A Funeral Elegy was written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies, A Funeral Elegy received scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”

Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, like Sylvia Plath's, dramatizes issues of primary psychological and sexual experience, issues that many critics have taken to be purely biographical. The openly apostrophic character of Tsvetaeva's writing has generated critical judgments about her character. Tsvetaeva's address, in both her lyrics and her letters, is embarrassing—not, as Jonathan Culler maintains, because apostrophe never fulfills its claims but, as Barbara Johnson argues, because it is a naked expression of need. Johnson's Lacanian conception of apostrophe as the child's demand illuminates Tsvetaeva's writing and helps to explain why Tsvetaeva has been charged with being a bad mother. However, Tsvetaeva's practice suggests that far from being contradictory impulses, demanding and giving can hardly be distinguished—a confusion that is reflected in the ambivalent responses her work has inspired.

In his Narrative (1845), Frederick Douglass constructs a self based on conversion rhetoric and binary logic. In the greatly expanded My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he complicates this textual self by both imitating and criticizing tropes conventionally used in the slavery debate, such as metaphors related to animals, Christianity, and manhood. Emphasizing the constructed nature of mimesis and metaphor, Douglass demonstrates his ability to escape the bondage of reductionist language even as he claims the power associated with linguistic mastery. This revision of self emerges from his experience of northern racism, manifested in his limited role in William Lloyd Garrison's organization. Douglass's renunciation of Garrisonian dogma and his entry into political action—including his striking textual reinterpretation of the United States Constitution—coincide with the stylistically “modernist” self of the second autobiography.

Mallarmé constructs a “crisis of verse” that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation to produce his celebrated poetic purity. Indeed, he constructs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on ambiguity. The significance of this defilement spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé‘s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Third Republic, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Moreover, because defilement is at once material and symbolic and because that “symbolism” is an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality, Mallarmé‘s cultivation of defilement is a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure” philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential.

Contemporary historians' definition of what constitutes historical evidence has expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s, but so have their doubts about the interpretation of evidence, especially for difficult and evanescent sources such as collective memory. As the ambitions of historical practice have challenged the limits of interpretation, the use of novel sources has necessitated recourse to “foundationalist” assumptions, without which errors in historical witnesses cannot be detected or evaluated.

Popular American tales of women's escapes from Roman Catholic convents were important manifestations of the virulent anti-Catholicism of the 1830s and 1850s. These stories also reveal how questions of evidence were imbricated with the woman question in nineteenth-century American culture. “Fictional” and “nonfictional” versions of these narratives attempt to prove their veracity, using a common standard of evidence and shared methods of authentication, documentation, and corroboration—including a reliance on their Protestant audience's reading history. Yet the multiple voices and forms and the visual, as well as verbal, rhetoric that the telling of the escaped nun's story entails work to destabilize feminine spiritual, religious, and moral authority. The escaped nun's intertextual story expresses and contains a cultural anxiety about young Protestant women and their influence in the remaking of American Protestant religious practices.

Eliot's Middlemarch reveals the effective alliance among ekphrasis (a literary response to a visual work of art), narrative, and the portrayal of desire. The novel's richest example of this dynamic occurs in the Vatican Hall of Statues scene, when Will Ladislaw and his painter friend Naumann observe Dorothea poised beside a celebrated antique statue, “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra.” Capitalizing on this statue's history of mistaken identity, Eliot affirms the power of visual art for literary representation by using the statue in three important ways: as a catalyst for the birth of desire, as a prefiguration of the novel's romance plot (through narrative references to the myth of Ariadne), and as a vehicle for representing female eroticism, which the statue's long-standing association with Cleopatra underscores.

Cleanness, an alliterative Middle English poem attributed to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, contains a graphic account of the destruction of Sodom. Elaborating the theme of cleanness, the poet advocates not only sexual purity but also right conduct and respect for God's will. Exhortations to clean behavior are conventional; less expected are the poem's bold censure of “unclean” sexual acts, especially sodomy, and insistence that the clergy maintain vigilant surveillance of sexual wrongdoing. A poem with a salacious cast, Cleanness takes unusual risks in describing sodomy while denouncing it. Using Foucault's “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses,” I analyze Cleanness in relation to contemporary manuals of confession, which avoid mentioning sodomy for fear that the word might encourage the act. The poem's description of Sodom concludes with a construction of the feminine that serves as a corrective to the sins of male lust.

It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah how the events referred to as the Shoah produce a reference to themselves. The film presents a montage of encounters, of unanticipated details discovered in filming, of instances selected and arranged as openings to other encounters not included in Shoah. Through careful choreography, the film invites the return of signs from the past. Shoah offers a way of seeing and invites encounters that—like the filmmaker's arrangements—are open to the force of evidence as that evidence constrains interpretative response. Lanzmann's stance, an openness to significance that precedes interpretation, provides a model for a viewer's relationship to Shoah and its material, to the otherness that addresses the audience through the film. In tracing what can be traced and in filming what can be witnessed, Shoah can turn spectators into producers in the work of bearing witness.

Some critics cite book 4 of Augustine's De doctrina Christiana as a source of the anti-rhetorical style of Renaissance English prose. However, such critics do not recognize that book 4 offers instruction in extemporaneous oral performance. Nor do contemporary critics note Augustine's pervasive orality, though a substantial critical literature addresses this fact. The relation of orality to literacy was complex in late antiquity, particularly as illiterates converted to Christianity, a text-based religion. Augustine's prescriptions can be seen to illustrate the development of “innerness” among Christians. Book 4 shows how Scripture reading, prayer, and style can be marshaled to produce extemporaneous oral performances that provoke interior religious experiences. Modern criticism of book 4 that views oralily and literacy as simple opposites and that privileges literacy can lead to misreading. As a document imbricated in the complex relation of literacy and oralily, however, book 4 makes a different kind of sense.