Any multicultural evaluation of difference— for example, my experience as a professor of Latin American studies in front of American students—should be preceded by a questioning of not only the places but also (and principally) the times of that experience. For me, this questioning refers to the transformations that I underwent on the road from student to professional. I offer some biographical particulars to ensure an accurate interpretation of my reading.

The most famous of Henri Beyle's pseudonyms is Stendhal, but it is only one of hundreds adopted by Beyle. I argue that his pseudonyms fall into three categories: those used in personal correspondence to strengthen affective bonds, those used for publication and thus for entry into the literary market, and those developed in the creative process and reserved for private use. The pseudonym Stendhal belongs to the second group, which is characterized by Beyle's attempt to co-opt the prestige of particular predecessors (in this instance, the art historian J. J. Winckelmann, from the village Stendal). The pen names Mocenigo and Dominique are significant examples of the third group, which most closely resembles the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms and heralds a modernist vision of authorship.

Responding to a reader's inquiry about what second language to study, the Vanity Fair columnist “Dame Edna” stated, “Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named García Lorca, but I'd leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you… . Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German.” I am aware that Dame Edna is a ficticious persona, but I disagree with the so-called entertainment value ascribed to this column. Whom does it entertain? The readership of Vanity Fair is largely upper-middle-class and upper-class white. The Hispanic community, outraged by the remarks, demanded a retraction, reminding Vanity Fair that if the whole Hispanic labor force went on strike, the US economy would break down. Readers cited as well the number of radio and TV stations broadcasting in Spanish, sixty to seventy percent of whose audience can follow programs in Spanish and English (the United States' bilingualism, much to Dame Edna's grief, is not English-French). Additionally, more than half the students in schools and universities who enroll in a second language choose Spanish. The voices calling for retraction were not leaf blowers but architects, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, athletes, writers, moviemakers, painters, journalists, governors, and bankers. And, last and most obvious, Hispanics make up the largest minority group in the United States (at present some thirty-seven million, or thirteen percent, and probably some fifty million by 2010 [Klineberg]).

This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.

This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan's attempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin's Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dressing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for control over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator's attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan's production of John Vanbrugh's Aesop. Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article illuminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities.

Americans living in England are sometimes inspired by a sense of belated recognition, a desire to claim the place as their own through an imagined return to an ancestral or a spiritual homeland. Nathaniel Hawthorne was hardly enamored of English life when he took up residence in Liverpool in 1853; nonetheless, after two years' stay he writes of a “latent” recognition: “I suppose there is still latent in us Americans (even of two centuries date, and more, like myself) an adaptation to the English climate, which makes it like native soil and air to us” (121-22). But even as Hawthorne became more at home in England, his contentment was disturbed by the political realities of living in the United Kingdom-an imperial entity created by an act of Parliament in 1801. Appearing at the edges of the detailed travel descriptions in the notebooks are lingering resentments over previous British-American conflicts and a dislike of the colonizer mentality. Writing in October 1854, during the CrimeanWar, Hawthorne adopts the tone of an expatriate's disdain: “Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion to this war, the Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help” (91). Hawthorne's reference is to two Times articles that are worth citing here, in that they seem to prefigure our era of “precision warfare” and triumphalist national self-regard: “The incidents of this [Crimean] war have already immeasurably increased the mutual confidence and respect of two nations [France and Britain] which have just shown they are the most powerful states in the world,” declared the Times on 4 October. The following day it stated:

Reading samuel beckett made me want to link literary and visual studies, although when i first began to love his work, I did not understand that these were different disciplines. A graduate student in the English department at Rutgers University, I read Waiting for Godot while sitting on the floor of my dorm room. I remember really squinting at the pages, trying both to read every word of the play and to see it on a stage in my mind. When I finished, I was convinced I had read the dialogue to a painting. What confused me was whether the painting existed before the play or whether Beckett was trying to create it in the play's performance.

'Biyi Bandele's Oroonoko, in its textual and performance history, bridges eighteenth- and late-twentieth-century forms of transnationalism. The Oroonoko story has always been an improvised text. Bandele's play relates to earlier versions of the Oroonoko story by Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, and John Hawkesworth. Three issues in Bandele's Oroonoko have special relevance to a transnational reading of the play: the deployment of an African setting as a strategy for counteracting a pseudouniversalism; the place of anachronism, especially in the representation of gender relations; and Bandele's use of English as a means of conveying Yoruban culture. His play raises the question of what it means to “sell” Oroonoko to a wide audience today.

Whereas first-generation theorists of virtual reality tended to regard simulated worlds as separate from real life, current trends in miniaturization, implants, wearable computers, and embedded sensors have shifted the emphasis to “mixed realities” mingling computationally intensive simulations with input from the real world. Contemporary films and novels have mirrored this trend, creating a blend of simulations mixed with everyday reality that Bruce Sterling has called “slipstream fiction.” To explore this phenomenon, we analyze three films that mix simulation with reality: The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive. These films present themselves initially as murder mysteries, but this pose quickly gives way to even more serious concerns, about the ontological status of the represented worlds. The narrative configurations suggest that when death is no longer the plots' logical end point, storytelling techniques undergo significant transformation, subverting usual assumptions about chronology, subjectivity, and topology and requiring new interpretive techniques.

Women's studies in english departments in germany have developed in a special and, when seen from an Anglo-American perspective, rather peculiar way. The irregularity, which seems to have been overlooked up to now, is caused by institutional and ideological conditions characteristic of German universities.

This essay begins by asserting the importance of Joanna Russ as an American writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Her feminist concerns and her stylistic bravura are examined, as are the ways in which she deals with the socioeconomic construction of power in orde r to transcend any uncritical biological essentialism. The second half of the essay considers the context of two phrases that occur in D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance and also in Russ's writing: “hill girl” and “the female man” (The Female Man is the title of one of Russ's novels). The possibility that Griffith's film is Russ's textual source for these phrases is considered.

This article claims that much of the contemporary scholarship on Nella Larsen's Passing attempts to correct the delusional apprehensions of the novel's main character, Irene Redfield. I suggest that this corrective effort ultimately places critics in the paranoid orbit they aim to diagnose. Critics are unable to escape the logic of paranoia primarily because they read Irene's paranoia according to a conventional tropology of paranoia, homosexuality, and delusional jealousy. The paranoid gesture tries to prove that Passing is “really about” homosexuality and simply passing itself off as a novel about racial passing. I work through the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and paranoia to show how the novel incessantly thematizes the processes by which race and sexuality are substantialized in the scholarship. Ultimately, it is because Passing rigorously drains identitarian categories of substance that the novel is available to the paranoid substantializing of critics.

Trained and working in literary studies, i began to analyze visual artifacts such as paintings sometime in the late 1980s. My interest in visual aspects has grown out of the realization that subjectivity is formed by a perpetual adjustment of images passing before the subject, who, as focalizer, makes them into a whole that is comprehensible because it is continuous. Having a certain continuity in one's thought depends, at a level more subliminal than conscious, on having a certain continuity in one's images.

But continuity is not the same thing as coherence. This distinction is another source of interest that informs work on visual narrativity. In such historically and sociologically varied texts and images as modern novels, the ancient and incomplete fragments that make up the Hebrew bible, and Rembrandt's paintings, I constantly came up against that which eludes the coherence of these artifacts. My attention was systematically arrested by the detail that seems out of place, the contradiction that tears open the work, the monstrous element that reveals flaws and disparities and, because it provokes astonishment, offers never-ending possibilities for the understanding of these works. Such experiences led me to consider those dimensions of literature that classical narratology has tended to think marginal and that pictorial narratology, unbounded by the presumption of linearity, would promote to the forefront or, at least, deploy as heuristic instruments with which to grasp structure outside linear plots.