Though at present it is critically unfashionable to view the early Auden as part of a literary group, during the thirties Auden and a number of his friends considered themselves intimately bound by personal, literary, and political ties. The notion of a group plays an extraordinarily important role in Auden’s early poetry. The underlying sociopolitical structure of The Orators is that of the group—much of its considerable obscurity is attributable to this fact and to the related circumstance that its primary audience was the Auden group. Two keys to understanding The Orators, namely its foundation on the psychological “theories” of Homer Lane and on the anthropological research of John Layard, were provided only years later by Auden’s friends, Isherwood and Spender. Moreover, its emphasis on groups has an important political significance which has often led to its being considered a quasi-Fascist work, not least by Auden himself.

Goethe's Werther and his Faust respond divergently to the Resurrection. Whereas Werther reclassifies Christ from exclusive mediator to model in order to emulate His death and rebirth, Faust is prevented by an Easter cantata from attempting self-translation. Faust's subsequent words and acts show that, although an unbeliever, he views Jesus as a mediator and has been reminded by the cantata of man's multifaceted dependence on mediation. The rainbow of “Anmutige Gegend” similarly affects a restored and newly hubristic Faust. Mediation underlies Goethe's concept of symbolism, and, like other Goethean mediators (e.g., the “Schleier” of the dedicatory poem to his collected works), the introductory symbols of Redeemer and rainbow in Faust, Parts i and ii, symbolize symbolism itself, man's essential mode of relating to ultimates. Mediation helps explain such puzzling inclusions in Faust as the quarrel between Neptunists and Vulcanists and is the central concept in the finale by the Chorus Mysticus.

Sonnets 94, 116, and 129 are unique in their mode and function. They are general, impersonal, deliberately detached from the conflicts explored in surrounding sonnets. However, the model created in each sonnet breaks down, resulting in heightened conflict in ensuing sonnets. Sonnet 94 creates a hypothetical “they” who share the conventional Petrarchan beloved’s incorruptible beauty and self-possession. But as the sonnet proceeds, the model collapses, and the corruption of the friend is painfully confronted in Sonnets 95 and 96. Similarly, the abstract model of perfect love in 116 is qualified in the couplet and destroyed in Sonnet 117. Sonnet 129 begins by defining lust as, like the love of 116, absolute and inalterable, but concludes in paradox, thus serving as a paradigmatic introduction to the dark lady sonnets. These three sonnets, however detached and immobile, participate in the ceaseless flow of the sequence, reacting to or acting upon the surrounding sonnets.

This essay examines parentheses on the level of individual narrative sequences in A la recherche du temps perdu. A narrative sequence is a limited, linear series of events that can be subsumed under a single label. “Sequence-level parenthesis” may be defined as an independent textual segment inserted between two contiguous moments in the sequence, interrupting its forward movement. The unique feature of Proust's sequence-level parentheses is the multiplicity of functions they fulfill: narrative, interpretive, associative. (1) Parentheses fill in gaps in the story, announce, prepare, or generate events to come, remind us of past events, etc. (2) They qualify or explain specific facts or situations; they also formulate generalizations or laws. (3) Parenthetical associations play a role analogous to that of the metaphor and the phenomenon of involuntary memory: they establish connections (rapprochements) between widely separated textual fragments. To borrow a term used by Proust, Spitzer, and more recently Deleuze, parentheses are the transversales of textual multiplicity.

Although much comment on Beckett’s prose from How It Is (1961) through The Lost Ones (1970) has appeared, uncertainty as to the artistic intent of this innovative fiction has hindered definitive analysis. An understanding of the pieces as further developments of the Beckettian hero’s progressive withdrawal from an absurd macrocosm and descent toward the ever-receding core of the microcosmic self not only defines meaning in each piece but also reveals a thematic unity binding these works together and to the earlier fiction. Trapped in the mind but unable to escape a suffering awareness of the outer world, the figures portrayed undergo Beckett’s own particular brand of crucifying self-perception.

Milton’s sonnets display the conventionalized career of their implied author, a Christian poet. As poet, he rises from Petrarchan apprenticeship to the role of his community’s conscience and is then retired; as Christian, he follows the career of fall and redemption. The poetic career is implied by the sonnets’ pattern of concerns: from amatory concerns to public concerns to private stocktaking. The Christian career is implied by the progress of the sonnets through a four-level structure of imagery: Heaven, Eden, the fallen world, and the world of sin. These patterns are intrinsic to the sonnets and justify regarding them as a sequence.

The pronouns I and you, together with several other “shifters,” do not have a referential function in language. Many of the questions we ask (and fail to answer) about lyric poetry arise out of inadmissable translations of I and you into referential forms. Buber’s myth of a primal I-Thou relation gives us a guide to a reading of I and you in Achterberg’s “Ballade” in such a preferential way, I seeking to recover the lost relation by calling You into being through poetic-magical activity. Here the quest of I, however, culminates in confrontation with “the hole,” the void from which comes the Logos. While the nominal theme of the poem is the failure of the poetic-creative self to bring back the Logos, its secret theme is that poesis-as-activity can cause the continual coming-into-being of the Logos and the lost You. (The essay includes a translation of Achterberg’s poem.)

The Center for Scholarly Editions (CSE), administered by a Committee on Scholarly Editions, was suggested by an ad hoc committee of the Modern Language Association in the spring of 1975 and officially established, by action of the Executive Council, as an entity within the MLA on 1 September 1976. The occasion for that ad hoc committee's deliberations was the impending expiration of the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities under which the MLA Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA) had been operating; the termination of that grant on 31 August 1976 offered an appropriate moment for the MLA to rethink its role in promoting editorial scholarship. The CEAA not only had fostered the production of a large number of editions of American authors but had increased the awareness of editorial problems among members of the profession generally. It seemed natural, therefore, that the next step should be a broadening of the scope of the MLA's committee on editions to encompass more than American literature. Accordingly, no restrictions were placed on the content of the editions with which the CSE could concern itself: editors of any kind of work or document—whether literary or not—from any country can feel free to seek the services of the CSE.

The Quart livre is Rabelais's Inferno. To project his vision of universal catastrophe, Rabelais borrowed from all the voyage literature he knew, from Homer through Cartier, but he drew most from two Old Testament myths. Like the story of Jonah, the Quart livre is a voyage down the digestive tract into the sick belly of the whale, of self, of the world—a voyage forecast in Chapter xxxii of the Pantagruel, where Alcofribas enters the giant's mouth, and in Chapter xxxiii, where he descends into Pantagruel's belly to cure him. Rabelais transforms Jonah's story into an account of death and regeneration. He also confers medical value on the story of Moses, who healed the world with the Word of God. As a writer-physician, Rabelais is also a “logotherapist,” and his characters strive to emulate Moses' achievement. They too seek the therapeutic word, “le mot de la dive Bouteille.”

Hopkins has recently been treated as a representational poet who aimed to praise God by imitating His creation, but his unconventional uses of language, which are related to his temperamental originality, introduce an autonomous quality into his poetry. His deviations, by their very nature, set reference aside to exhibit the inherent signifying capacity of language, a capacity that Hopkins' journals show he fully appreciated. His original methods, including his phonetic structures, his conception of inscape as it applies to poetry, and his unconventional syntax and imagery, give language dominance over experience and use it to reshape reality according to linguistic principles.

Audience participation in theater often obscures or confuses the magical nature of the activity of theater. The uniqueness of this activity is centered in the separateness of the world of the play from the world of the audience, as Stanley Cavell remarks. The importance of such separateness becomes vivid in recognition scenes which are the structural core of most drama. Aristotle perceives the importance of recognition scenes, but does not show adequately what such scenes do to the spectator. The recognition scenes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear reveal drama’s special ability to allow the spectator to acknowledge another while himself remaining private. The critical process involved in coming to such an understanding of drama, while similar to some elements of structuralistic analysis, focuses more directly on a concern with the patterns of relationship between play and audience. My methodology corresponds to Stanley Fish’s “affective” stylistics.

Almost every English verb, in context, expresses either a state or an action, and the difference between them may be defined by empirical texts that combine syntax and semantics. Applied to passages from Congreve (1700) and Ben Jonson (1609), these tests give strong if not extensive evidence that eighteenth-century prose is more nominal than early seventeenth-century prose: eighteenth-century authors choose to express meaning in terms of stative relations between nouns, rather than in terms of actions or events. This preference may be considered as a matter of literary style, and perhaps also as an episode in the history of the evolution of modern English.

Translation is notoriously impossible, and yet people persist in doing it, perhaps nowhere so much as in the case of the Bible. And, while prose is generally more translatable than poetry, it is Old Testament poetry that survives the process with peculiar success, by reason of the peculiar poetic form of the original: a system of parallelism, or “rhyming” of ideas rather than sounds. The remarkable degree of overlap of form and content ensures a remarkable degree of accuracy, or transfer of meaning. The field is rich for structuralist studies, in that it offers an exemplary combinatoire, and the psalm structure is a model of totality, transformability, and self-regulation, an “instrument of coherence,” which may in turn constitute a subunit of a larger structure.

The variety of moods and techniques and the astonishing erudition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have frustrated critical attempts to grasp the work as a unified whole and have fostered instead an emphasis on decoding and explicating. The generic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin discerns in the tradition of Menippean Satire, however, provide a fresh and integral interpretation. Bakhtin's description subsumes such formal and thematic aspects of the work as its suppressed comedy, variety of styles, topicality, wide adaptation of other genres, fantastic inventiveness, frequent sharp contrasts and abrupt transitions, scandalous eccentricity, intellectual seriousness, three-leveled world view, utopianism, and psychological abnormality. These apparently heterogeneous characteristics are organized and unified within both Bakhtin's theory and the book's world by the model of carnival festivity. As an annually recurring celebration of change, carnival allows us, furthermore, to understand Lowry's spatializing sense of the book as “trochal,” like the regularly turning wheel of a machine.