Wieland is conventionally and correctly regarded as a novel of purpose which marks a turn from the stories of love and seduction fathered by Richardson to the kind of story made prominent by Holcroft, Bage, and Godwin. The particular purposes of Wieland, however, have never been precisely identified, and this reading is offered in the belief that the novel has been subjected by most students to a form of damnation through faint praise. By marveling that an American in 1798 could produce readable fiction, they place undue emphasis on mere chronology and slight the importance of the novel as part of a more meaningful cultural continuity. Wieland is an important novel because of the extraordinary manner in which Brown employs sentiment against itself (rather than simply dismissing it, as it is averred he has done), penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character.

The referential and marginal features of footnotes serve different functions in criticism and literature: scholarly footnotes shore up the text by enclosing it and limiting its claims; in fiction, footnotes extend textual authority by enlarging the fictional context. Both inner- and outer-directed, these two kinds of notations display a self-conscious anxiety about the critical and creative acts they annotate. Scholarly notes mask this ambivalence by claiming extratextual authority; literary notes highlight the ambivalence by consciously dividing the text against itself. This essay examines the ways footnotes in Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake parody the notational convention and draw attention to the faulted authority of its discourse by flouting scholarly claims to objectivity and neutrality, by calling into question the relations of author and reader on textual grounds, and by using self-reflexive narrative methods to illustrate the rhetorical double bind that keeps all language at the margin of discourse.

If a dialogics, inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, were recognized as an art of discourse on the level of the arts of rhetoric and dialectic, it might shape a critical practice different from those governed by the more familiar arts. Tzvetan Todorov's recent essay on dialogic criticism and Merle Brown's account of F. R. Leavis's “collaborative exchange” in criticism contribute to the invention of such an art; further efforts to rationalize it seem desirable and possible in the present critical conversation.

The Influence of Scandinavian on English vocabulary as a result of the settlement of the Northmen in England before the Norman Conquest was well established over fifty years ago by Bjôrkman. Claims have been made by some scholars about Scandinavian influence on English syntax, but these have been the subject of much controversy. As early as 1908 Logeman noted the tendency of both Danish and English to stress the preposition and usages such as “he has someone to work for,” which are not found in the other Germanic languages. Jespersen cited several correspondences between Modern English and Modern Danish, which he felt might possibly date back to the Viking settlements. Specifically he enumerated (1) relative clauses without pronouns, (2) the omission of the conjunction 'that,' (3) the use of 'shall' and ‘will’ in Middle English, (4) the genitive before nouns. Later students have followed Jespersen's lead; e.g. Marckwardt in his Introduction to English (Toronto & New York, 1942) and Pei in his Story of English (Philadelphia and New York, 1952).

What happens when a text is read in different centuries, different countries? The fate of the Divine Comedy in the Soviet Union suggests one answer. Focusing on Osip Mandelstam's intense attachment to Dante and thinking generally about the consequences of a globalizing readership, this essay argues for literature as a peculiar form of “life,” a planetary life. Not biological like an organism and not territorial like a nation, this form of life extends across linguistic borders and across the borders of chronology. This form of life comprises a population of temporal hybrids: “translations” that disrupt the territorial sovereignty of the state, even as they disrupt its regime of simultaneity.

A new form of intellectual authority and professional status has emerged in literary studies since the 1970s. Although some scholars have always been more influential and famous than others, only recently have such scholars been constructed as stars in the media and in the profession. This star system, similar to the one that flourished in studio-era Hollywood, makes leading scholars into personalities. It is related to the growth of the conference and lecture circuit and to the rise of literary theory. Although this system does not necessarily reward the wrong people, it does contribute to the public delegitimation of the discipline.

How Liquidare We? the Metaphors Defining Contemporary world systems can be thrillingly fluid. Dark pools is the mysterious term financial traders use to describe outsize transactions hidden from ordinary investors. Liquid modernity describes a post-Fordist world where the site-intensive factory machinery and fixed capital of “heavy modernity” dissolve into outsourcing, batch production, and hypermobile capital (Bauman 1-90). Arjun Appadurai defines global “flows” as forces of transglobal acculturation and communication that exceed the boundaries of localities and states: a metaphor that supersedes the core-periphery model (which imagines sharp cultural differences between haves and have-nots). Global flows invites scholars to reconceptualize far-flung geographies as multiply connected via techno-, media-, idea-, ethno-, and finance-scapes (6-7).

If the spate of recent publications on transnational Afro-Asian connections is any indication, we may have finally arrived at a welcome third stage of ethnic studies, one long postponed by a standoff between a multiracial model limited by a national horizon and a diasporic model that lacked a historical ground for conducting cross-racial analysis. The neo-Bandung allegiance of this Afro-Asianism—most prominent in the work of Vijay Prashad and Bill Mullen—explicitly aligns itself against the postnationalist ethos of hybridity theory and in favor of a toughened anti-imperial stance. There is much to admire about this critical turn; its increasing influence is surely a sign of our worsening times, reflected in the difference between the postsocialist euphoria of the 1990s—which projected the radicalization of democracy through the articulation of class with race, gender, and sexuality—and the return of empire and its banalization of democratic rhetoric after 9/11. Despite this Afro-Asianist project's more open recognition of the relevance of Asian embourgeoisement to its own desire for a renewed resistance politics, however, it is not yet clear whether the retrieval of Third Worldist genealogies accomplishes something more than a nostalgic response to the rise of Asian capitalism on a world scale and to the thinning claim of Asian American intellectuals to any representative function. And yet, to fulfill the originary promise of ethnic studies, which emerged out of the articulation between anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle in the late 1960s, this is what it must and should do.

In the wake of the collapse of the cold war bipolar world order, Jacques Derrida wrote:

Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself. … The invention of the enemy is where the urgency and the anguish are: this invention is what would have to be brought off, in sum to repoliticize, to put an end to depoliticization. Where the principal enemy, the “structuring” enemy, seems nowhere to be found, where it ceases it to be identifiable and thus reliable—that is, where the same phobia projects a mobile multiplicity of potential interchangeable metonymic enemies, in secret alliance with one another: conjuration. (Politics 84)

Prefaces to critical books often display more self-consciousness and uneasiness than we usually associate with critical discourse. These moments when critics speak about their own work can undermine our assumptions about disinterested scholarship. Moreover, they can lead to a reexamination of the critical activity and a search for new ways of evaluating critical prose that take account of the critic's attitude toward his own work. We need to examine criticism's stylistic and formal properties, not just its paraphrasable content. Such analysis can reveal the way a critic's interests and commitments are woven into the texture of his language. That language, however, will always partly betray or suppress the critic's experience. Criticism, moreover, can neither wholly escape nor wholly dominate the texts it treats. Yet it can also never be entirely self-effacing. As a result, criticism is a particularly ambivalent and compromised form of writing.

If you had typed genre into amazon.com's search engine on a certain day in March 2007, you would have come up with an initial ten listings that included two gay men's magazines (Genre and Instinct Magazine), one introductory theoretical text (my own Genre), a compact disc by a group called D-Genre, a composition textbook (Tom Romano's Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers), three resource kits for children (Carson-Dellosa's Literary Genres, Susan Ludwig's Twenty-Four Ready-to-Go Genre Book Reports: Engaging Activities with Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need to Help Students Get the Most Out of Their Independent Reading, and a bulletin-board set entitled BB Set Genres of Lit), and, finally, two school textbooks (Tara McCarthy's Teaching Genre (Grades 4–8) and Heather Lattimer's Thinking through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshops 4–12).

For those of us who were students or professors of African or African American literature in the late sixties or through the seventies, it is a thing of wonder to behold the various ways in which our specialties and the works we explicate and teach have moved, if not exactly from the margins to the center of the profession of literature, at least from defensive postures to a position of generally accepted validity. My own graduate students often greet with polite skepticism an anecdote I draw on in the introduction to my seminars. When I was a student at the University of Cambridge, Wole Soyinka, recently released from a two-year confinement in a Nigerian prison, was on campus to deliver a lecture series on African literature (collected and published by Cambridge in 1976 under the title Myth, Literature, and the African World). Soyinka had come to Cambridge in 1973 from Ghana, where he had been living in exile, ostensibly to assume a two-year lectureship in the faculty of English. To his astonishment, as he told me in our first supervision, the faculty of English apparently did not recognize African literature as a legitimate area of study within the “English” tripos, so he had been forced to accept an appointment in social anthropology, of all things! (Much later, the distinguished Nigerian literary scholar Emmanuel Obiechina related a similar tale when I asked him why he had taken his Cambridge doctorate in social anthropology.) Shortly after I heard Soyinka's story, I asked the tutor in English at Clare College, Cambridge, why Soyinka had been treated this way, explaining as politely as I could that I would very much like to write a doctoral thesis on “black literature.” To which the tutor replied with great disdain, “Tell me, sir, … what is black literature?” When I responded with a veritable bibliography of texts written by authors who were black, his evident irritation informed me that I had taken as a serious request for information what he had intended as a rhetorical question.

The emergence of European Colonialism in the fifteenth century and the establishment of the Enlightenment project in the eighteenth century mark the rise and expansion of European modernity in the West and elsewhere. As the uncontested superpower on the world stage today, the United States is not just the custodian of empire but indeed the guardian of a European tradition of modern liberal humanism, one now mobilized to declare that the project of human freedom has been accomplished within the domestic borders of the nation-state. Our putatively color-blind moment is marked by the assertion that racial difference has given way to an abstract and universal United States community of individualism and merit—even as (or if) it demands the inexorable growth of the prison-industrial complex and ever-increasing militarization and unfreedom in global locales such as the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay (see Gilmore; Kaplan).

At the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, the Philosopher Francis Bacon Cited the Nautical Compass, Enabling Cross-Ocean travel, as one of three technologies that had changed “the whole face and state of things throughout the world,” more influential than any “empire … sect… or star” (the others were gunpowder and the printing press [118]). Bacon was not overstating the importance of saltwater transport networks in the forging of global modernity. Across an era spanning from Columbus and Vasco da Gama to the twentieth century, the maritime world was a frontier of capitalism and colonial expansion. Goods, people, and information moved across the oceans of the globe, exploiting what was called “the freedom of the seas,” even as nations warred on each other's ships for control of trade routes and coastal access. The immense wealth and power at stake in maritime transport led governments and companies to pour resources into research and development, making the maritime world one of modernity's ongoing frontiers of science and technology. It was also a great reservoir of books, narratives, and fantasy. Occurring in an environment that few could access yet that affected the lives of so many, sea voyages piqued the curiosity of stay-at-home audiences. As global ocean travel grew up together with the printing press, armchair sailors combed sea voyage literature, factual and fictional, for strange, surprising adventures as well as for information about world-altering developments and events recounted in what was called “news from the sea.”

“With You is My Life, with You My Death.” With these Words, the American Missionary Rev. William Richards Placed Himself Under the protection of the ‘aha’ ōlelo, a Hawaiian chiefly council composed of the highest-ranking ali'i in the Sandwich Islands. On the afternoon of 26 November 1827, Richards defended himself before the ‘aha against a charge of libel brought by the English consul, Richard Charlton. Charlton had argued with Richards over a letter the minister had written to his Boston-based employers, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The letter, written in October 1825, contained the news that an English captain, William Buckle, had purchased a Hawaiian woman from a chiefess. The problem was not the letter itself but the fact that it had been made public, through American newspapers. It would take the news two years to make its way back to the islands from New England, a world two oceans and six months’ sail away. The purchase of the woman, according to Charlton, was slavery and constituted a violation of British piracy law (qtd. in Richards, Letter to Evarts, 6 Dec. 1827). When Richards refused to sign an oath swearing to the veracity of his letter, Charlton accused the missionary of libel. Now both parties had come before the ‘aha ‘ōlelo to argue their cases. The question before the chiefs was whether or not the American Richards should be turned over to Charlton to face the charge in front of an English jury.

In her essay “what feminism means to me,” the second-wave feminist vivian gornick describes her entry into 1970s feminism in terms that have become very familiar. First, there is the “exhilaration” that comes from feminist analysis, “the particular type of joy [that arises] when a sufficiently large number of people are galvanized by a social explanation of how their lives have taken shape and are gathered together … elaborating the insight and repeating the analysis” (64–65). Then there is the seemingly inevitable declension. “[A]round 1980,” Gornick reports, “feminist solidarity began to unravel. As the world had failed to change sufficiently to reflect our efforts, that which had separated all women before began to reassert itself now in us…. Personalities began to jar, conversations to bore, ideas to repeat themselves” (66–67). While Gornick's account may at this point seem routine, her perspective on the routine makes her description remarkable: in contrast to countless other such reports, Gornick places no blame on the internal politics of feminism itself, either in the form of the critique by radical women of color or in the turn to theory. And, in the absence of this blame laying, something else becomes visible: in Gornick's reckoning, the problem was not so much that feminist analysis was challenged and hence destabilized by internal critique but rather that it remained the same for too long, so that it stopped being exciting and came to feel boring and repetitive instead. In suggesting that repetition in and of itself may be a problem for feminism, Gornick's account gestures toward some of the complex and, I think, usually unexplored relations that feminist theory implies between the new, the politically useful, and the intellectually compelling.

A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Édouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by … balls and chains gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poem's irruptive consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic. Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher's / strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.”

Literary animal studies started for me when the question of animal agency arose in a survey-course discussion of a short, forgettable William Wordsworth poem titled “Nutting.” A shy undergraduate, I hesitantly volunteered an interpretation of the text as reflecting the squirrel's thoughts on the subject of seasonal change.

In the physiological study of speech articulations our most objective information has come, until recently, from radiograms. Now we have, in addition, spectrograms, which, if we learn to interpret them, can also give us very objective information. For the typical phase (portion) of a speech sound, the interest of a spectrogram may be about equal to that of a radiogram; but for the transitional phases, the interest of a spectrogram will probably be much superior; and from the practical viewpoint of availability, the spectrogram will have a marked advantage for it can be had in a few minutes and at low cost. But to the linguist, the usefulness of a spectrogram depends on his ability to interpret it in articulatory terms. We need not stress, therefore, the importance of investigating the relation between formant positions and speech organ positions at this stage of the still young science of sound spectrography.