Reality is communication. Culture is a complex form of communication. Language is the most important medium in this abstruse level of communication. Literature is the richest and most effective use of language. The membership of the MLA, as symbolic of the institutionalized, academic interest in language and literature in the United States, is no longer representative of the concerns of the population as a whole. Its interest pre-ponderately in English and European literature and languages does not accord with the increasing national interest in the literature and languages of this hemisphere, in the varieties of English used in this country, in pedagogy, and in the modified expectations of literacy today. As teachers of language and literature, MLA members live and move in the world of symbols. They cannot expect to be absolved from the practical effects of these symbols. In their responsibility or irresponsibility, they and their Association are these symbols.

The term “dramatic monologue” was not in use when the great Victorian dramatic monologues were being written. They were sometimes called “monodramas,” which Tennyson defines as works in which successive phases of passion in one person take the place of successive persons. This agrees with the form as invented by Rousseau in Pygmalion (1763) and as practiced in Germany from about 1772 to 1815. It is related to other forms, e.g., the “attitude,” in which virtuoso performers attempted to portray rapidly shifting roles through pantomime. Monodrama was introduced into England by William Taylor of Norwich, Dr. Frank Sayers, Southey, and “Monk” Lewis; and Tennyson’s Maud, “Locksley Hall,” and “CEnone” have some characteristics of the genre. The form arose partly out of the prosopopoeia and should be distinguished from the Browningesque dramatic monologue, where the “drama” is normally between the speaker and the reader rather than between different phases of the speaker’s soul.

The Friar’s Tale is replete with distinct verbal echoes of the Wife of Bath’s Tale that point to subtler structural similarities: clear parallels exist between the Friar’s green Yeoman and the Wife’s Loathly Lady in their mysterious shape-shifting, their knowledge of unearthly secrets, and their radical metamorphoses as each tale ends. The Friar’s quiet parody of the Wife’s romantic idealism contributes to a pattern familiar in the architectonics of the Canterbury Tales. The consecutive tales of Wife, Friar, and Summoner form a dramatic triad exactly parallel to the well-known triad involving the Knight, Miller, and Reeve where, as here, the unity of the three turns upon the parody in the pivotal second tale. The Friar’s parody of the Wife also suggests that the thematic center of the Third Fragment is in the idea of maistrie, and coincidentally, suggests that the Friar’s and the Summoner’s Tales do not interrupt the Marriage Group but advance its chief theme.

Renaissance English casuistry, the branch of moral philosophy that applies general principles to particular cases, supplies a significant context for Milton’s Samson Agonistes. In subject matter, structure, and language, Milton’s tragedy resembles the prose cases of conscience in which casuists showed how to overcome doubt and despair and gain peaceful consciences by resolving difficult moral problems. Such casuistical concepts as the supremacy of the individual conscience, the relevance of circumstances to moral law, and the role of reason in resolving doubt illuminate the conflicting moral judgments that form the dramatic texture of Samson Agonistes. Samson learns how to judge his own actions in particular circumstances, and by doing so, learns to repent of his past sin, overcome his sense of powerlessness, and act with a clear conscience. The drama goes beyond conventional casuistry in its uncompromising assertion of the supremacy of the individual conscience and its unflinching recognition of the tragic limits of human power.

Contrary to the view of Calvino as a writer divided between sociopolitical concern and escape into fantasy, his works point to an unambiguous poetics in which this apparent dichotomy is in fact a dialectic process. His stylistic and narrative experimentations, from the “neorealist” mode to allegorical and mathematical fictions, and to self-reflexive narrative, disclose a precise ideological intent: to propose ever-changing models of reality, to question each form as it is produced, to explode every narrative system so a new one may be created. By means of lexical and syntactical deformation, of shifts from one semantic code to another, of ironic metalinguistic references, and by the use of special subcodes (e.g., the comic strip), Calvino breaks down the conventional barrier separating high literature from popular culture, opens to question the whole of literary tradition, and exposes the paradoxical nature of writing (écriture) in the dialectics of signification.

The anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes is a master of deception. He makes his protagonist supremely attractive to the reader by contrasting him with unlikable characters (the blind beggar, the priest, the squire) and by the intimacy of autobiography. The reader increasingly sympathizes with Lazarillo, reaching in the third chapter a point of genuine admiration for the boy’s self-sacrifice at the time of greatest physical suffering. The author then creates an illusion of passing time to reach the book’s final scene, in which the mature Lázaro profits from the sexual exploitation of his wife. Lazarillo de Tonnes, comic only on a superficial level, presents a corrupt society that forces its materialistic values on even its most virtuous members; Lázaro, like all men, eventually compromises. The reader, so attracted by the young Lazarillo who dominates the work, often fails to see the odious Lázaro who finally emerges and obliterates his former self.

Part of Goethe’s intention in Hermann und Dorothea is to awaken in the reader a disturbing sense of discrepancy between form and content. Systematic, statistically controlled analysis of the poem’s meter, along with a treatment of specific Homeric allusions in the text, leads to this conclusion, also supported by less rigorous but no less valid interpretive arguments. This discrepancy, moreover, is left unresolved, creating a feeling of pervasive irony, but not in the sense of satire or mockery. The reader is encouraged to adopt a superior critical perspective toward the bourgeois values in the poem, but, in that this perspective itself becomes an object of irony, he is also invited to affirm such values. Although this contradiction, like the tension between form and content, is never resolved, it can be understood as expressing an idea of the historical need for bourgeois stability, however banal, in the period depicted.

The divided self in James’s fiction may be regarded as an inevitable structural consequence of James’s desire to dramatize the problem of the free spirit in an enslaving world. But the divided self required by art is not essentially different from the divided self known to psychology, and an understanding of the anxieties of that self, particularly of the “obsessive imagery” James uses to depict those anxieties, enriches our understanding of James’s work. The fear of a world that threatens one’s being issues in an elaborate development of an escape motif; of imagery of seizure by the eye and by the world of appearances; and of imagery of petrification, reflecting a dread of being turned into a mere tool or machine. James’s vision of “the great trap of life” permits him to come to terms with his own limitations and culminates in a searching philosophic examination of the problem of free will and determinism.

Using Joseph Campbell’s aphorism “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths” as a pointing device, this essay explores the resilience and breadth of medieval literature as it incorporates into a single purview many perspectives that seem incongruous to the literary taste of later times. The argument maintains that the presence of a common myth to which the society generally adheres accounts for most essential differences between medieval and modern poetry, affecting not only the multiple ways in which the language functions but also the relationship of poet to idea and poem, and the vigorous interplay between poet and audience. The essay treats half a dozen Middle English lyrics, a poem by William Carlos Williams, and a fabiliau by Guerin.