All discourse evolves in all three dimensions of verbal practice: doing, making, and meaning. While there are special links between speaking and action, between writing and creation or production, and between quasi-verbal thinking and signification, we should avoid reducing any instance or type of discourse to nothing but action, creation, or signification. The analogous triad of intersubjective culture, objective nature, and subjective identity likewise points to three complementary modes of existence: the social, the physicobiological, and the personal. At any given time, we tend to experience human beings, including ourselves, in just one mode: as players of socially assigned roles, as physically situated and genetically determined organisms, or as free and responsible selves. Yet we should not turn any of these ways of experiencing into a master doctrine designed to debunk the other two as mere delusions.

This essay closely examines several mythological autos sacramentales by the seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca. These eucharistic dramas, allegorizations of famous tales from antiquity, raise provocative questions about the relation of myth to allegory and about the hermeneutical problems inherent in both. By explicitly thematizing the Word as source and guarantor of pagan myth and of language and illuminated interpretation themselves, the plays embody a powerful allegory of the assumed divine origin and sacral significance not only of myth but also of an essential and radical logocentrism. For Calderón divine ordination and revealed truth implicitly sacramentalize the auto and sanction the human author's hermeneutical and creative endeavors. This study shows that Calderón's metaphysics and allegorical theory constitute a timeless witness to Christian truth and a timely challenge to some widely accepted tenets of modern literary theory.

Hawthorne attempted not only to change his readers' understanding of historical events but also to undermine their complacency about historical understanding. In The Marble Faun, he questions the positivistic assumptions and complacent moralism of nineteenth-century historiography by representing sympathy and estrangement as principles of knowledge. The story of Kenyon and Hilda, Miriam, Donatello, and the model, set amid the ruins of Rome, indicates that both the truths of history and the truths of the human heart are produced in narratives that reflect the affective links between the tellers of tales and the objects described. For Hawthorne history and romance are not morally or epistemologically distinct. Sympathy does not solve the problem of historical knowledge but reposes it in a form more proper to the ambiguities of romance as Hawthorne used the genre than to the certainties of history as traditionally conceived.

Mateo Alemán's Ortografía castellana ‘Castilian Orthography’ (Mexico City, 1609) is one of many little-studied Renaissance treatises on correct spelling. It offers a modest scheme for reforming the representation of spoken Spanish sounds in writing, argued with elaborate artifice and based especially on the claim that written letters communicate thanks to inherent Pythagorean harmonies. The treatise includes a full illustration of these reforms in an appendix called the “Problem,” which tells how two courtiers inconclusively debate whether speech or writing possesses “greater excellence.” By offering arguments composed entirely of topoi, establishing a rhetorical paradox, and employing devices of admiratio, the “Problem” achieves a fusion of “intersubjectivity” and “intertextuality” that identifies as a single reading experience the wonder of the paradox posed with the success of the improved spelling.

Rereading the canon in the light of recent theory and criticism can turn into a subversive project when one finds that a novel long considered easily accessible and safely categorized may be neither. Such is the outcome of this essay's reading of Theodor Fontane's popular Effi Briest (1894–95). Incomplete stories in the text lead to a reassessment of its ending, of the heroine's position, and of the text's political implications. What emerges is a modern, self-reflexive, incipiently feminist Effi Briest that resists the standard readings and instead moves closer to “shocking” texts of the time (such as Wedekind's first Lulu play and Freud's Studies on Hysteria) than to those texts with which it is traditionally compared.

Previously unpublished archival material and recent scholarship in legal history provide new information and allow a coherent account of Daniel Defoe's arrest, interrogations, conviction, and release for the seditious libel The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Details about Nottingham's questioning of Defoe, the costs of the prosecution, and the final decision to send him to the pillory emerge. More significantly, it is now clear that Defoe's case came before the justices at five (not two) Old Bailey sessions, and the full records have come to light. These records and those in the Lowndes papers provide a full account of Defoe's release from Newgate Prison.

The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior exhibit parallel narrative strategies. The respectively black and Chinese American protagonists work their way from speechlessness to eloquence by breaking through the constraints of sex, race, and language. The heroines turn to masculine figures for guidance, to female models for inspiration, and to native idioms for stylistic innovation. Initially unable to speak, they develop distinctive voices by registering their own unspoken grief on paper and, more important, by recording and emulating the voices of women from their respective ethnic communities. Through these testimonies, each written in a bicultural language, Walker and Kingston reveal the obstacles and resources peculiar to minority women. Subverting patriarchal literary traditions by reclaiming a mother tongue that carries a rich oral tradition (of which women are guardians) the authors artfully coordinate the tasks of breaking silence, acknowledging female influence, and redefining while preserving ethnic characteristics.

Members of the association are invited to submit letters, typed and double-spaced, commenting on articles published in PMLA or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. Footnotes are discouraged, and letters of more than one thousand words will not be considered. Decision to publish and the right to edit are reserved to the editor. The authors of articles discussed will be invited to respond. It is a boon to Henry James scholarship to encounter a critic like Julie Rivkin, who values James's years in the theater as a playwright. Yet in reading “The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors” (101 [1986]: 819–31) I wasn't entirely clear about what this valuation was as the context of Rivkin's discussion.

Gender conflicts troubled Hawthorne's personal life and afflicted his daughter Una badly enough to bring on episodes of disabling psychic isturbance. They are likewise inherent in The Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne subverts the norms of womanhood and manhood that were asserted by the domestic ideal, a middle-class version of male dominance then coming to the fore. Yet the work also affirms that those norms provide a measure against which his daughter's aberrations should be corrected. Hawthorne's solution to Una's problem is depicted in Pearl's redemption, so that Una's unhappy later life—as well as Hawthorne's—provides a biographical countertext. By treating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, and The Scarlet Letter as interdefining arenas of conflict, this essay provides a glimpse into the processes by which gender is constructed in persons and works of art.

Mikhail Bakhtin's concern with the dialogic nature of the fictional text and of the self serves as an important precursor to more recent theoretical work on “the problem of the subject.” Bakhtin's dialogism is an especially useful tool with which to approach the familiar problem of point of view in The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” A dialogical reading of this novel reveals a polyphony of ideological voices out of which the “I” narrator, who emerges only on the final pages of the novel, is born. Conrad's novel lays bare this function of ideology, the construction of individual subjects. Recalling Conrad's preface, we might say that this process is what the dialogically attuned reader is made to “see” or “hear.”