The battle is not yet joined, and the poet has listed for us the array of warriors, of ships, of forces. “tell me now,” the poet of The Iliad has sung, in Richmond Lattimore's translation, “you Muses who have your homes on Olympos. / For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, / and we have heard only the rumor of it and know nothing. / Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaäns?” (2.484-88). Then the catalog: the list. In the Homeric tradition, a catalog unrolls under the guarding eye of the Muses, the witnesses, under the keeping and inspiring eye of divine and distant figures who have seen the scene, whose witnessing we imagine, from whom we borrow the faint authority we wear when we begin our own songs. These Homeric lists seem to us scattershot today—this ship here, that one there, a warrior next to another warrior simply on the grounds that, yes, there he stands. And yet to the extent that they turn on the authority of the fact, of a divine witness who reports this disorder and from whom we take the rumors of the fact, Homer's lists are at core structured, signed, legitimated. The Iliad is not only the story of the encounter between Trojans and Achaeans; it is also the story of the encounter between two phenomenologies—one envisioning orders of events, names on a list, as they present themselves to us, rumored, accidentally, contingently; another envisioning the order of what presents itself according to the signature of the presiding Muse, according to an immanent principle of structure derivable, if at all, from the totality of the list. These two encounters and these two phenomenologies don't line up; they're fought on different fields and at different levels; they have different scopes. One phenomenology is in principle endless—there's always another matter at hand; we cannot foreclose the possibility that another ship will appear; and the chaos of the battle always means that another figure, foe or friend, may step before us when we least expect it. The other is always bounded, limited on both sides by the immanent unfolding of its principle: that this or that friend or foe should have appeared makes manifest, sub specie aeternitatis, the reason for his, or her, appearing.

Recent statistics on african american readers outline distinct trends that are difficult to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, standardized tests of high school reading proficiency show that African Americans are falling further behind students in every other racial and ethnic group. The National Assessment of Educational Progress “report card” on reading claims that “Black twelfth-graders scored lower in 2013 than in 1992,” when the assessment began, while “the White-Black score gap widened” over that period (“Top Stories”). On the other hand, the Pew Research Center, in a survey published in 2014, reveals that a notably high percentage of African American adults are book readers. Pew's statistics show that when it comes to having read at least one book in the past year, there are more black readers than white or Hispanic readers (81% versus 76% and 67%, respectively) and that African Americans have read more e-books, audiobooks, and books in print than any other group (“E-Reading”).

Not far into the first volume of laurence sterne's tristram shandy, we are presented with the death scene of yorick, the country parson who plays a central role in the novel. Yorick has barely made his appearance before his death is lamented in one of the novel's most arresting passages. This death scene is unexpected and out of sync with the way the story has been told so far. Readers are not yet aware that events transpire according to a system all their own; nor do they realize that in Tristram Shandy death is implicit in the lives of its characters as perhaps in no other novel, certainly no other comic novel, of the last half of the eighteenth century. Of course, in Tristram Shandy there is no law about when things happen or how they relate to matters around them, except some supple notion of memory and the association of ideas, as articulated by John Locke. Still, Sterne, who uses the self-effacing parson to represent himself, has made no bones about his ill health and how short a time he has for writing his novel, and in that sense this scene could be placed anywhere and it would be perfectly intelligible. One critic, at least, reads the novel as a direct reflection of Sterne's awareness of his own mortal illness.

This essay aims to contribute to current studies of language and empire by considering arabic and persian in the ninth and tenth centuries. Following the lead of Edward Said on colonial empires and translation, I focus on the political aspects of language and translation in “premodern” trans-Asian societies, which have not received the nuanced attention they deserve. Accentuating the act of adopting and supporting a language as political, I argue that the wax and wane of imperial languages were predicated on two usually simultaneous dynamics: intra-imperial interests and, to use Laura Doyle's term, inter-imperial competition. Imperial patronage aimed, on the one hand, to consolidate power, exercise control, stabilize administration, and order lived reality for imperial subjects and, on the other hand, to create a discourse to fashion and project an image of rule capable of competing with rival claims in Afro-Eurasia. On both fronts, the promotion of one vernacular as “high language” entailed resisting another one in an already filled political, sociocultural, and linguistic space. The new language thus proceeded in an intrusive and even disruptive way since it involved a construction of new meanings to conform to alternative sociopolitical and cultural norms and priorities and to tame the multiplicity of language. Yet, such a political engagement or competition with existing language(s) and discourse(s) also led to new forms of hybridity of language and discourse, as was the case for Persian when the Samanids (819-999) adopted the script of the Arabic language and much of its vocabulary and idioms to express their thoughts.

As a former dean ina college made up of students from more than 150 countries, most of whom were the first in their family to continue their education past high school, I do not find it difficult to celebrate the pluribus that makes up the United States. In this role, I was reminded too that America has registered important successes in its quest to offer a democratic education, an education available to all and providing every student an equal opportunity to make the most of his or her abilities.

This essay focuses on two tenth-century bronze objects, a basin and a bowl, inscribed with an epigraphic band that can be read as the repetition of the Arabic word for sovereignty, al-mulk. These objects were probably made in the area that now comprises Iran and Central Asia, an artistic, intellectual, and commercial center of the Islamic lands in the ninth and tenth centuries. Bronzes like these, luxury commodities that would have appeared gold when new, are rarely found outside Iran and Central Asia (Allan; Baer). Yet those I discuss here were discovered far from their likely region of origin—indeed, at opposite ends of the Islamic territories of Eurasia. The large bronze basin was discovered in Inner Mongolia, while the small bronze bowl was unearthed in Córdoba, in southern Spain. These inscribed objects hint at a transhemispheric cultural-political history that has implications for reigning narratives of modernity, including for those that relate to medieval studies.

I would like to suggest that we use the term emotionality instead of emotions. this will avoid the taxonomic impulse at work when we take specific emotions and name them as objects of our inquiries. These taxonomies render emotions more stable than they are and create a hierarchy of the most talked-about or salient emotions (like melancholy, for queer studies, or fear, for political theory). More abstract than emotions, the term emotionality can take on the quality of a name and thus allow us to think together with emotionality the way one may think something through with another person. This essay will define emotionality as minimally as possible so that its particulars are allowed to shift and change.

What happens when i watch a creature suffer or when i share in my dog's joy? what is the power of these emotions, what do they teach me about living with animals and engaging ethically with their differences? While these questions may still seem sentimental to some, they have become increasingly relevant to those who study animals. Emotions have made a remarkable comeback in recent animal literature and philosophy. Rehabilitated by a new wave of theorists, they have found their way into some of the most provocative contemporary reflections on animal ethics. Josephine Donovan, Jacques Derrida, Ralph Acampora, Donna Haraway, and others have all granted compassion theoretical pride of place. They share a critique of the rationalist bias of the justice-and-rights tradition and suggest that compassionate attention to animals is the “ground upon which theory about human treatment of animals should be constructed” (Donovan, “Attention” 174). For many such contemporary thinkers, then, compassion—a deeply affective way of sharing another's emotion—is the fundamental means of forging the ethical bond we have with nonhuman animals. Replacing the “calculable process” of current animal-rights theories with the emotional encounter of the other's living—and dying—reality, compassion offers a new understanding of responsibility and relationships (Wolfe, “Exposures” 19).

In what has often been read as a comic display of frivolity, the protagonist of christopher marlowe's doctor faustus (c. 1589-92) produces a dish of grapes to satisfy the craving of a pregnant duchess. The duchess, a German, had implied that such a delicacy would be available to her in the summertime but was quite out of reach in the current month, January—“the dead time of the winter” (4.2.11). Whereas modern-day global capitalism makes fresh fruits and vegetables available year-round in northern supermarkets, the gratification of a wintertime desire for them in the late sixteenth century required magic or stagecraft. Asked how he managed to procure the grapes out of season, Faustus explains, “[T]he year is divided into two circles over the whole world, that when it is here winter with us, in the contrary circle it is summer with them, as in India, Saba, and farther countries in the East; and by means of a swift spirit that I have, I had brought them hither, as ye see” (4.2.22-27). Thus, instead of simply conjuring the grapes out of thin air, Faustus employs a spirit courier who swiftly retrieves the grapes and transports them across the globe, from the warm climates of the Eastern Hemisphere to the German court of Vanholt. If Faustus's spirit transgresses the laws of nature, it also relies on a kind of scientific knowledge and technology to ascertain where grapes naturally grow in January. Additionally, the seizure of the grapes from “India, Saba, and farther countries in the East” implies a right of access that is attained (or circumvented) by Faustus's magic. In short, the magic for which Faustus has sold his soul to the devil is, in this instance, that of effortless global commerce—or, rather, the ability to attain a foreign commodity while bypassing the means of production and contingencies of exchange.

Concerns about declining competence in elementary education are hardly new. In 1385 John of trevisa complained that new teaching methods were disadvantaging children “in alle þe gramere scoles of Engelond” (“in all the grammar schools of England”) since they once learned Latin and French but now “conneb na more Frensche ban can hir lift heele” (“know no more French than does their left heel” [Higden 2:161]). This concern was clearly widespread because William Langland also complains, at roughly the same time, that “naught oon among an hundred” (“not one among a hundred”) can read “a lettre” (“a letter”) of French (15.371-75). According to Langland, not only did schools no longer produce well-educated adults (“noon… kan versifie fair ne formaliche enditen” [“none can versify well nor write according to the rules” (15.372-73)]), but they were failing in even the most basic literacy training (grammar itself, he said, now “bigileth [perplexes] all children” [15.371]). The decline was so real—or the panic so great— that it seemed Johnny already couldn't read in 1357 (schoolchildren chanted basic prayers in Latin “without knowing how to construe or understand them” [“absque eo … construere sciant vel intellegere”], and “when they are grown up they do not understand what they… read every day” [“in etate adulta, cotidiana que … legunt non intelligant” (Leach 316-17; see also Zieman 73)]).

Literary representations of emotions fascinate us as readers; they connect to us logically and naturally because we experience in our daily lives many of the emotional events depicted in novels, plays, and poems. Students are intrigued by the similarities and differences between their everyday feelings and the emotions represented in literature. Emotions are thus interesting processes to study, and in classroom discussions and activities most students have something to say about them. For this reason, I use emotion (broadly defined) as an important subject of inquiry in my literature and culture classes. In what follows, I share a structured journaling assignment based on emotion that helps students read with more detail, improves their foreign language skills, and boosts their engagement with difficult subject matter.

This essay will read over the shoulder of Henry James as he reads a “boy's book” by Robert Louis stevenson, with the Design of using that seemingly unlikely encounter to think about children, books, and learning to read. An attentive reader of Stevenson's books for children and adults, James shared an affection and admiration for the man and the works with many of his contemporaries. The two became friendly after communicating in the pages of Longman's Magazine in 1884, beginning with James's essay “The Art of Fiction.” Often overlooked in discussions of this much cited essay is, first, the venue, a magazine that would become largely devoted to boys' adventure serials, and, second, the weight that James gives there to the recently published Treasure Island (1883), which he treats as exemplary in that it “succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts.” He contrasted it to Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie, which “deplorably” failed in its effort to depict “the development of the moral consciousness of a child” (61), as much as James thought that particular “country” worthy of the art of fiction (62). The reader will “say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before” him, and, as to childhood, James asserts expert personal knowledge. After all, he writes, “I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition” (62).

How might early modern studies participate in the larger conversations and transformations of postcolonial studies while attending to the specificities of the age? How might we develop and mobilize period-specific understandings of a moment when states aspire to both empire and nation? My inquiry is motivated not only by the questions posed by the cluster of essays to which it belongs but also by the generalized, and often historically imprecise, move to transnationalism as a catchall for work that complicates our traditional nation-based categories. As I will suggest here, despite the strategic advantages of transnationalism for forging trans-historical connections, for developing a critical pedagogy, and for interrogating our own academy, the approach threatens to occlude the intertwined histories of nation and empire, even as it fails to capture the liminal, transitional qualities of the early modern. Instead, I propose a focus on imperium, to highlight the mimetic rivalries occurring among emergent empires at the very time they solidify sovereignty. Imperium studies challenges the self-sufficient histories of nation and empire by arguing for their imbrication and competition: only a plural history of the intersections among them can provide the full picture. Moreover, imperium studies explicitly engages with the multiple early modern temporalities, as well as allegiances—to an imperial future, certainly, but also to a classical past that remained central as exemplar and motivator and to the imperfect, incomplete work of nation making.