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.

Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his “audience” to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point. All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers. In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real—not imagined—fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.

A tradition of oral poetry (izibongo) still exists among the Xhosa-speaking tribes of South Africa, but as yet few analytical studies based on fieldwork have been published. The Xhosa tradition differs in some respects from the Serbo-Croatian tradition as defined by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, though there are elements common to both traditions. Parry and Lord concentrated attention on the guslar, an improvising epic poet, but the Xhosa tribal poet (imbongi) should be seen in the context of all poetic activities in his community. The tradition of Xhosa izibongo is complex, consisting of at least four distinct activities: many Xhosa tribesmen have the ability to compose poetry on the inspiration of the moment; most Xhosas commit to memory traditional poems or poems of their own composition; the imbongi, a figure of considerable importance and influence in traditional society, generally composes his refined poetry in performance; and some literate Xhosas commit their poetry to writing. Each of these four kinds of poetic production is significantly different from the others, but each also influences the others.

In the Renaissance, religious and political confrontations generated an intensified awareness of the self which marks a decisive phase in the evolution of human personality, whose study may be entitled Historical Psychology. Alienation from religious and political strife turned the interests of Petrarch and Montaigne toward their own minds, Marot's persecution for heresy developed his self-awareness in L'Enfer, followed by Ronsard's self-defensive autobiography in his Reply to Insults. Such models prefigure Milton's authorial intrusions of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare illustrates the creative impact of religious controversy by enriching the hints of Lollardry in Falstaff with a wide variety of Puritan affectations in the Elizabethan period. The Protestant attacks on Machiavelli also help in developing the character of Richard III and similar introverted creations, as T. S. Eliot notes. By the time of Marvell, personality is considered essentially artificial and willed—an inheritance from which Swift, the Romantics, and many modern authors have profited. Historical Psychology is thus a necessary tool if we are to handle the development of literary tradition.

Sophisticated readers of A Christmas Carol, moved though they may be by the dramatic reformation of Scrooge, are frequently inclined to question the psychological validity of the old man's change of heart. Far from being a sign of the story's inadequacy, however, this divided reaction is the key to its effectiveness. Dickens' chief target in A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's nineteenth-century rationalism, and the reader's skepticism about the old man's moral and spiritual recovery is an exact analogue of that rationalism. What the reader's delight, in the face of his skepticism, suggests, therefore, is that there is a level of the story on which Scrooge's regeneration is entirely authentic; that if A Christmas Carol is less than convincing as a psychological case history of an elderly neurotic temporarily reformed by Christmas sentimentality, it is certainly a success as the metaphysical study of a human being's rediscovery of his own innocence.

Though in his criticism Zola welcomed attempts by his contemporaries to abandon traditional forms of the plot, his novels reveal a constant concern for ordered construction. L’Assommoir demonstrates a particularly rigorous unity of design. In its internal organization one can discern a system of interrelated features deriving from a scheme of three controlling structural oppositions that, throughout the novel, character, action, and description illustrate: work/idleness, cleanliness/filth, abstention/indulgence. The development of the plot is the process by which the two principal characters, Gervaise and Coupeau, progressively abandon the positive values of this scheme and submit to the opposite tendencies. Zola traces this process within a symmetrical framework of measured effects and equivalent phases of development organized around the central chapter of the work to form a rigorously structured rising and falling action which adds to a novel of stark, repelling contingencies an engaging formal dimension of harmonious order.

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.

Starting with Raglan's suggestion that Falstaff may be a “holy fool” and with Auden's belief that he is a comic symbol of charity, this essay explores the medieval tradition of wise fool, and especially Falstaff's always canny use of biblical allusion. His various jests, if read in relation to the political action of the main plot, reveal him as characterizing England's time of day and parodying the unchristian behavior of Hotspur, Henry, and Hal. By the time he dies mumbling Psalm xxiii to an uncomprehending Nell Quickly, there have accumulated many hints that he is, in fact, a candle to his age, a professional Fool with the heart of a faithful Lazarus, and destined to join Mowbray in Abraham's bosom. The merriment for which readers have found him lovable amid his masquerades of vice has its mysterious basis in his covertly Christian understanding of England's neo-Roman Caesars.

One of Shakespeare's first and most formative intellectual legacies, with major influence on his shaping of sources in the historical tetralogies, was Elizabethan thought on the relationship of God, Fortune, and war. For the Henry vi plays, the legacy offered a thematically appropriate concept of Fortune, with humanly meaningless skirmishes and futile stratagems, pointing nevertheless toward the ultimate control of God over Fortune. For Richard iii Shakespeare chose a divinely governed war, with Richmond as a passive instrument having little character. The second tetralogy employs the most dramatically advantageous stage of the legacy: a transitional, confused period when necessity for human responsibility in war becomes first, and somewhat ambiguously, recognized (Richard iii) and then disturbingly, though covertly, prominent and Machiavellian (Henry iv and Henry v). The experience in these formative plays of trying to resolve the conflicting demands of supernatural control and human resourcefulness helped prepare Shakespeare for tragic resolutions deeper than those of military victory or defeat.