Founded on the dualism elaborated in Descartes's early metaphysical writings, such as the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations, most studies of corporeality in Descartes delimit the alienated body according to its mechanical functions. His later writings on ethics and the passions reappropriate the body for the subject and emphasize the sensible or “aesthetic” functions of corporeality. By analyzing Descartes's correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia during the last five years of his life and his late treatise Les passions de l'âme, this study examines the construction of the Cartesian aesthetic body and explores the ways in which that body, rather than the mechanical body, produces the ethical individual in society, a subject–body. Displacing the Aristotelian concept of sensus communis ‘common sense,’ Descartes turns the body into the source and target of affective ethical habit. I argue that Descartes's ethical doctrine is based on the cultivation, development, and deployment of that aesthetic body. (ERK)

This essay examines the role of Rétif's writings in the development of the concept of erotic fetishism and in the formation of the French literary canon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rétif explored foot and shoe fetishisms more than a century before the phenomena were medically recognized, anticipating the modern psychosexual use of the term fetishism and making important contributions to the invention of the theoretical concept. Rétif's works were accorded a privileged place in early pathologies of fetishism, which provoked a series of polemics among German and French medical doctors and literary scholars centered on notions of national supremacy and literary value. Marked as bad literature, in both senses of the term, Rétif's writing was subsequently excluded from the French literary canon on moral grounds and became a kind of fetish object in the French literary corpus. (ASW)

In “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Henry James locates the uncanny in the servants' quarters at the top of the house, where the genteel protagonist finally corners his ghostly double. James thus prompts us to reread Freud's “The Uncanny” (1919) with a pair of questions in mind. First, how does class identity bear on the uncanny; and, second, how in turn does the uncanny bear on class identity? Steering well clear of servants in his discussion, Freud apparently dodges the issue altogether; a closer look, however, reveals that he cannily represses the social value of the uncanny so as to hold it in reserve. James, on the other hand, documents how and why psychoanalysis converts bourgeois anxiety about servants into “the uncanny,” an abstraction that floats freely across the twentieth century from séance to academic circles, where it continues to function as a ghostlier demarcation of class. (BMcC)

Why should comparison be an act laden with ethical obligation? Readers of ethnic literatures have long insisted that doing justice to these literatures must be a tenet central to work calling itself ethnic studies. I argue for a renewal of that sense of obligation: the difference of ethnicity is an occasion for articulating, juxtaposing, and reworking the relations among otherwise separate ethnic literary traditions. To the extent that difference follows a logic of intertextuality–one of crossing, exchange, and perpetual expansiveness–it enables reading ethnic literatures together even as it emphasizes the ethical difficulties of such a reading practice. From the disciplinary discourse of comparative literature to the metatextual commentary in Richard Wright's “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” and ultimately to the pragmatic context of an intertextual reading, this essay seeks to suspend ethnic difference from its position as a point of permanent untouchability. (Y-HW)

This essay contributes to a history of evolutionary models of media shift through a reading of Daniel Defoe. Published in 1722 but depicting events of 1664–65, A Journal of the Plague Year represents temporal distance in terms of shifts in modes of communication. Modes that in reality are coexistent and interdependent are here represented as parts of a linear, progressive development. Defoe helped shape an emergent hierarchy of media forms with print at its apex. A key structuring binary of this text opposes a backward past associated with orality to a new, print-oriented modernity linked to the collection and reproduction of accurate statistics and true report. The essay first examines Defoe's handling of the “Women-Searchers”–agents employed to search bodies to determine cause of death, whose oral reports formed the basis for the printed bills of mortality–then considers the depiction of rumors and an oral street culture that is associated with old women, error, and contagious superstition. (PMcD)

The Delegate Assembly was created in 1970 as a successor to the former annual Business Meeting of the Modern Language Association. Within the governance structure of the Modern Language Association, the Delegate Assembly is intended to function as the voice of the membership, the forum at which issues of professional concern are to be debated and policies formulated.

In Thomas Hardy's fiction, the human body is the untranscendible foundation of putatively ethereal interior entities such as mind and self. The emerging sciences of physiological psychology and evolutionary biology, with which Hardy was familiar, provide a context in which to understand his bodily materialism. Hardy explores these interests in The Return of the Native through a striking emphasis on the faces of characters and landscape and particularly on sensory perceptions–primarily associated with organs located in the face–as means of bringing the world into the human interior and of dissolving distinctions between subjects and objects. Reading Hardy's materialism with the tools provided by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of faciality elucidates both the fiction and the theoretical model, for the writers share an idea of depsychologized character. For Hardy, as for Deleuze and Guattari, experience of the self and the world is fundamentally corporeal, and perceptual experience makes landscape inextricably contiguous with the human. (WAC)

This essay reads the novella Die Narrenburg (1844; “The Castle of Fools”), by the Austrian germanophone writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), in terms of colonial and postcolonial theory. I argue that Die Narrenburg captures the moment when race becomes visible in a multinational Austrian Empire figured as inner colonial space. The novella also offers a challenge to the reality of race emerging into visibility and presents a strikingly modern picture of divided colonial consciousness, its desires suspended melancholically between the symptomatic maintenance of imperialist identifications and a sensitivity to the colonized that anticipates Frantz Fanon. The text thus exposes Hapsburg Austria as an unexpected symbolic locus for thinking about European racial and colonial discourse. It serves as a perceptive theorist of race and colonialism in a broad sense and suggests how we might read other seemingly peripheral works of central European literature for insights into intra- and extra-European colonial contexts. (JM)

This study focuses on the French Enlightenment's fascination with the materiality of non-Western and nonalphabetic scripts in the broader context of the history of the book. By examining definitions of writing in the Encyclopédie as well as Françoise de Graffigny's novelistic appropriation of the Inca quipu script in Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), I argue that there emerges from these texts a conception of the literary sign capable of challenging the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment printed book: dematerialized textuality and absolute legibility. Shaped by the scriptural imagination of eighteenth-century book culture, literature was able to acquire full aesthetic legitimacy only insofar as it was defined as the other of the purely semantic text. (LP)

In two contemporary Samoan works, Albert Wendt's short story “The Cross of Soot” (1974) and Sia Figiel's novel They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), tattooing produces and proclaims the psychological and social place of the tattoo bearer. The tattoo signals the splitting or doubling of subjectivity, a mechanism by which the individual human subject is produced continually and repeatedly. The Samoan tatau creates not only Samoan subjects but also the English word tattoo and the French tatouage. Wendt and Figiel treat the production and movement of the tattoo in the Pacific and the world; they thus invite a cross-cultural critique of Lacan's theories of subjectivity, which present the tattoo as constitutive of the subject. Whereas Lacan's tattoo is disembodied and nonlocalized, Wendt and Figiel account for the tattoo's material and corporeal effects, its origins in Oceania, and its function in inaugurating a collective Samoan subject. (JE)

Beginning with a reconsideration of the symbolic ending of “The Heroic Slave,” where Madison Washington and his compatriots find themselves in the Bahamas and not the United States, this article works through Frederick Douglass's understanding of national affiliation. Taking two specific problems in his imagination–the rhetoric of democracy and transnationalism–I reassess the concept of national affiliation for African Americans when political citizenship is denied. Through its protagonist, Washington, who is thoroughly versed in the vocabulary of United States nationalism, “The Heroic Slave” discloses the incongruence between the rhetoric of nationalism and its materialization as a failure of democratic enactment. The text also intimates Douglass's increasing recognition of transnationalism as an affective system of imagined belonging based on either a shared belief (in democracy) or racial contingency. By deterritorializing cultural belonging, “The Heroic Slave” depicts the liminal position of African Americans, suspended between the nation-state and the black diaspora. (IGW)

Readers have long acknowledged John Donne's lament for the decay of the world in the two Anniversarie poems commemorating Elizabeth Drury. What has not been acknowledged is the extent to which the second of these poems stages the reluctance of the soul to depart from the carcass of the earth so vividly depicted in the first. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne does something unprecedented in early modern literature: he gives voice to a soul that cannot bear to leave its earthly body behind. This essay argues that Donne represents a mutual longing between soul and body that stands in marked contrast to conventional Protestant depictions of the relationship between the two parts of the self. His explanation for such mutual longing, I contend, derives from his belief in the corporeal origins of the soul. (RT)

This essay combines a consideration of the two-decades-long publishing strategy of Goethe's last major prose work, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1808–29), with a reading of specific formal features unique to the final version of the novel. In doing so, it argues that Goethe's use of print and narrative work in concert to form what we might call a particular media imaginary–to reimagine the printed book not according to emerging nineteenth-century criteria of sovereignty, nationality, and permanence but instead according to values more in keeping with the technological capabilities of print media, such as transformation, diffusion, and connectivity. In his vigorous engagement with the material manifestations of his work as a key site of literary work, Goethe offers us an ideal place to explore the productive intersections that the disciplines of book history and literary history are opening up today. (AP)

Grendel's mother projects Anglo–Saxon cultural anxieties about weaknesses in the system of feuding and revenge. Killing off one opponent (Grendel) will only trigger the appearance of another (Grendel's mother) as long as the system of revenge by kin is in place. That she is an avenging mother may have seemed particularly monstrous, in ways that resonate with Julia Kristeva's comments on abjection and the maternal. Grendel's mother attacks to avenge her son shortly after Wealhtheow has attempted to weave the ties of kinship on behalf of her sons. By contrast, women in Old Norse literature often incite men to vengeance or on rare occasions take vengeance themselves. Seen from the social world of the Anglo–Saxon hall, however, a maternal avenger can only be imagined as monstrous or subhuman, carrying the male hero to the threshold of death. The abjected mother returns, with a vengeance, to haunt the patriarchal stronghold. (PA)