This essay argues that our inability to map the circulation of William Blake's proverbs in contemporary Anglo-American culture is critically and politically instructive. Opening historicist literary criticism and reception study out to each other, I contend that mainstream citations of the proverbs today point the historicist critic to the radical political potential that Blake's poetic form possessed (but never successfully unleashed) in the original historical contexts in which Blake wrote. Understanding the proverb form and its centrality to Blake's poetry sheds light on how and why his work resists analysis through familiar literary-historical categories like text, corpus, reader, and reading formation. Recognizing this resistance clarifies in turn how, through its use of proverbs and proverblike sentences, his poetry constituted a heterogeneous regulatory challenge to the regulatory power of systems of laws–common, religious, and divine. (MG)

This paper considers the story of the making of Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky as a case study for the emergence of the art novel as a commercial niche after World War II. Bowles's novel expresses disdain for American culture and depicts its characters' flight to the Sahara, but its subject matter contrasts with the story of the novel's creation: an unlikely collection of American mass-culture and high-culture institutions, including Doubleday, the William Morris Agency, and the avant-garde publisher New Directions, collaborated in the production and promotion of The Sheltering Sky. The story of the novel's making and of its immediate commercial success, the product of a New Directions marketing campaign that effectively advertised Bowles's distance from American culture, exemplifies a neglected aspect of postwar cultural history, when institutions from across the cultural spectrum recognized the existence of a growing market for avant-garde detachment. (EB)

Within or alongside the larger field of print culture, a new area for scholarship is emerging in the humanities and the more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies. This development is being driven by the cultural turn in departments of language and literature, by the development of digital archives that allow for such studies on a broader scale than ever before, and by what the producers of the Spectator Project have called “the special capabilities of the digital environment” (Center). Literary and historical disciplines engaged with the study of modern culture are finding in periodicals both a new resource and a pressing challenge to existing paradigms for the investigation of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and modern cultures. The forms of this new engagement range from Cary Nelson's suggestion, in Repression and Recovery, that periodicals should be read as texts that have a unity different from but comparable with that of individual books (219) to the organization of groups like the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, founded in 1968, and the more recently established Research Society for American Periodicals. Every year new books are appearing that emphasize peri–odicals and investigate the ways in which modern literature and the arts are connected to the culture of commerce and advertising and to the social, political, and scientific issues of the time.

Thus does Denis Diderot express his skepticism about whether it was actually the Marquis de Croismare, an Ostensibly Innocent player in the machinations leading to the composition of La religieuse, who replied to letters to him by Diderot and company or whether Frédéric Grimm and friends tricked Diderot into believing it was Croismare. Counterbalancing the philosophe's questioning volley is Grimm's assertion in the “Préface”:

In her 2003 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Amy Kaplan suggests that current crises have “exposed certain limitations of our available tools” (2). Kaplan's address reflects the move beyond the traditionally nationalist concerns of American studies, but her appeal to think more critically about disciplinary identities and methods at this point in our nation's history has wider implications. Alarmed by the “uncanny mirroring” between the lexicon of the champions of empire and that of its critics, Kaplan urges scholars “to do more than expose the imperialistic appropriation of the name America and then turn away from it” (2, 10). Embracing the transnational turn in American studies, Kaplan calls for a comparative historical approach that recognizes the ideological force of “America” and that understands how “America” “changes shape in relation to competing claims to that name and by creating demonic others, drawn in proportions as mythical and monolithic as the idea of America itself” (11).

I trace the historical connection between Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the development of print-based cryptography to examine how war transforms the cultural meaning of books as mobile objects and as readable texts. The first section of the essay, “War and Print,” argues that the spatial portability of print is key to our understanding its role in the two forms of national aggression at the center of Michael Ondaatje's novel-namely, British colonialism and the Second World War. The second section, “War and Handwriting,” turns to The English Patient and proposes that in Ondaatje's novel the admiration of immobile works of art and the act of handwriting attempt to defy the violent human displacements that print enabled. (AB)

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE AND. WHEN JUDITH BUTLER AND I DEcided to cochair a conference called “Human Rights and the Humanities,” we aimed to create a connection between two apparently disparate fields and to leave its nature general enough to allow participants to probe different types of relations. I say “apparently” because connections between the humanities and human rights have existed historically and conceptually in the West through the mediation of humanism. Even though in Renaissance Italy umanista, the teacher of classical languages and literatures, was contrasted with legista, the teacher of law, humanist thought held that the reading, understanding, and critique of the bonae litterae, as Eugenio Garin has argued, could contribute to the renovation of the world, social life, and government and thus to human happiness. Not surprisingly, then, civic humanism was to merge with the ideals of freedom, equality, justice, tolerance, secularism, and cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. And since 1945 Enlightenment humanism has provided the philosophical underpinnings of human rights declarations, covenants, conventions, protocols, and charters.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: that an art form consisting of a literary text, a dramatic stage performance, and music should be studied in all its multimedia and “multimediated” dimensions (Kramer, Opera 25). Today I can make this statement with confidence because the academic study of opera indeed covers all those aesthetic bases, but that has not always been the case. So long as opera fell primarily within the domain of musicology, it was studied first and foremost as music alone. The fact that the music was written for a specific dramatic text was not deemed particularly significant. The very name given to that text betrayed a belief in its secondariness: the diminutive libretto. But things have been changing: in recent years, some musicologists have challenged the dominant positivistic historicism and formalism of their discipline; some have even looked to literary theory for inspiration, bringing new approaches to the music of opera through narratology (e.g., Abbate) or semiotics (e.g., Nattiez). But just as important for opening up the study of opera as an aesthetic and cultural form has been the attention of scholars working in other disciplines. To take but one example, Peter Rabinowitz's rhetorical narrative theory introduced new ways of thinking about opera as narrative, not only as drama and, more pointedly, not only as drama with the composer in the role of dramatist (Kerman). It was opera, not dance, for example, that became a focus for interdisciplinary studies; already multimediated, it attracted diverse lines of inquiry. To cite the title of David Levin's groundbreaking 1994 volume, we can now see “opera through other eyes.” (Musical theater too has been seen through other—especially literary—eyes, but that is not the focus of this piece [see, e.g., Most; Miller; Rabinowitz].)

The continuing fallout from the theory wars, evident not least in the nostalgic after-theory narrative that is still in vogue, has dissipated critical energy in contemporary literary studies. Rejecting that narrative, this essay calls for a review of the legacy of theory and the polemical oppositions that set it against other scholarly enterprises, like book history. In particular, it suggests that the theoretical interrogation of the category of literature in the past forty years fruitfully intersects with book history's investigation of the material conditions of literary production, opening up new possibilities for literary historiography, while also imposing new demands on it. The essay identifies two traditions of antiessentialist thought (the skeptical and the enchanted), considers the ontology of the printed literary text, and examines the legacies of, among others, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu. (PDMcD)

Human rights doctrine defines its brief inclusively to encompass “all members of the human family” (Universal Declaration, preamble). But the vantage point from which human interactions are viewed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), although it invokes the family metaphor, is partial: all humans “should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (art. 1). This disjunction between inclusive membership and partial perspective encapsulates the position of children in human rights doctrine: they are included in the broad scope of protection but peripheral to the framing conception of agency. The particular conception of “human” motivating the doctrine is restrictive in other ways relevant to childhood: article 1 of the UDHR states, “All humans … are endowed with reason and conscience,” which is manifestly not true unless “endowed” is interpreted to indicate a capability rather than an ontological state. But “endowed” suggests a current reality, not a future possibility. As the Brazilian delegation to the UDHR drafting process wryly noted, “[U]nfortunately it is not exactly true that all men are endowed by nature with reason and conscience” (qtd. in Morsink 297). And it is certainly not true that all children are. How, then, do children fit into the human rights project?

In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.‘

RULA, A PALESTINIAN WOMAN, WAS IN THE last stages of labor. Her husband, Daoud, could not convince the soldiers at an Israeli military roadblock to let them through to meet the ambulance that was held up on the other side. After a long wait, Rula could no longer hold it. She started screaming in pain, to the total apathy of the soldiers.

Ten years ago, in the introduction to his edited collection The Future of the Book, Geoffrey Nunberg predicted, “If we take the book in its broad sense to refer simply to bound, printed volumes, then most books will likely disappear soon.” Imagining the prospect of electronic books, of devices that would present text not just on a screen but on something “almost the equivalent of paper in [its] weight and flexibility,” Nunberg looked forward to a time when printed pages would no longer be the primary bearer of textual information (12). That time has not come. The e-book never seemed to make it, either as a viable technology or as an attractive commercial product. More bound and printed volumes are being made and sold than ever. And the history of the book as an academic discipline continues to grow—not out of a sense that books are history (in the colloquial sense of that phrase) but out of a conviction that they are here to stay and that to know their future we should know their past.