The rhetoric and the models of social process that inform much of the work of new historicists and cultural materialists in the field of English Renaissance studies are governed by a subversion-containment binarism. While conceptualizations of the operations of power based on this binarism (and its underlying Foucauldian vocabulary) have generated important insights, it may prove useful to reconceive conflict as negotiation, exchange, and accommodation. The Elizabethan English constable, representing a flexible deployment of power, offers us an alternative to repressive masters and subversive peasants. His role in Shakespearean drama and his characteristic malapropisms suggest that aristocrats and common folk were together enmeshed in what Anthony Giddens calls a “dialectic of control”.

In Artist Descending a Staircase, Stoppard has constructed a play so well suited to radio that it cannot be translated to any other medium without a significant loss. The play thereby calls into question the popular notion that radio is inferior to the stage as a forum for drama. The play also questions our ability to know, with any certainty, those things we have not witnessed, not to mention those we have. Thus, the two mysteries at the heart of the play—Who killed Donner? Whom did Sophie love?—remain essentially unsolved, even though the play suggests convincing solutions. Similarly, although the play does not explicitly discuss Marcel Duchamp, a portrait of the artist nonetheless emerges, drawn in meticulous detail. Artist, then, is built upon paradox, teasing us at every turn with “Now you see it, now you don't.”

Kleist's “Kohlhaas,” though much admired, is also much criticized for the “subplot” concerning the gypsy woman and her prophecy. Many readers believe that Kleist spoiled his story by introducing material that is not germane to the plot's central concern. Such criticism is based on the assumption that the novella initially revolves around Kohlhaas's horses but then swerves to focus on the slip of paper containing the gypsy's prophecy. But the assumption is incorrect. The same issue is central at the beginning and at the end: the possession and interpretation of powerful documents. Even the horses themselves turn out, when examined carefully, to be stand-ins for missing papers. The prophecy material is no swerve, for it provides Kohlhaas with a document he can use to counter the power of another document (the Paßschein) that has been withheld from him. When Kohlhaas swallows the gypsy's paper, he incorporates the mysterious power that it represents. Kohlhaas thus redeems himself by means of a piece of writing just as Kleist hoped to redeem himself in the eyes of his Prussian family by producing texts like “Michael Kohlhaas.”

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.

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The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee are frequently criticized for their lack of specific application to the social and political concerns of his country. In Dusklands, the first and least studied of these texts, the author makes an implicit response to the controversial and weakly defined question of the political value of literary works in postcolonialist discourse. For Coetzee, the inherently masculinist, aggressively terrorist underpinnings of the very concept of value urgently require demystifying; for the purposes of this paper, Roland Barthes's distinction between studium and punctum provides the analytic key.

The Death of the Author creates a hermeneutic vacuum that must be filled by some other determinant of meaning. For many of the new Marxist critics of Shakespeare, this author surrogate is a universal law of textual behavior. The text becomes an enemy that adopts various strategies (displacing the real subject, concealing contradictions, offering an imaginary resolution, etc.) to trick us into accepting its hegemonic ideology, but it always manages to expose and defeat itself. This construction of the text serves the political professions of these critics, since it enables them to wage—and win—a war against the forces of evil represented by the textual project and thus to act out in this displaced arena their “commitment” to transform society. Many feminist neo-Freudian critics of Shakespeare use a similar universal law wherein the text's masculine project (or fantasy) is always subverted by a feminine subtext, often embodied in an absent but omnipresent mother.

Let us anchor ourselves, for a start, to some acceptable terrain of cultural definitions. I shall use an example from our not too distant encounters. Few will disagree with me today, if I propose that we reject the concept of culture as realized in that manifestation known as Festac 77 [Festac: Black and African Festival of the Arts, Lagos, Nigeria, February 1977]. For, in the main, our people were offered a narrowed-down, reductionist aspect of culture in a gargantuan orgy of ill-organized spectacles. That negative reference is meant to limit the field, to eliminate decisively what often imposes itself on public consciousness as Culture with a capital C, or as something pronounced into being by a Ministry of Culture. What Nigeria exhibited was Culture as a sum, not even of parts, but of spectacular parts. Now, “spectacle” need not be superficial. Revelry can attain profound Dionysiac proportions, involve an inner ennoblement, almost cathartic—but it requires a consciously organizing hand, with an integrated motif around which even disparate acts of revelry are drawn. In those extravagant fields of “Festacian” revelry, however, such complex, enriching offerings were relegated to token, or symbolic, expositions, starved of funds and given scant coverage even in the media, and were finally relegated to the archives of that supracultural monstrosity known as the National Theatre. The theater of which nation, by the way? Of Nigeria? Or of Bulgaria, from where the concrete carbuncle was lifted, then grafted onto Lagos marshlands? What, in that general's cap or Christmas cake of a structure, constitutes even a fragment of Nigerian or African architectural intellect, modern or traditional? But more on that building in another place.

Despite the last decade's preoccupations with the pleasure of the text and sexual difference, few of the theories that have addressed the relation of narrative and pleasure have raised the issue of the difference between women's and men's reading pleasures. An oedipal model of narrative whose ideology of representation is derived from male sexuality not only places the female reader in the position of reading from a male point of view but also distorts our expectations for narratives written by women. Reconceiving such issues as incipience, repetition, and closure in terms of an experience of the female body helps to explain a “problematic” narrative such as Frankenstein. George Eliot's Romola thematizes and thereby discredits the oedipal struggle that structures it. Both strategies remind us that the oedipal paradigm's claim to universality depends on its either “forgetting” or actively discrediting issues that would expose its arbitrariness and mitigate its pleasures.