Thomas Thorpe's brief greeting to “Mr. W. H.” in the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeares Sonnets has been one of the great conundrums of modern literary studies. But it is not Thorpe's only such greeting to survive. His remaining epistles, taken together with the dedications in many other English books of the period, suggest that, unless Thorpe was here forsaking the conventions that elsewhere governed his and his contemporaries' practice, scholars have been wrong about “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,” wrong about “Mr. W. H.,” and wrong about “our ever-living poet” and the “eternity” he “promised.” But in this they are not alone. The original compositor also got something wrong. If the evidence of other Renaissance epistles is to be trusted, the mysterious and celebrated “Mr. W. H.” is a misprint.

William Bradford's tableau of the Pilgrims' landing at Cape Cod supplies a conventional point of departure for American literature. Yet, in the customary ordering of literary history, the passage is doubly anomalous. Written in 1630, it presents, at least one hundred years too soon, an example of what Kant later called the dynamical sublime; and it anticipates, some two hundred years too soon, episodes from the canon of nineteenth-century American literature that criticism describes as characteristically American. The essay considers the formal motives and rhetorical coercions behind this double anomaly to show how the sublime, as it emerges in Bradford, signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The level of aggression Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal lends his writing a recognizably American bent. The passage shows us a scene of writing at once singular to Bradford and distinctly American.

It would be deceptively easy for a critic defining the central conflict of The Back Room, Carmen Martín Gaite's first post-Franco novel, to sort out a series of polar forces—chaos and order, memory and memoir, fantasy and reality, “loose” woman and Falangist supporter. While the narrator recognizes the impossibility of emancipation from these necessary structures of thought, she nevertheless insists on her freedom to question such dualisms and to collapse apparent polarities in a radically ambiguous manner, rendering undecidable many issues of limits and transgression. The resulting story is both untellable and never-ending, and its most significant allegorical representation in the text is a sewing basket full of miscellaneous items tangled in colored thread.

The “Rhyming Poem” is a bizarre verse experiment combining a rhyme scheme common in Latin hymnody with a stringent use of Old English alliterative meter. It has been thought that the poet, in his unsuccessful effort to carry out his self-appointed metrical task, strained his language to the breaking point, producing a poem crackpot, incompetent, and quickly corrupted. It is more likely, however, that the poet was being linguistically inventive in the manner of many such experiments in Carolingian and Hiberno-Latin poetry. Such obscurantism only exaggerates a quality already present in much Old English verse, notably in the latter part of The Exeter Book, where the “Rhyming Poem” is found, and also in much Norse and Irish verse. Considering the several poetic traditions coexisting in Anglo-Saxon England, it is surprising that the “Rhyming Poem” is the only example of the genre in Old English.

The tiny lyric “Foweles in the Frith” may be the oldest surviving love song written in English. Endlessly anthologized, this late thirteenth-century poem has in recent years become the object of intermittent academic debate between an old school that views it as a secular love song and some later critics who see it as some sort of religious complaint. Actually, it could have been understood variously by a medieval audience. It works well as a simple spring love poem sung by a man about a woman, but there is also evidence for reading it as a lament for postlapsarian humanity or as a specifically Christological complaint. As one critic has noted, for a medieval exegete the precise relation between a text's littera and sensus was far from “automatic”; barring the discovery of an original poetic context for “Foweles,” any unitary solution to the lyric's meaning will probably remain elusive.

Owen Wister's The Virginian, considered the prototypical cowboy western, only vaguely satisfies formula expectations. Encounters consist more of wordplay than gunplay, and physical conflicts rarely occur. Far from depicting a conventional male violence tamed at last by a feminized East, the novel celebrates the Virginian's rhetorical triumph over the schoolmarm and the silencing of her feminism in favor of a “logic” of patriarchy. Why should this best-seller have established a formula it does not fulfill? One explanation may involve its setting in Wyoming—known as the “Equality State” for first having enfranchised women. By opposing a thesis of sexual inequality to that setting's implications, the novel could be read as two things at once: a paean to an older, masculine West and yet a brief for modern male hegemony. Readers troubled by a resurgent feminism could delight unawares in the novel's contradictions and read into it the formula western.

For Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, the word home is itself both “familiar” and “foreign,” a paradox that confronts him with questions of both political and linguistic identity. Stephen's solution is to idealize the notions of exile and exteriority, but Joyce recognizes that this attempt to domesticate the experience of cultural alienation is a project wed to figurative language and one that may well end up reinscribing the very oppositions it intends to bring under its control. Nowhere is this dilemma more clear or more urgent than in the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses, Joyce's most fully articulated confrontation between interiority and exteriority, patriotism and exile. What makes the confrontation truly dialectical is not simply the figurative reconciliation or balancing of Manichean oppositions but rather the referral of the conflict to a historically occluded political subtext, whose very enigma points forward to tensions as yet untranscended in our own contemporary culture.

Dissonances within texts may result from contradictions within ideology or the contradiction between ideology and history. The disjunctions between the two parts of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, between both parts and the ending, and the gaps within each of the parts can be explained as arising with the contradiction between Chaucer's ideological project in the tale—an attack on the emergence of productive capital—and the literary means for the attack. The result is a confession told without moral content and then a fabliau made to serve Christian morality. Productive capital, which is virtually unrepresented elsewhere in the Chaucerian canon, is both invisible and glaring in the tale; and it competed in Chaucer's London with commercial capital, which reinforced the feudal aristocracy as well as depended on it.

The first part of this guide describes the various kinds of meetings at the MLA convention and the procedures for organizing them. The second part describes the policies of MLA divisions and discussion groups—their purpose and function, their structure and formation, and their governance.

The calendar of deadlines, referred to in this guide, is available from the Department of Convention Programs at MLA headquarters. All correspondence concerning the procedures and policies should be sent to the Department of Convention Programs.

Members of the association are invited to submit letters, typed and double spaced, commenting on articles published in PMLA or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. Footnotes are discouraged, and letters of more than one thousand words will not be considered. Decision to publish and the right to edit are reserved to the editor, and the authors of articles discussed will be invited to respond.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading J. Douglas Kneale's “Wordsworth's Images of Language: Voice and Letter in The Prelude” (101 [1986]: 351–61), I would like to quarrel with one of its basic concepts and with a few passages. Kneale establishes a false dichotomy between “speaking” and the “engraved or inscribed or imprinted word” in that he ascribes “voice, audience, and hence the idea of a rhetor” (351) only to speaking. Using Bakhtin in opposition to Saussure and Derrida, I would argue that both the spoken and the written consist of utterances and that every utterance has voice as one of its characteristics. This voice is invested in the utterance by both the utterer and the hearer or reader. This false dichotomy leads to certain mistaken emphases, such as the concept that all writing is a “dead letter” in contrast to a “living voice” (356). A legal will exemplifies the living voice present within the “dead letter” of a text. And how much stronger is the voice of the Wordsworthian narrator within the written text of The Prelude each time a reader reads the poem and renders it once more an utterance invested with a voice that mingles Wordsworth's initial voicing with the reader's own conception of the narrator's voice and the dual perceptions of the utterance's meanings—the author's perception integral to the formation of the utterance and the reader's perception brought to that utterance from his or her own cultural context.

Traditional allegorical readings of Joyce's Dubliners story “Clay” have tended to collude with the story's rhetorical aim of aggrandizing the figure of Maria. The estimation of the “old maid” is indeed the story's crux, and the exigencies of desire compel the manipulative textual strategies that render the story ambiguous and produce conflicting interpretations. The story thereby achieves a fine dramatization of the precarious ontology of the old maid, a dramatization in which the fragmented reader (whose ear and eye are in conflict) participates as a principal actor.