How do we know where languages begin and where they end? It is widely assumed that languages exist as discrete, distinct entities, an idea that forms the basis of mono- and multilingualism, as well as of source and target languages in translation theory. What created that clear-cut division between languages? I argue that our current conception of language was invented as part of the process of the creation of the nation-state. The idea of a language, and therefore of translation, was a product of nation-state formation that required the construction of boundaries to divide homogeneous territories, peoples, and their languages. The Stammbaum model of linguistic filiation emerged as part of the same politicized ideology of modernity. Against this, I consider the alternative model of language mixture, which conceptualizes language as a transformative process of interaction without boundaries and challenges ideas of a language and of translation.

This is the first work of criticism to read Abdelwahab Meddeb as a poet. Selfconsciously indeterminate from philosophical and poetic perspectives, Meddeb's poetry is indebted to European, especially French, high poetic modernism; to the French literary turn to the United States; and to the author's desire to be read in the lineage of the major Sufi poets of classical Arabic literature. Turning his back on the hegemony of postcolonial literary prose with the 1987 chapbook Tombeau d'Ibn Arabi, Meddeb generates a new francophone lyric infused with the Sufi traditions of al-Andalus, North Africa, and the Near and Middle Easts. His new lyric rewrites itself as a Sufi consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state, and his tonguing of the new francophone lyric leads us to a long overdue analytical paradigm.

In the early 1960s two editions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart were published with competing sets of illustrations. The first, by Dennis Carabine, illustrates a realist novel, the second, by Uche Okeke, a modernist one. Reading Achebe's iconic novel through its early publication history and for its visual images shows how the famous ending of Things Fall Apart turns, stylistically, to the impenetrable flatness of the modernist surface. At mid-century, modernist style could be made to serve realist imperatives, and Achebe's flat style challenges colonial modes of literary representation and the myth of modernist primitivism in the visual arts. This essay stresses the importance of the visual image to mid-century anglophone literature and the importance of modernist style to the poetics of decolonization.

Some Things Don't Change Much. One Hundred and Fourteen years ago, at an MLA conference in Champaign, Illinois, the president of the Central Division, the Germanist James Taft Hatfield of Northwestern University, delivered an address on “the relation of scholarship to the commonwealth,” which I recognize as a version of this year's theme, Literature and Its Publics. When the address was published later in PMLA, the account of it went as follows: “the remarks of the President were clear, incisive, sparkling, and proved an excellent introduction to one of the most interesting meetings” of the association. (The minutes go on to share the secretary's concern that the conference has too many papers, which run too long, and to record the balance in the Central Division's funds: $1.33 [“Proceedings” lxxv].)

Engaging with and amending the terms of debates about poetry performance, I locate the origins of the default, neutral style of contemporary academic poetry readings in secular performance and religious ritual, exploring the influence of the beat poets, the black arts movement, and the African American church. Line graphs of intonation patterns demonstrate what I call monotonous incantation, a version of the neutral style that is characterized by three qualities: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence and slow, steady pace. This style is popularly known as “poet voice.” Recordings of four contemporary poets—Natasha Trethewey, Louise Glück, Michael Ryan, and Juliana Spahr—demonstrate this style, which contrasts with more expressive, idiosyncratic readings by poets as distinct as Frank Bidart and Kenneth Goldsmith.

Keats's tracks into the nineteenth century angle toward a “modernism” often defined at his expense—yet with latent identifications. In relations of past and present, figurai identifications may register in nuances different from conscious allusion or the psychodramas of influence, ravages and resistance, hauntings and felt belatedness that issue in self-interested misreadings. “Latent Keats” and “Latent Yeats” play into an important, underreported current in both Keats studies and Yeats studies: a “Long Romanticism” in intimate verbal figures that trouble any “Modernism” of definitional difference from “Romantic.” Keats's writing harbors figures to which Yeats could respond, even correspond, vexed as he was by “Keats” as the name for the puerile outsider's dreamy sensuousness that a proper “modernist” needed to spurn. Such complication is one of the variable formations by which a “modernist” program manages to conjure the “Romantic” precedence it would supersede.

Exploring the links among accelerating patterns of migration, homogenizing forces of globalization, and transnational sites of creativity, this essay highlights the contributions that francophone voices from islands of the global South have made to the diversification of the knowledge economy. We discuss the critical effectiveness of literature as an agent of cultural change, focusing on minor writers who reach wide audiences by negotiating new pathways into the literary marketplace. The Comoran Soeuf Elbadawi, the Malagasy Jean-Luc Raharimanana, the Mauritians Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel, and the Tahitian Chantal Spitz instigate literary dialogues that underscore ways of reimagining our world and redefining world literature. The issues they raise reveal the enduring relevance of literary studies and its interpretive approaches to a full appreciation of human diversity, which cannot be captured by purely quantitative methods.

In 1923 the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky returned to the USSR after a year of exile. Tike his entire cohort of “fellow travelers,” he accommodated himself to the new Soviet regime. He did so in the language of travel and other kinds of movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, nomadism—a prominent motif in works by Shklovsky from A Sentimental Journey through Marco Polo—emerges as his central figure for accommodation to official culture. This association occurs through the submerged double meaning of his signature term ostranenie—at once defamiliarization and reterritorialization. This duality of ostranenie has implications for our broader understanding of the way mobility is active in cultural production and intertwined with structures of power. In the Soviet case, ostranenie underscores that nomadic movement is essential to the operation of cultural agents, whose relative freedom becomes a mechanism of state authority and control.

Literary critics' engagement with copyright law has often emphasized ontological questions about the relation between idealized texts and their material embodiments. This essay turns toward a different set of questions—about the role of texts in the communication of knowledge. Developing an alternative intellectual genealogy of copyright law grounded in the eighteenth-century contest between innatism and empiricism, I argue that jurists like William Blackstone and poets like Edward Young drew on Locke's theories of ideas to articulate a new understanding of writing as uncommunicative expression. Innatists understood texts as tools that could enable transparent communication through a shared stock of innate ideas, but by denying the existence of innate ideas empiricists called the possibility of communication into question. And in their arguments for perpetual copyright protection, eighteenth-century jurists and pamphleteers pushed empiricism to its extreme, linking literary and economic value to the least communicative aspects of a text.

R. K. Narayan's work has been faulted for its sidestepping of the brutal realities of colonial rule. Yet Narayan stages, in the dreaminess of his fictionalized township of Malgudi, the unwriting or undermining of the logics of language that subtend colonial rule. The author has fashioned a way to write about India that displays the vacuity of the colonial model of governance and, through his tales of failed authorship, points to something other. Emerging in his comic episodes and in his baffled protagonists is a recognition of the importance of keeping things unsettled, in suspension, or visible only in their negation. Narayan, this essay argues through a series of questions that underscore the uncertainty in his world, imagines passivity as an interruption of the progressive, purposive, and productive time that defines modernity.

This essay combines a history of publication with a discussion of the sonic dimensions of Roger Williams's seventeenth-century Narragansett-English vocabulary, A Key into the Language of America, modeling one way literary scholars might think beyond print-centric analyses. Drawing on historical reprintings as well as Native American linguistic reappropriations of A Key, I argue that cross-cultural encounter emerges most powerfully in relation to Williams's text not as a vestige of the past, accessible through the dialogues or the language, but as a function of the text's reproduction, the audiences' imagination of its reproducibility, and the points at which it fails to be a mimetic record.

How did Mariama Bâ‘s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This essay traces how the Senegalese author's work became recognizable to a global audience as an attack on polygamy and a celebration of literary culture. I explore the flaws in these two conceptions of the novel, and I recover aspects of the text that were obscured along the way—especially the novel's critique of efforts to reform the legal framework of marriage in Senegal. I also compare striking shifts that occur in two key translations: the English edition that helped catalyze Bâ‘s success and a more recent translation into Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. By reading Letter back through these translations, I reposition it as a text that highlights its distance from an audience and transforms this distance into an animating contradiction.

As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane's ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë‘s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women's biological “periodicity,” Brontë‘s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane's empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction.

Marianne Moore's response to World War II took an unexpected form: her translation, published in 1954, of the fables of La Fontaine. While Moore's project emerged from a wartime effort of European cultural transmission, the fables' indirect speech also served more personal political ends. It afforded a protected means for entering a gendered debate about war and a language for writing about large issues—violence, suffering, injustice—that avoided the oversimplifications and divisiveness of wartime and Cold War rhetoric. Critics have mostly neglected Moore's Fables along with her politics, but both are essential to understanding not only her response to war but also the larger goals of postwar American poetry and translation as a political project—one that allowed Moore and her peers to offset the guilt of spectatorship by reclaiming intellectual labor as a mode of war participation.

The field of neurodiversity offers new ways to think about the history of the book and the history of reading. Because autistic individuals—especially those marked by “classical” symptoms—often report a strong reliance on physical objects and a pronounced tendency toward sensory engagement, their interests coincide with those of book historians and reception critics who investigate the embodied reading experience and the material aspects of the book. Indeed, the textual practices of autistic individuals can resemble those of bibliophiles, who often enjoy touching and smelling books. But autistic textual engagement occasionally takes singular forms, thereby pushing historians of the book into surprising new territory. For example, many classical autists attest to an intense intimacy and intercorporeity with the material book. In so doing they create opportunities for reflecting on the interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds.

Performing a historicized analysis of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), this essay returns this understudied author to the center stage of modernist studies and includes the popular stage in accounts of the technologized mechanisms of modernist writing. By disclosing a deep correlation between the composite narrative tactics of Dos Passos's multilinear novel and the mass entertainments of this period, particularly Florenz Ziegfeld's annual Follies revues, it supplies new parameters for theorizing strategies of narration and characterization in modernist fiction vis-à-vis the technologies of popular entertainment and display in the early twentieth century. The discussion of Dos Passos's broad critique of the gendered specular economy of the modern metropolis in the era of Taylorism repositions his early writing as integral to the development of high modernism in the 1920s.