The Tales of Belkin have suggested that they are not what they seem—a cycle of simple, diverting stories. Why Pushkin chooses to filter the telling of the Tales through several narrative voices, why he puts “poetic” epigraphs into ironic play with “prosaic” narratives, and why he develops the narratives around a web of allusions to major Western literatures and to Russian literature have led to a lively, expanding discourse among Pushkinists. But why Pushkin frustrates the Russian character who imitates a foreign model, why he takes the poetic models of the epigraphs as points from which to “step down” to prose, and how he sees the parodic debate between foreign and domestic models as a necessary step in the development of Russian prose are unanswered. Moving toward a new reading of “The Coflmmaker,” the asymmetrical story generally considered of only anecdotal interest, our essay addresses these questions.

Matthew Arnold asserts that because the motivation of the Antigone's heroine is obsolete the play's action no longer interests us. This dismissal contrasts sharply with Hegel's recurring celebration of the tragedy's ethical and dramatic perfection. Moving between these positions, George Eliot accepts the modernity of Antigone's character as moral pioneer but finds the play's action without much application to Victorian reality. For Virginia Woolf Antigone is a natural counter within the feminist polemic of Three Guineas and an image capable of complex novelistic development in The Years, while Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age makes the purported irrelevance of Antigone's motivation to the 1970s the very basis of the play's absurdist appeal. The Antigone thus serves, pace Arnold, as an Arnoldian touchstone to correct his merely “personal estimate,” that of a statist who might naturally object to the heroic treatment of an individual in defiance of the state's claim to primacy.

Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.

L'Emploi du temps is a metapoetic roman á thése that demonstrates the views on language Butor expresses in his theoretical essays. Parodying Proust, Butor undermines the idea that memory or language can recover an authentic layer of experience. By creating a text on two levels, a level of unsuccessful referentiality and a level of language as an autonomous entity, he replaces the notion of a vertical relation between text and referent with the notion of the bookto- be-continued. As description cedes to metaphor, metaphors crystallize into myths, and the narrator's “original experience” comes to reflect previous works of art, Revel's retrospective diary blossoms into imaginative creation. The “empty center” of the referential narrative, the missing date February 29, becomes the open end of Revel's novel. Four double metaphors—the labyrinth, the map, weaving, and the mirror—which are crossover points in the novel's chiastic structure, engage both the referent (Revel's year in Bleston) and the process of recreating it in writing.

The proponents of modernism, in their putative wish to be free of inherited patterns, release a compensatory reaction, an anxiety over the sense of a lost relationship with tradition. In this context, the critical dogma lamenting the “anxiety of influence” may be seen as one modernist's attempt to regain a relationship with the past at the expense of the equally recalcitrant doctrine of originality. But this most recent defensive reaction only represses an even deeper anxiety over the loss of the present moment in the inevitable formal quality of literature. As a way out of this impasse, the modernist poet Hart Crane returned to William Blake and Walt Whitman, whose poetry of pure possibility does not mediate the present into a durative past but recovers it as a possible present, a coming again of what is ever more about to be.

Among critics who accept the Aristotelian distinction between “poetry” and “history,” those who recognize that Pound's Cantos aspires to “history” generally consider it bad history and “impure” poetry; critics who value it as poetry usually dismiss its claim to history. But Pound's aesthetic recognizes no essential difference between poetry and history; a poem, for him, is a report of its author's experience, and by reading historical documents as attentively as poetry, one can penetrate to the reality behind them, too. A good literary critic is therefore the best historian. The Malatesta Cantos show this theory in action; Pound's Sigismundo, derived from a critical reading of primary sources, seems more plausible than the one found in most secondary sources. These cantos show that Pound's attempts at writing history should be taken more seriously than they have been and that his achievement as an epic poet should be reevaluated.