Although recent scientific discoveries about the genetic and biochemical components of manic-depressive psychosis have radically revised our understanding of the etiology and psychodynamics of this illness, psychological studies of Virginia Woolf's life and work have generally remained tied to Freud's outmoded model of loss-induced neurosis. This model appeals to critics because it readily imposes coherence on often inconsistent biographical data, but it fails to account for psychotic breakdowns and tends to disparage Woolf with its emphasis on the infantile and evasive aspects of art. Since Woolf's symptoms do fulfill the manic-depressive paradigm, a consideration of how contemporary psychiatric theory alters our reading of her life may also explain the therapeutic value of her bold experiments in fiction as well as her profound insights into subject-object transactions and the pitfalls of interpretation in general.

The Hebrew Bible depicts interpretation as a continual process of losing and finding, of forgetting and remembering. Texts are lost and found, and in the Joseph story (Gen. 37–50), Joseph himself is abandoned and recovered, with all memory of him repressed until it is dramatically recalled. His story demonstrates that repression is the condition of interpretation, and that interpretation—not resurrection—holds forth the promise of a future life. Nonetheless, the repeated losses that punctuate the Joseph narrative have inspired the opposite conclusion: that Joseph is a type of Jesus, that his descents and ascents prefigure the final one. Typology, a mode of biblical interpretation that prevailed during the early church, has enjoyed a recent revival in the context of literary studies; but I argue that the typological language of “fulfillment,” of shadows and truth, is alien to Hebraic—and postmodern—understandings of textuality.

Woolf called Orlando a “joke,” an “escapade,” and critics have taken her at her word. Although an enormous amount has been written about Woolf, the novel that celebrates her love for Vita Sackville-West tends to be ignored, dismissed as an anomaly, or explained as something other than what it is. But the things we joke about are often the things we care about too much to risk seriousness. The bold and dazzling achievement of Woolf's “joke” only becomes clear when Orlando is set in the context of the love that inspired it and seen against the social, historical, and literary background in which it was conceived.

The thematic approach adopted by a number of feminist critics of Shakespearean tragedy raises serious problems. Some of these are inherent in thematism itself, such as the need to select the facts of the play to fit the theme and to manipulate the theme to fit the facts. But other problems are peculiar to their choice of “gender conflict” or “patriarchy” as the central theme that is the subject of these tragedies and the cause of their outcomes. This leads to the confusion of a necessary condition with a sufficient cause and to difficulties in their treatments of the protagonists, the emotional effects, the tragic genre, and the role of the author, who is supposed to be condemning “patriarchy” in these plays. Further problems arise because of the particular conception of masculinity that some of these critics bring to their readings.

Emerson's economic thought has most often been interpreted from the perspective of a Marxist analysis of trade and production. Such a perspective fails to distinguish between the different levels of Emerson's thinking—spiritual, commercial, and natural. Following the logic of symbolic exchange employed as a critique of Marxism by Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard, and others, this essay argues that Emerson's economy of expenditure not only contradicts the basic premises of Marxist doctrine but also alters our understanding of such fundamental Emersonian concepts as self-reliance and compensation.

WHEN members of an institution debate, it may seem that they are arguing about fundamental principles, but it is more often the case that the truly fundamental principle is the one that makes possible the terms of the disagreement and is therefore not in dispute at all. I am thinking in particular of the arguments recently marshaled for and against blind submission to the journal of the Modern Language Association. Blind submission is the practice whereby an author's name is not revealed to the reviewer who evaluates his or her work. It is an attempt, as William Schaefer explained in the MLA Newsletter, “to ensure that in making their evaluations readers are not influenced by factors other than the intrinsic merits of the article” (4). In his report to the members, Schaefer, then executive director of the association, declared that he himself was opposed to blind submission because the impersonality of the practice would erode the humanistic values that are supposedly at the heart of our enterprise. Predictably, Schaefer's statement provoked a lively exchange in which the lines of battle were firmly, and, as I will argue, narrowly, drawn. On the one hand those who agreed with Schaefer feared that a policy of anonymous review would involve a surrender “to the spurious notions about objectivity and absolute value that … scientists and social scientists banter about”; on the other hand those whose primary concern was with the fairness of the procedure believed that “[j]ustice should be blind” (“Correspondence” 4). Each side concedes the force of the opposing argument—the proponents of anonymous review admit that impersonality brings its dangers, and the defenders of the status quo acknowledge that it is important to prevent “extraneous considerations” from interfering with the identification of true merit (5).

Paradise Lost traces evil through three inceptions—Satanic, Adamic, and historical. Each origin seems to envision a different etiology: Satanic evil springs exclusively from the self in an instant of radical “Pelagian” freedom. Adamic evil emerges from the ambiguous interplay between self and seductive environment. Historical evil contaminates the whole race by means of necessary “Augustinian” inheritance. Ricoeur's analysis of the “Adamic Myth” and original sin clarifies etiological traditions Milton assimilates from Christian symbol, myth, and dogma. Through Ricoeur, we can identify the contrasting modalities of evil (inherited and imitative, physical and moral, ontological and existential, necessary and free, communal and individual) fused in Paradise Lost. Ricoeur's work reveals Milton's text to be a subtly inclusive etiological myth, one whose complex genesis of evil recovers Scripture's fullness of meaning in a new mythopoesis.

ONCE, AS A JOKE, some friends and I invented advertisements for university positions in nonexistent disciplines. We divided these disciplines into four departments: adynata, or impossibilia, containing sciences that were historically impossible, such as history of the wheel in the pre-Columbian empires, history of painting on Easter Island, Aztec horse racing; oxymoronica, containing sciences that were self-contradictory and analytically impossible, such as nomadic urban studies, institutions of deviance, binary logic of the included middle; byzantinica, containing sciences of utter uselessness, such as potiosection, or the art of cutting broth; and tetrapiloctomia, or the art of quartering a hair, containing sciences of excessive subtlety, such as microscopy of indiscernibles.

Vampire sexuality, as represented in Bram Stoker's Dracula, reveals itself both as a phenomenon that is terrifyingly foreign to typical experience and, paradoxically, as a distorted mirror of human behavior. On the one hand, the vampire inspires a xenophobic response because his needs violate the normal limits of exogamy: he is physiologically dependent on women who are foreign to him. On the other hand, the novel undermines the very idea of the “foreign” by suggesting that even the most bizarre aspects of a vampire's sex life are strangely familiar—usually because they parody or literalize human sexuality.