The malaise depicted in early nineteenth-century French novels is said to characterize the age but is in fact a malady of men. In these works male alienation takes the form of emasculation. Nevertheless, Chateaubriand's René illustrates how the male protagonist's feminization becomes a sign of moral superiority and poetic genius. Although the hero claims to tell a tale devoid of conventional intrigue, he makes his solipsistic discourse prurient and melodramatic by introducing a woman who suffers the consequences of desiring him despite his disablement. The mal du siècle strategy consists in creating interest in character through the feminine in the man while providing drama in plot through the man's fatal effect on the woman. While the early Romantic novel breaks down stereotypes of masculinity by feminizing the hero, its conventions of narrative causality and discursive empowerment draw on traditional ideologies of gender difference to reempower alienated postrevolutionary man.

An essay on language that Benjamin wrote in 1916 provides access to his “arcades project” (Das Passagenwerk), the materials on nineteenth-century Paris that he collected from 1927 until his death, in 1940. The arcades, glass-and-steel structures enclosing spaces between houses into exotic commercial zones, function as Benjamin's emblems of capitalist modernity. Rhythms of ceaseless production and obsolescence not only absorb all counterideologies (revolution) but control the language of possible experience. By juxtaposing documents on objects, technologies, and dreams with glimpses of allegorical clarity in Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, and others, Benjamin seeks to establish a text that will both embody and unmask the myth of history that obscures these rhythms. His goal is a structure of quotation that will speak for itself. Such speaking requires and makes possible “awakened” readers, able to translate the repetitious syntax of commodified individualism into a usable political language.

The Genesis B poet built his image of Eve out of the traditional elements used to create the regal, glowing, intelligent, verbally adept women of Old English poetry, but the story he was telling mandated distortions of that image. Labeling Eve as weak-minded (no other woman in the corpus is so characterized) represents the most damaging distortion. Although the reasons for this intrusion of antifeminism into a poetry mostly devoid of it remain elusive, the spread of Christianity, the restructuring of secular and religious power, and increasing literacy were undoubtedly factors. But despite the distortions, the image of Eve retains its stereotypical power because of the connotative and associative strength of the very image the poet is undercutting. This unique female portrait both contributes to and reflects the ambiguity and problematic status of the Anglo-Saxon woman in a society undergoing rapid and complex cultural change.

Theoretical accounts of the “postmodern” have recently invoked the aesthetic category of the sublime, but without attending to the rhetorical complexities that the category names and conceals. This essay opens by considering disturbances legible in Fredric Jameson's proposal of a postmodern sublime, then goes on to consider narratives by Thomas Pynchon that interrogate and allegorize the burdens of such a proposition. From the early short stories to V. and Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's texts develop increasingly complex stagings of the sublime, putting into question the psychological and epistemological consolations that these scenarios exist to afford.

Instead of being essentially Platonic, as generations of critics have contended, Shakespeare's sonnets embrace a fundamentally economic idea of value. Their claims to certainty and to permanence refer to human systems rather than to transcendent absolutes. In this respect they resemble Wittgenstein's final writings, collected as On Certainty. Basing their own predicted endurance on their continued utility through time and social change, the sonnets sketch a pragmatic account of human continuity and a nonessentialist idea of human nature. This description of their literary process also suggests why they now seem peculiarly canonical.

One of modern feminism's most crucial literary texts has incited a systematic backlash that would save its author from feminism, denying that mere gender can have a place in Ibsen's universal art or claiming that Nora Helmer is too inconsistent, frivolous, dishonest, abnormal, or unwomanly to be a feminist heroine. The argument that Nora represents not Woman but Everyman is a gender-based tautology in itself; applied to the play's thoroughgoing feminist text it becomes doubly nonsense. The confused notions that Nora's critics have about feminism and its relation to art lead them to uphold equally illogical positions, and their charges against Nora, which repeat those of her foil and husband, constitute both a serious misreading and, unintentionally, a kind of spurious deconstruction that denies the play's coherence and worth. Finally, research on Ibsen's life proves that, all claims to the contrary, his intentions in A Doll House were thoroughly feminist.