The work of Jewish Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh (1917–2010) explores the coextensive experience of Muslims and Jews in Morocco and the larger Arab-Mediterranean region, tracing a continuum of Judeo-Arab-Muslim affiliation. This notion of affiliation is reflected in a highly dynamic, fluid poetics, fed by a secular engagement with Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions and with a range of modernist and postcolonial writers. El Maleh found deep inspiration in Walter Benjamin's work on the ethical dimension of allegory as informed by kabbalistic notions of language. The chaotic profusion of events and images in El Maleh's third novel, Mille ans, un jour (“A Thousand Years, One Day”) reflects Benjamin's “Kabbalistic shard” and his valorization of the “scraps of history.” This discursive mode challenges the totalizing narratives and racialized binaries undergirding forms of violence that El Maleh identifies in colonialism and fascism, as well as in contemporary Zionism. His work thus aims to dissolve the false oppositional binary through which the identities of Jew and Arab have come to be understood.

Situating Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in the context of late Victorian information culture shows how Holmes's professionalism worries the line between information and knowledge, surveillance institutions and liberal society. Because of his information savvy, Holmes has often been considered a figure of surveillance. A closer look at the Holmes narratives, however, reveals that he occupies a more ambiguous place—while his surveillance techniques seem to align him with bureaucratic institutions, he asserts his independence from state institutions and acts as a liberal agent concerned with information sharing and the moral well-being of society. Holmes's cognitive process strikes a balance between data and narrative, allowing him to maintain a critical distance essential to his professionalism and liberalism.

So begins Constantine Cavafy's classic poem of November 1898, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's assured translation. Cavafy was a writer who tested all manner of boundary conditions. His every identity came with an asterisk. He was a Greek who never lived in Greece. A government clerk of Greek Orthodox upbringing, in a tributary state of a Muslim empire, he spent his evenings on foot, looking for pagan gods in their incarnate, carnal versions. He was a poet who resisted publication, save for broadsheets he circulated among close friends; a man whose homeland was a neighborhood, and a dream. Much of his poetry is a map of Alexandria overlaid with a map of the classical world—modern Alexandria and ancient Athens—as Leopold Bloom's Dublin neighborhood underlies Odysseus's Ithaca. And I conjure Cavafy because, as I want to persuade you, he is representative precisely in all his seeming anomalousness.

Journey to Mecca (; al-Rihla al-Makkiyya; 1941), by the distinguished Moroccan historian and legal scholar Ahmad al-Rahuni, recounts a hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, sponsored by the fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1937. Franco's support for the hajj was part of a vast propaganda effort to cast Franco's Spain as a friend of Islam and a defender of the cultural heritage of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia). Al-Rahuni's travel narrative blurs the line between Mecca and Spain by casting Spain's Islamic heritage sites as a metaphoric Mecca to which Muslims should make pilgrimage. The account thus highlights the collaboration between Spanish fascists and Moroccan elites. It also complicates the dominant scholarly narratives about modern Arabic literature, which have tended to focus on Egypt, the novel, and secular epistemologies. Al-Rahuni's text speaks, instead, to the persistence of Arabic prose genres that do not conform to a Eurocentric notion of literature.

For much of the nineteenth century, nonhuman animals shared the English stage with human performers in a series of popular, widely produced quadruped dramas. Work in animal studies and performance theory overlooks this phenomenon when it laments theater's unbroken history of animal exclusion—a notion of exclusion that quadruped dramas actually helped propagate and reinforce. The animal melodramas produced through the Victorian era featured animal characters whose appeal depended on the perceived otherness of animal actors, especially the knowledge that animals did not so much act in the drama as perform set responses to subtle, real-world cues from their trainers. Playwrights used animals' imperfect integration in the dramatic illusion to inject an uncanny sense of reality into their melodramatic plots. Their experiments with estrangement admit the difficulties of animal performance by explicitly staging animal otherness—but only as a spur to deepen human engagement with the more-than-human world.

The conceptual foundations of ecology were laid in the seventeenth century by the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, when he developed the idea of “the oeconomy of nature.” Digby transformed the practical agrarian discourse of “natural oeconomy” (household management), which links human beings to their environments, into the natural-philosophical concept of the oeconomy of nature. Using the oeconomic values of thrift, regularity, and efficient dispensation to conceptualize natural processes, Digby projected a human institution, with all its ideological baggage, onto the natural world. But, for Digby, closely observing nonhuman creatures in the framework of oeconomy opened up the more radical possibility of a decentered system, in which each creature is a potential householder, each the center of its own oeconomy of nature.

Virginia Woolf's “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40) develops her most radical ontological and pedagogical insights, which are inseparably connected by her concept “moments of being”—redefined in this essay as pedagogical accidents. This redefinition opens readers to an unexplored dimension of Woolf's late thought: namely, the reorientation of learning and teaching around the creative function of accidents, the unhinged temporality of “sudden violent shock[s]” that repeat their difference across one's lifespan, and the prioritization of feeling. The nonlinear, nonrealist, and nonsequential temporality of these events serves Woolf as a model not only for the memoir but for the double task of learning how to write her life otherwise and of teaching her potential readers the shapes and intensities of their own selves and lives. My reading of Woolf's memoir as a work of “sensuous pedagogy” attempts to account for the importance of feeling to this task.

Disability studies scholars and Renaissance scholars have much to learn from early modern schemata of disability. Early modern people used nature and the natural to discriminate against and to include people with atypical bodies and minds. In his writings, the English physician John Bulwer (1606–56) considers Deafness a natural human variation with definite advantages, anticipating current concepts of biolinguistic diversity and Deaf-gain, while acknowledging his society's biases. He refutes the exclusion of sign language and other forms of what he calls “ocular audition” from natural law, which made capacity for speech the benchmark for natural rights. Instead of using Deaf people as exceptions that prove the rule of nature or as limit cases for humanity, Bulwer makes deafness part of a plastic understanding of the senses, and he promotes the sociability of signed languages as a conduit to a universal language that might be encouraged and taught in England.

The aesthetic of the sublime has long been associated with the language of elevation and height. Activities such as mountain climbing offer a physical correlative to this discourse. In these cases, the sublime is associated with a high point or summit, and the process of descent is minimized or erased. By contrast, what I call the Red Bull sublime—named for the energy drink company that claims to “give you wings”—uses technological innovation to draw attention to the aesthetic pleasures of falling. Taking Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump as its paradigmatic example, this essay elaborates the central features of the Red Bull sublime, connecting it with a Romantic tradition, represented here by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, of peering over the edge of the abyss.

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama promotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.

J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.

The aesthetic practices in Max Frisch's late story Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene [1979]) lend themselves to a reflection on the current global environmental crisis and its anthropological and epistemological repercussions. Frisch's visual and narrative artwork anticipates central issues in the current Anthropocene debate, in which the humanities have made incisive interventions. I bring these interventions to bear on close readings of Frisch's intermedia aesthetics, unearthing an environmental reflexivity that revolves around issues of time and history, place and identity, nature and human knowledge, metamorphosis and anthropogenic transformation. I thus invite us to reconsider in the light of the anthropological and sociopolitical imaginaries of the Anthropocene some ways in which the literature of the past half century has negotiated the relation between human beings and their natural environments.

Near the end of their lives, the poets Jorge Luis Borges and Seamus Heaney both translated the Old English poem Deor. Medieval Germanic literature was an object of deep ambivalence for these poets, and their identification with Deor, the poem's eponymous scop, charges their translations with a sense of preemptive self-mourning. Analyzing the structure of the poem, particularly its refrain, “That passed over, this can too,” reveals a chronological framework in which the reader's temporality forms a legible outer limit enclosing the poem as a whole. The poem's acceptance of its own finitude resonates with the work Borges and Jacques Derrida produced late in their careers, as they tried to understand the afterlife and independence of their own creations. Just as the poet Deor was outlasted by the poem that ostensibly bears his name, the authorial name survives and mourns the mortal author.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis has been embraced by critics and popular audiences alike as an accessible intercultural memoir-in-comics that challenges predominant Western stereotypes about Iran through the universality of its first-person narrator. But the text's global legibility goes beyond the familiarity of Satrapi's graphic avatar. In examining the surprising factors on which the text's globalism depends, I look closely at one of Persepolis's diverse inter-texts—the Persian miniature painting—and situate Satrapi in both Parisian bandes dessinées and Iranian diasporic artistic contexts to argue that the work's concurrent production of local, national, and global scales is inseparable from its connection to several genres and across several media, engaging its readers through multiple modes of perception. Persepolis draws on a global history of graphics as dissent by challenging preconceived notions about comics as a mass culture form, memoirs as limited confessionals, and Iranian women as silenced victims of an oppressive fundamentalist state. The global accessibility of this graphic novel exists not despite but because of porous categories of genre and culture, which are at once integral to its narrative structure and secondary to the aesthetic of protest that it ultimately embraces.

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.