Lex liaisons dangereuses neither celebrates pure cynicism nor confirms Rousseauesque sentiment. Instead, the problem that this novel traces takes the form of a question: how is it possible to reconcile the desire for power, in the form of seduction, with the desire to overcome power in friendship? The answer to this question is embedded in the relationship between Valmont and Merteuil, who develop a new model for friendship, one that is merged with seduction. Because sex does not turn out to be a sign of conquest in the relationship between seducers, conquest can begin to operate invisibly. Les liaisons dangereuses points toward the emergence of a new representational possibility—that of invisible conquest—in the literary history of seduction.

A long-standing debate over Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns on the question of intention. While defenders of the novel say that Huck's change of heart toward Jim represents a critique of social conformity, recent detractors claim that the novel's celebration of this change of heart represents a form of liberal bad faith. This essay argues that both readings misunderstand the novel, which works not only to highlight Huck's good intentions but also to replace this sentimental model of responsibility with one drawn from the emergent law of negligence. Having effects rather than intentions be grounds of liability, this new legal paradigm made persons responsible for the inadvertent harms they caused others. From the perspective of negligence, Huckleberry Finn is an indictment of post-Reconstruction racism—not because it offers friendship as a model of reform but because it imagines accountability even in the absence of malice.

Charged with having plagiarized Stephen Spender's 1948 autobiography World within World in his 1993 novel While England Sleeps, David Leavitt responds through his novella “The Term Paper Artist” and his coedited anthology of gay writers Pages Passed from Hand to Hand by defending the place of copying and imitation in the transmission of gay culture. Echoing the preoccupation with mimicry in contemporary gay-lesbian cultural theory, Leavitt's novella fictionalizes his accused self and presents a parable of how literary inspiration, like desire, derives from inhabiting identities not one's own. “The Term Paper Artist” invites a detective game of source study that leads to figures as diverse as Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Jack the Ripper, as well as to less mentionable icons of contemporary popular culture, all of whom are used to authorize a version of gay writing and gay literary genealogy that finds generative and regenerative power in the copy.

Let me begin by quickly spelling out what I take to be the intellectual and disciplinary basis of this forum as implied in its title. I'll also say a little about the general assumptions that may have governed or provoked its convening at the MLA convention this immediately premillennial year.

“Flash,” the slang of the criminal and boxing subcultures, illuminates Byron's Don Juan more than critics have recognized. This slang was devised to hide meanings from most listeners, and the flash language in the scene in which robbers attack Juan exemplifies discursive encryption in general. Such encryption is not always evidence that the speakers need to conceal their meaning, but it reminds us that in Byron's Britain many groups of people needed to communicate in secret, most often because of illegal activity, including illegal sexuality. The poet's most dangerous secret was sodomy, a capital crime, and the form of flash he had needed most was the coded language on which sodomites had to rely. The robbery scene bestows darker connotations on the polyglossia that runs throughout Don Juan: such diversity can reflect not just emancipation but also constraint.

At the risk of sounding like a parody of a conversation about opera and illness in the 1987 movie Moonstruck, we would like to relate a postperformance dialogue about Richard Wagner's last opera. Parsifal (not Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, as in the film). While descending the same staircase at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Loretta and Ronny, the film characters played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, a man turned to his wife and said, not “You know, I didn't think she was going to die! I knew she was sick,” but “Do you think audiences today understand that Amfortas had syphilis?” Since this man is a physician, his wife was used to his medical observations, though this time he took her by surprise: “Syphilis? He was wounded by a spear when caught in the arms of the seductress Kundry!” “Yes,” he replied, “but that might just be Wagner's indirect or allegorical way of invoking nineteenth-century obsessive worries about venereal disease. Did you notice that this is a wound (one inflicted in a moment of amatory indiscretion) that won't heal, whose pain is worse at night and is eased only slightly by baths and balsams? To any nineteenth-century audience these symptoms and signals would have meant only one thing: syphilis.” “If that's the case.” his wife suggested, “then people must have written about this and we can find out.” “Not necessarily. People didn't talk openly about this kind of disease; it was secret and shameful, remember. And today, thanks to the discovery of penicillin, we luckily don't have to know about such things anymore,” said he.

In literary studies, our current use of global is often implicitly or explicitly invested in the notion of an ever-widening network of communications, of unprecedented linkages among previously disconnected or distinct cultural units. Where things were formerly separate and unrelated, they are now believed to be increasingly connected through multiple contacts, in processes that are rendered cosmopolitan, international, and cross-cultural. The underlying assumption in much of the talk about globalization is that of inclusionism—of the possibilities of including, of incorporating things into a kind of coexistence that was once out of the question. If we translate this state of affairs into religious terms, globalization would probably appear in the form of the command “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Psoriasis is the structuring principle of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. The condition is also a metaphor for Updike's writings, in their concern with surface and their proliferation. Updike seeks to avoid self-revelation by making Self-Consciousness a memoir about the other. Displacing his psoriasis into a consideration of black and mixed-race skin. Updike reflects, in the mirror of the autobiography, his self with a letter to his half-black, half-white grandsons. In a series of pronominal substitutions, in which Updike's grandsons are transformed from addressees to narratees. Self-Consciousness discloses a racial unconscious. This racial unconscious is also that of American history. As slavery was founded on a Manichaeanism of black-white skin, desires for crossing the skin border were repressed. The unconscious dimension of racism survives in the stigmatization of differently marked skins. Reading the surface of Self-Consciousness as profound, this essay assigns Updike a novel place in a racially conscious American canon.

Marking a narrative break in the twenty-fourth-century writer Knarf's novel about world war II, a novel Knarf recounts orally to his Friend Ord, this passage From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 342-43), by M. Barnard Eldershaw (pseudonym of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), enacts a scene of collaboration, falling just short of “full and equal” partnership (though perhaps all literary collaboration must thus fall). Knarf is a reader of his own text, a listener to his own story; the writer is continually in conversation—disagreeing and agreeing with—a would-be writer of the text; that conversation inflects, indeed inscribes itself in, the writer's writing, so that the would-be other writer—who is a reader and listener too—becomes inseparable from the text in process. Thematically contained in these relations, but also uncontainably circumscribing them, are “world history” and “community”: those suprapersonal entities both demand and are produced by collaboration(ism), yet they also overwhelm, dwarf, or marginalize “little fishes” like Ally, Ord, and Knarf. But, then again, world history and community are themselves elusive if meant as much more than fictions about and by little fishes, riding on their high horses.

I have no way of knowing whether it was fate that has pushed me onto this dais but as various lucky coincidences have created this opportunity I may as well call it fate. Putting aside discussion of the existence or non-existence of God. I would like to say that despite my being an atheist I have always shown reverence for the unknowable.

A person cannot be God, certainly not replace God, and rule the world as a Superman; he will only succeed in creating more chaos and make a greater mess of the world. In the century after Nietzsche man-made disasters left the blackest records in the history of humankind. Supermen of all types called leader of the people, head of the nation and commander of the race did not baulk at resorting to various violent means in perpetrating crimes that in no way resemble the ravings of a very egotistic philosopher. However, I do not wish to waste this talk on literature by saying too much about politics and history, what I want to do is to use this opportunity to speak as one writer in the voice of an individual.

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke, Death 19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke, Death 16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion of écriture “has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke, Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.

The debate over Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio has centered on whether or not Menchú told the “truth” regarding details of her personal life. According to her critics, her “lies” discredit her testimony and reduce the moral authority of leftist intellectuals who teach testimonial texts. This focus on verifiable facts ignores the literary value of testimonios in general and the importance of Menchú's testimony in particular in a discursive war tied to cold war politics. This essay explores the problematics of truth, the nature of testimonio as a genre, and the relation between political solidarity and subaltern narrative. It also examines the function of Menchú's testimonio as a discourse on ethnicity and considers the relation among the anthropologist, the subaltern subject, and truth. The conclusion deals with the need to rethink the concept of identity, with the desires and fantasies of subjective transformation, and with the notion of identity politics.

What does it mean to be an author? this question has been interrogated from just about every imaginable angle, as the status of the author has been problematized, deconstructed, and challenged to such an extent that discussions of the author problem now seem decidedly old-hat. Scholars now understand—in theory, at least—that the notion of author (like that of the founding or sovereign subject on which it depends) is a peculiarly modern construct, one that can be traced back through multiple and overdetermined pathways to the development of modern capitalism and of intellectual property, to Western rationalism, and to patriarchy. Foucault's assertion that “[t]he coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” no longer surprises (141). The author, like the autonomous individual of Descartes's cogito, is, we understand with Raymond Williams, “a characteristic form of bourgeois thought” (192), one that Ralph Ellison parodies, for instance, when his protagonist, in a fleeting moment of self- and cultural integration, proclaims “I yam what I am” (260). The relentless intertextuality of Web culture, the rapid proliferation of multiple selves online, and the development of what Sherry Turkle has called “distributed selves” of postmodernity would seem to have moved us well beyond autonomous individualism (Life 14).