In writing Mithridate, Racine manipulates his historical sources to put into play two names—Pharnace and Xipharès, Mithridate's sons—and two forms of death—pharmakon ‘poison’ and xiphos ‘sword’—and to explore the relation between the heroic individual (Mithridate) and the two forms of death that come to be associated with these two sons. The pharmakon takes on a double valence: as a vaccination against the world seen purely as the domain of betrayal and as a potential cure for the living death that constitutes heroism. It is emblematic of the hero's duplicity, which the heroic name attempts to cover up and which only the revelation of the hero's inner feelings—his love for Xipharès, the “sword” ‘xiphos’ that penetrates the protective layers of heroism and touches the mutable being hidden within—brings to light.

Ibsen's Ghosts is conventionally viewed as a Sophoclean quest tragedy in which the protagonist achieves self-knowledge when she confesses to her son that she was not sexually warm to his father, thus announcing, in Lionel Trilling's phrase, the “summation of the play.” But this interpretation disregards Ibsen's spirit and purposes and contradicts the play's tragic structure: the careful exposition, which shows that no amount of wifely responsiveness could have affected the fatum already in place, and the brilliant development, the inexorable revelation of the truth about Helene Alving's cowardice, her marriage, and her son's disease. The “summation” of Ibsen's tragic schema is the request the doomed son makes of the woman who, in submitting to his father, gave him life: “Take it back again.” Part 5 of the essay tells what happened in the author's Tours classroom as her students helped solve the mystery of Ghosts and its commentators.

This essay explores the significance of history in Hawthorne's fiction. Hawthornean romance, despite its extensive use of history, emphasizes its distance both from a real world and from ordinary historical discourse. The world, it seems to argue, is more like fantasy than fact, more like story than history. Nonetheless, Hawthorne's historical fictions remain carefully researched, meticulously detailed. The Hawthornean world, so highly subjective, so complexly encoded and symbolic, never dissipates into the fantasy that seems to narrate it. What prevents the evaporation of reality into dream, according to Hawthorne, what ensures the distance between the perceiving self and the world, and hence what restrains the imagination from engulfing a reality that is largely at the mercy of the individual's perceptual authority, is historical consciousness. Hawthorne's historical romances are about a historical imagination that is also a moral imagination.

Realism in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes is a process of imagining and managing the threat of social change identified with urban life in late nineteenth-century American culture. As a narrative of settlement, it seeks to establish a knowable community and to control a foreign and unreal territory. The strategies for representing the city are generated in an introductory scene in which the main characters look for an apartment. The narrative progresses through an escalating struggle between conflicting trajectories in realism—coherence and fragmentation, containment and excess—that explode in the pivotal streetcar strike. The novel ends with the impossibility of closure, at the limits of Howells's theory of realism.

Each meeting in this Program has been assigned a number; in the following list, numbers in parentheses refer to meeting numbers in the Program. *Denotes closed meeting.

The frames that Lewis Carroll provided for the two Alice books have largely been ignored, when not simply dismissed, in recent Carroll criticism. Their conventional form and diction may account for this negative response, but examination of their provenance, their function within the structure of the two books, and the artistry evident in the individual frame components indicate how and why the frames are important to our understanding of Carroll's vision and purpose. The frame poems are designed to lead the reader into and away from the central dream tales through a process of lyric transformation and estrangement.

Strether's final gesture of renunciation, like his various attempts to live vicariously through those around him, follows from his own position of ambassador—both for Mrs. Newsome and for Henry James. The logic he invokes in the closing scene to justify his renunciation denies the ambassador any direct profits in his own person but permits him to delegate to others his desire to “live all [he] can.” This Jamesian logic of delegation conforms to the Derridean “logic of the supplement” and governs both the novel's fictional and its compositional plots of the deviation from authority and the mediation of experience. In particular, it regulates the novel's central thematic conflict between a New England theory of representation as the preservation of an original and a Parisian theory of representation as a potentially infinite dispersal of delegates without a guiding origin or authority.

Skelton's poem begins with a radical view of reading in which the text “cues” readers to create (rewrite) texts in their own images, as does the work's fictional reader, Jane. Although Jane's rewritten text appears to be uniquely hers, the second section of Phyllyp Sparowe deconstructs it to show how it was predetermined or “cued” by her past reading. The third section of the poem disempowers Jane further, deconstructing her physical person and reconstructing her as a text that Skelton the poet “scripts.” Although Jane soon escapes his control, he once again deconstructs her autonomy and power. This time Skelton points to another form of both licensing and limiting the reader, the interpretive community of male readers that enables Jane to challenge Skelton and simultaneously determines and shapes her criticism. Ultimately, Phyllyp Sparowe requires us to examine the nature of reading and the ways in which interpretive communities function.

The power of novelistic tradition to translate ideological structures of belief into narrative structures that encode and perpetuate those beliefs is ominously illustrated in the Anglo-American novel's “marriage tradition.” Novelists who have attempted to escape such strictures have had to contend not only with the socially conservative thematics of the traditional love plot but also with its highly codified, closed structural variants. The protomodernist experimentation and formal openness of The Golden Bowl provides a case in point: here James methodically explodes the premises of traditional love fiction by making the novel's experiments in form mirror its unsettling critique of the sexual codes engendering marital strife. In the process, James's attempt to plot the contradictions inherent in the conventional ideal of wedlock underscores the degree to which a traditional novelistic pattern of happy endings has always been a self-subverting literary enterprise.

Readers of Dubliners are usually well prepared for a leap out of the suffocating world Joyce displays there, for a promise, however ambiguous or mundane, of escape. But in a story like “The Dead” the production of a desire for escape at all costs may be the crucial interpretive problem, for it inevitably stimulates our mystified identification at the end with a character whose apparent awakening is itself socially conditioned. Unless interpretation radically reevaluates the cultural codification of reflective consciousness, we remain locked within a Christian paradigm of self-knowledge as truth that transcends material oppositions through selflessness—through the insistent generosity that punctuates this story. Gabriel's concluding “insight” and humility may then only reproduce an ideology that Joyce cruelly traces throughout bourgeois Dublin life: to escape his constant humiliation by others, Gabriel must finally humiliate himself.

A fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes suggests that any attempt to transgress the binary prison of male and female (active and passive) tends to invert the traditional terms without disrupting their oppressive and spurious authority. Barthes proposes a neutral and utopian “third term,” or “non-sense,” that will transcend transgression itself and that he identifies with a “happy” sexuality and a “Gongorine” text. The poetics of Golden Age Spain are underwritten by implicitly gendered conceptions of the rhetorical body: ornamental style, lyric genre, and Italianate ethos are associated with the “female” text and hence made subordinate to their “higher” male equivalents. In the Soledades Góngora stresses the “female” terms, but his usage may not be transgressive: generic confusion (sexual and textual) was already widespread elsewhere. He tends, rather, to a nomadic indeterminacy that displaces author as active origin and reader as passive recipient of authoritative and authoritarian meaning.

As a conceptual framework, the ascending spiral does not originate with Coleridge, but it appears in his work in a prominent and distinctive form. Although he used the figure at first to describe the external world—and modified it for that purpose during the 1820s—Coleridge soon connected it with the human world of the mind as well. Attempts to put it to work as a principle of development in his writings include the revised Friend of 1818 and the Aids to Reflection of 1825.