and Company, was for Ernest Hemingway “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living” (35). In 1919, with support from Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a neighboring bookstore, Beach launched the Left Bank shop that would serve as a hub for French and expatriate writers.1 In her 1959 memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach tells stories of her friends and patrons, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, Simone de Beauvoir, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Samuel Beckett, and many others. Beach also describes there her other great feat, the publication of Ulysses. When British and American printers were prevented from publishing Joyce's Dublin epic because it was considered too obscene, Beach stepped in. Her fortuitous situation as a seller of English-language books in Paris inspired her to risk bringing out Ulysses herself. In February 1922, after a legendary struggle, the first edition of Ulysses appeared under the imprint “Shakespeare and Company.”

Today the argentine judiciary dispenses ritual punishment as it condemns the oppressors of the last military dictatorship (1976–83) in the name of historical truth. Human rights organizations and movements have contributed immeasurably to this end. More than two decades have passed since the historic military-juntas trial (1985), and over the years successive state policies have proved that traumatic memory is a contested site, subject in this postdictatorial democracy to both debate and governmental intervention.

The prospect is sublime. Off the coast of the mainland are islands—in fact, sweeping archipelagoes—inhabited by educators and students. The residents have built massive modern classrooms, high-rises, clock towers, conference rooms, amphitheaters, auditoriums, and libraries among the evergreens, campuses with spacious lawns. To get to one of these islands, you can go directly from certain information kiosks or portals. Or, if you know the way and don't run into any invisible Plexiglas walls extending far up into the sky, you can just levitate, tilt into the wind, and fly there, while the landscape scrolls along below you like a map (which it is).