When the last Inca emperor and the conquistador from Extremadura, Spain, met in Cajamarca, Peru, on Saturday, 16 November 1532, a world separated them, but they had one thing in common: neither knew how to read. In Andean popular culture and historical analysis, Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro remain the protagonists of that formidable collision of worlds, in which the most powerful man of the Tawantinsuyo, the Inca empire, which stretched from Ecuador to northern Argentina, confronted a Spanish adventurer who was seeking an easy fortune, well aware that this encounter was his last and greatest opportunity. Beyond a mnemonic system of colored knots called quipus, which registered population numbers and other types of numerical accounting, the Incas did not know writing. Pizarro was an illegitimate child from a rich family and apparently had been a swineherd as a boy. It has been repeated that despite his illiteracy, he belonged to the “civilization of the sign” while Atahualpa, despite his power, was condemned for belonging to “the culture of orality.” However, according to legend, during his months of prison, out of curiosity the Inca learned some Spanish words and wrote on the fingernail of his thumb the word Dios (“God”). It is said that he showed it to Pizarro, asking him what it meant, and found that his rival could not read it. From the prison cell of a condemned man and the site of his punishment, Atahualpa engaged in what might have been the first critical reappropriation of the Castilian language (Garcilaso, Historia 98; bk. 1, ch. 33).

This essay explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Don DeLillo in his essay on 9/11. What distinguishes the essay is less what it says about 9/11 than how, in responding to the event, it puts the question of response at stake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what 9/11 means, he instead shows that response is always a question of response-ability, or the ethical “how.” To image 9/11, DeLillo rhetorically activates a neorealist mode of seeing that differs ethically from other accounts of perception, such as those of (neo)phenomenology. Whereas the latter locate the perceiving subject's perspective outside an event, DeLillo insists that point of view—the act of seeing—is immanent in the event. Responding to this immanence, DeLillo's rhetoric of seeing suspends and questions any representational judgment of 9/11.

A rich critical literature explores the relation between Edmund Burke's theatrical style and his counterrevolutionary argument. Redirecting this line of inquiry, the essay treats Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as a histrionic literary performance, arguing that to appreciate its significance we must recover a neglected subtext: a preoccupation with boredom and restlessness. Burke's loyalties are divided: defending England, he counsels against extremes of torpor and excitement. He works to preserve England in a state of settled “repose,” yet his rhetoric reveals a baseline of boredom. Indulging in fantasies of reform and utopia and deploying strategies of tragic hyperbole and self-parody, he mobilizes conventional associations of boredom and revolution to negotiate a new position from which to exercise cultural authority. Textual histrionics do more than contain a revolutionary threat; they establish an alternative theater of boredom.

The instrumentalization of nineteenth-century literary historiography in the project of literary and cultural nation building has become a critical commonplace, as Claudio Guillén (6) and David Perkins (4), among many others, have outlined. Beginning with John Neal's American Writers (1824–25), nineteenth-century histories of North American literature emphatically embraced this nationalist paradigm, striving to identify and defend the “American” qualities in America's newly emergent national literature. But when called on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to justify the establishment of American literature departments in universities across the country, literary histories were, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, under even greater pressure to prove the extent to which American literature is indeed American (Vanderbilt 186–91). Although the rise of New Criticism and the influence of Russian formalism after World War II saw a temporary setback to American historiographical nationalism (Spengemann, Mirror 154), the subsequent institutionalization of American studies took place in the context of the cold war, and the 1960s, in particular, brought a renewed emphasis on the (for the most part nationally oriented) sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature. And even the shift to intra-American cultural pluralism in the wake of trans- and subnational challenges to traditional notions of the nation-state throughout the past few decades has all too frequently been accompanied by renewed attempts to establish a revised version of historiographical nationalism.

Jorie Graham's blanks offer the chance to see how lyric intersects with the historical vicissitudes of material culture. The word-length line segments in Graham's poems function as both a graphic representation of lyric and as a reflection of late-twentieth-century material culture, a way of writing the surfaces and textures of everyday life. While reducing to the simplest expression the alienating distance that gives the lyric I its definitive privacy, the blank also replicates the nebulous substances of late-century technology—latex, spray paint, Formica. Such substances become a material idiom of mediation, a repertoire of images that shape our understanding of interpersonal relationships, which in contemporary culture are both void of definition and thick with significance. While much lyric criticism defines the genre in terms of transhistorical rhetorical patterns, the example of Graham's blanks suggests that lyric must also be considered as an intimate material history.

Nineteenth-century historians and critics attacked the works of their Enlightenment predecessors as dry, abstract, and overly rational, yet eighteenth-century authors also placed considerable stress on the need for emotional involvement in the reading of history. Using the idea of historical distance, this essay shows that two forms of distance operated in the historical works of this period. On cognitive grounds, Enlightenment historians were committed to a theory of explanation that demanded considerable abstraction. In affective terms, however, the moral psychology of Hume, Smith, and Kames emphasized that history's potential for moral instruction depends on the writer's ability to reduce emotional distance. Actuality rather than exemplarity became the watchword of historical narration as readers were invited to appreciate history in ways that were strongly influenced by the contemporary culture of sensibility.

Recent studies of medieval English literature have queried anew the role of the anthology (medieval and modern) in shaping both historical and current notions of vernacular canons. Here, my examination of two major assemblies exemplifies the theoretical, interpretive, and pedagogical problems raised by this recent work. In British Library manuscript Harley 2253, an early-fourteenth-century collection, and in Sammelbände of printed books put together in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, I discern sequences of texts that take as their theme the idea of the anthology: the languages of poetic expression, the technologies of public literacy, and the cultural values that generate canons. Studying and teaching medieval literature requires us to restore texts to such early compilatory contexts; but it also requires us to reflect on our contemporary fascination with anthologies and with the de-authorizing of the literary in the wake of postmodern theory—a move, I suggest, anticipated in medieval literary culture.

In her last essay, “House of the One Father” (1941), Mary Antin, most famous for her immigrant autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), questioned her “divorcement” from Jewish life and found herself

When scholars heed the “historicist turn” in literary criticism, invariably they try to situate a work in its relevant context. Doing so seems to confirm the work's social significance and its relation to proximate historical events. But what happens when a work dissolves these implied connections, rendering them provisional or meaningless? Is it evading context or pointing intelligently to that phenomenon's limited powers of determinism? This essay reconsiders whether contexts help or hinder understanding of especially antirealist fiction. What escapes context, I argue, alternately transfigures and defamiliarizes experience, thereby complicating our relation to the past.