The use of Oscar Wilde's Salome as the ground for the silent-screen star Norma Desmond's film script and character is central to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard but oddly neglected by the film's critics. This essay reads the film through its engagement with Salome, discussing its adoption from the play of a self-consciousness about the conditions of its art, which extend beyond the film's production to cultural history and film aesthetics. Norma asserts the image and ideology of the Hollywood star through her identification with the aestheticist figure of Salome, while Joe Gillis not only writes film scripts but, with his peers Betty Schaefer and Artie Green, also foregrounds narrative conventions in his efforts to organize and control his own life and experience in the film. Through its main characters, Sunset Boulevard presents an allegory of Hollywood cinema in which the complementary filmic principles of image and narrative culminate respectively in madness and death.

Recent interest in globalizing literary studies has largely involved attempts to locate conjunctures between contemporary literature and the economic formation of global capitalism and thereby to name a new literary structure of feeling—structure in terms of the organization of various literatures into a world system and feeling in terms of the literary production of new affects in new forms, styles, and genres. Its precedent is the idea of “world literature,” first articulated by Goethe in 1827 and recently recuperated. While many scholars resuscitating this concept offer a nominal apology for its Eurocentric origins, this Eurocentrism's constitutive hierarchies and asymmetries are seldom analyzed. Twenty-five years after Edward Said's Orientalism and the book's specific criticism of Goethe, it appears that the critique of Eurocentrism in general has exhausted itself, that one only needs to show awareness of it because it is predictable. Instead of working through the problem, one gives recognition to it, which serves as an expedient and efficient strategy of displacement, a tropological caveat, able to push aside obstacles on the path to globalist literary studies of global literature.

“So much living with so little life.”thus did henry James, writing to Mrs. Humphry Ward, describe H. G. Wells, or so I remember it. (I should look this up, and probably will not. My research/scholarly instincts have atrophied, except in instances— more common in old age than formerly—when I cannot remember the source of some haunting phrase or fact.) James's words are perfect for those of us coping with retirement and old age (I am of the “call a spade a spade” school), “living” less and seeking more of life. I have, in this mood, reread Henry James's The Ambassadors.

The theory of exile as a form of intellectual empowerment strongly influenced writers of the Romantic and modernist periods, when major figures from Byron to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett sought to take advantage of a dissociation from native customs to embrace the authenticity of their art. More recently, however, displacement from indigenous cultures has become such a commonplace that it appears difficult to credit the process of migration with any special qualities of critical insight. Nevertheless, literary scholarship remains to some degree in the shadow of the idealization of “exiles and émigrés” that ran through the twentieth century. Edward Said, a Palestinian in the United States, consistently linked his “politics of knowledge” with a principled alienation from “corporations of possession, appropriation, and power,” while looking back to the exiled German scholar of comparative literature Erich Auerbach as a model for transcending “the restraints of imperial or national or provincial limits” (Culture 335). Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian in France, associated a similar perspective of estrangement with Christian narratives of exile and purification, along with their negative correlatives, psychological traumas of disinheritance and depression; but she also attributed to the foreign writer a levitating condition of “weightlessness”: “since he belongs to nothing the foreigner can feel as appertaining to everything, to the entire tradition” (32).

Theories of grief based on Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia“ typically portray mourning as a disembodied process. This essay investigates the literary portrayal of grief in the context of phantom limb pain, a literally embodied, neurological response to loss. By comparing Derrida's image-based discussion of mourning with theories of embodied habit by Merleau-Ponty and of disability by Lennard Davis, this essay investigates the physical apprehension of loss caused by our habitual engagements with the bodies of our loved ones. Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty, Alfred Tennyson, and Donald Hall portray the physical confusions and discomforts of grief that occur when the griever takes up a habitual position in relation to a lost body. Embodied grief emerges in tangible illusions that, like the phantom limb, memorialize the lost beloved through misperceptions of material presence.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in discourses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testimony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide.

Even at their most bizarre, representations of alien sex are bound to reinscribe the terms of human desire. Thus there can be no representation of an alien sex act that is radically alien. However, for certain writers, this representational impasse provides an occasion for thinking through the limits of fictional and feminist representation. Through a reading of Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, I explore how alien sex is represented not only or even primarily in literal terms but also as an act that takes place in a fictional discursive milieu that critiques contemporary human sexual relations. I also describe how these writers' creative imaginings of alien sex function as a dialectical corollary to their theoretical investigations into the limits of representation.

When poisoned or fatally wounded, characters in Marlowe's plays often develop an uncanny knowledge of what is happening inside their bodies, including the precise anatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset of death. In effect, they conduct their own autopsies. These moments of peculiarly physical self-knowledge pose a useful challenge to our conventions for the representation of pain, embodiment, and interiority. Marlowe's wounded speakers deploy these anatomical selfdescriptions in a metatheatrical competition: in a struggle for the attention of the audience, describing one's wounds can be a powerful strategy.

Science fiction, ranging from films to industrial design to world's fairs, is a cultural system no more confined to literature than love is to love letters. From its self-recognition in 1926, science fiction has involved commercial and social realities most obviously visible in fandom and the hundreds of annual science fiction conventions. This system includes many types of consumers and producers, even collaboratively self-correcting volunteer bibliographers. Collectively, science fiction fandom, the first organized fandom, has created vast informational resources that allow not only reference but also statistical inquiry. The Genre Evolution Project (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/) shows that these social structures and resources potentiate, in an age of widespread computer networking, the transformation of criticism from acts of isolated scholars working with narrowly defined subjects to collaborative projects drawing on human and informational resources across disciplinary boundaries. Science fiction points to a future in which criticism will be more systematic, collaborative, and quantitative.

While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.

Any multicultural evaluation of difference— for example, my experience as a professor of Latin American studies in front of American students—should be preceded by a questioning of not only the places but also (and principally) the times of that experience. For me, this questioning refers to the transformations that I underwent on the road from student to professional. I offer some biographical particulars to ensure an accurate interpretation of my reading.