It has been an honor and a privilege to serve as your president this year. I was appointed to my first MLA committee thirteen years ago; I was elected to the Executive Council ten years ago; I have been an officer of the association for the past three years. And it is a most curious thing—the MLA is one of the few organizations I've known whose internal workings appear more impressive the closer you look. My thanks to Rosemary Feal and all the other members of the senior staff, who have been so wonderful to work with, and my thanks to all of you for being here tonight, postponing dinner for a while and joining me for my first and last Presidential Address.

This essay tracks relations between Laurence Sterne's sonorous prose and his discussions of time in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), identifying a novelistic technique of rhythmic narration geared to represent experiential temporality. I call this technique sonorous duration, and I demonstrate how it conveys a pulsating embodied experience shared by intradiegetic communities as well as by readers. After giving a brief account of early musicology and eighteenth-century elocutionary treatises to indicate the cultural context in which Sterne develops his notions of rhythm and duration, I offer close readings of key scenes in Tristram Shandy that exemplify a novelistic interest in sonority as a means for representing shared and embodied temporal experience. In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as Gérard Genette and Garrett Stewart.

In 1891 Oscar Wilde argued that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” A hundred years later, the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE takes up where Wilde left off, arguing that “[t]o be an artist you have to be a good liar.” This essay explores how Shonibare reinvents Wilde's antirealism for a globalized, postcolonial world. Building on Leela Gandhi's notion of “interested autonomy,” I argue that in works such as his 2001 photo series Dorian Gray, Shonibare turns to Wilde's aestheticism as a means of upending the relation between realism and politics found in Chinua Achebe's critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, rediscovering the disparate racial and sexual geographies at stake in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Albert Lewin's 1945 film version of it. Shonibare's post-colonial decadence, I argue, demonstrates how decadent aestheticism may become central to postcolonial imaginings of the real.

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje's haunting novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, probes paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictional representations of transnational violence. What is conveyed by novels of war and genocide that cast the whole of a decolonial territory as a “deathworld”? The prism of death in Anil's Ghost requires readers of this text to relinquish settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude and our entanglements with the deaths of others. Postcolonial fictions of violence conjoin historical circumstance with phantasmatic expressions to raise important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies. Advancing a theory about “postcolonial crypts” in fiction, I argue that postcolonial fictions' attention to violence transforms notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework.

Norman Mailer was haunted by the specter of social death—a specter created for him by living as a Jew between the parentheses created by the Holocaust and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. As an antidote to social death, Mailer sought its opposite—sovereignty within and beyond his writer's sphere. In the boxer Muhammad Ali, Mailer found an exemplar of the seizure of sovereignty within and beyond a sphere. The Fight chronicles the heavyweight championship battle between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, a country treated like a private bank account by its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. I argue that Mailer regrettably failed to emphasize fully the fact that Zaire was exhibit B (the Vietnam War being the writer's inevitable exhibit A) in the case Mailer passionately made that the Cold War brutalized the American psyche.

This essay considers the poetry of the juvenile author Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), largely unstudied today but well known throughout the nineteenth century. Kirke White's work provides an example of the importance to juvenile writing of prolepsis—a trope that yokes immediacy to the future, employing a range of strategies including both anticipation and retrospection. Robert Southey's edition of Kirke White's Remains, coming on the heels of Southey and Joseph Cottle's edition of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), consolidated juvenile writing into a recognizable tradition. Taking young Romanticera writers seriously now helps us recover how many young people published and how actively their writing was discussed. Romanticism's relation to juvenility can shape new hypotheses about literary practice and offer alternative understandings of tradition: the juvenile tradition, through a proleptic sense of its own immanence, anticipates its future critical neglect but indicates the retrospection and reinterpretation that will someday remedy it.

In the name of “homohistory,” “queer temporality,” and “unhistoricism,” some early modernists have accused queer historicists of promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. These early modernists announce their critique of the “straight temporality” allegedly caused by a framework of teleology as a decisive break from previous methods of queer history. Using the accusation of teleology as an analytic fulcrum, this essay scrutinizes these scholars' assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change. Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept queer, as well as homo and hetero, in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake are not only our emerging understandings of the relations between chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but also some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.

Tort law, which governs civil wrongs, coalesced during the late nineteenth century as courts became increasingly willing to compensate injured people. Its history, however, has been told without reference to issues of race or compensation for slavery and its aftermath. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Charles Chesnutt stretches tort discourse by using its principle of corrective justice to theorize liability for racial injustice and so discovers what law suppresses—the problem of collateral consequences when responsibility is made a function of race. Not only does corrective justice reach an operational limit when the enormity of the wrong exceeds the ability to pay, but using race to assess liability aligns corrective justice with the logic behind the southern practice of lynching. Recovering Chesnutt's use of tort challenges the dominance of contract law as the framework for reading Marrow and revises our historical understanding of the significance of reparations.

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

In his tale of the miraculous healing of a mute youth in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (bk. 5, ch. 2), Bede figures language pedagogy as poetic emancipation. The tongue's loosening is an escape from physical disability and a figurative deliverance from the bonds of pagan sin through baptismal gesture. It also signifies liberation from the desolation of being trapped in one's own consciousness, a freeing into communion with other people. Bede uses the figure of a linguistically disabled youth to explore the grammatical underpinnings of all language, spoken or written. While he depicts the sacramental aspects of Latinate language learning, he also makes a startling move, hinting that English, a tongue ideologically and geographically peripheral, can adopt the pedagogies of Latin for its own secular uses. The story is an interpretative capstone to Bede's accounts of Cædmon, Imma, and Gregory I's encounter with English slaves in a Roman marketplace.

After showing that nine percent of William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects of Running, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just as Running prolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another.

Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne This essay examines the role of flânerie in Ralph Werther's 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne. In his everyday male existence, Werther lived a life of self-alienation. Strolls through urban slums in search of same-sex pickups, however, allowed him to become the woman he felt himself to be at his core. Critical assessments of the memoir largely overlook his preferred model of femininity, which derived from Victorian-era assumptions that women were, psychologically and morally, little more than children. Autobiography shows that flânerie was an ontology built on a paradox, for just as the flâneur's static identity consists of constant movement, Werther based his identity on the notion that childhood, itself transitional and peripatetic, was the destination of Victorian womanhood. By aligning flânerie with Victorian womanhood we might better understand how the latter is not antithetical to modern notions of sexuality but is the foundation on which the parameters of modern sexuality were constructed.

This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil's Aeneid, focusing on the bee simile in book 1, the poem's inaugural miniaturizing moment. Deviating from the standard paradigms of Vergilian criticism, I suggest we can learn a great deal about smallness in this poem by studying it through the lens of the sublime. My analysis bypasses the proliferation of Romantic sublimes to draw primarily on a model of sublimity derived from Neil Hertz's influential reading of Longinus. Read through the Hertzian sublime, miniaturization in the Aeneid is revealed as a subtle articulation of the poem's running concern with power. The bee simile, I argue, enacts a threefold drama in which hero, author, and reader confront what I call their sublime condition, coming to terms with their implication in immensities beyond their comprehension and control.

From the mid-1960s onward, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have turned to the question of Palestine as a model of political and aesthetic innovation. Taking the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles-Anfas as an early, paradigmatic example of the literary turn to Palestine in the Maghreb, I argue that writers such as Abdellatif Laâbi and Abdelkebir Khatibi used Palestine as a springboard for “cultural decolonization,” reactivating global anticolonial discourses in order to articulate a relational, cross-colonial Maghrebi identity. Focusing on discussions of language, poetic form, and cultural autonomy, I show that Palestine served as a point of reference in debates on postcolonial Maghrebi culture. Without muting the ethical pitfalls inherent in representing a heterogeneous anticolonial struggle in a postcolonial context, I take this example of cross-colonial poetics as an invitation to rethink along multidirectional, transnational lines the way we approach Maghrebi and, more generally, postcolonial literature and culture.

This article contributes to the new formalism by considering the relation between literary form and race. It argues that Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker is primarily concerned with its own figurative activity and that only when the analytic framework is shifted away from Asian America and toward allegory does the novel's far-ranging critique of whiteness, referential language, and native speaking become apparent. This figurative activity consists of strategies of concealment that disguise their artfulness by posing as self-evident or referential. Race, espionage, and allegory are examples of this representational mode, defined by hiding in plain sight. As part of a larger argument for formal analysis in Asian American literature, the article explores how the novel's central tropes figure the figuration of Asian American experience, and it seeks to demonstrate how reading for form can sharpen the politics of race.