Studies of the New Negro Renaissance have long emphasized the emergence in black poetry of the vernacular and of folk-oriented rhythms in particular. Sterling Brown's critical work and poetry show, however, that traditional English meters had a central role in the discourse and poetics of New Negro poetry. Reading his 1931 Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes together with James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) suggests that these meters counteracted dominant racialized ideas about black bodies, rhythms, and song. The polymetrical surface of Brown's own early poem “When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home” (1927) reveals that Brown treated iambic pentameter as a vernacular form, destabilizing entrenched divisions between conventional and innovative, white and black, past and present. Future studies of black poetry might therefore look to prosodic hybridity as a powerful critique of audience ideology.

A century separates us from an iconic moment of aesthetic metamorphosis: 1914 witnessed the appearance of James Joyce's Dubliners, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Mina Loy's “Parturition,” and the vorticist journal Blast. It was the year Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, aided by Ezra Pound, started the literary review the Egoist in London and Condé Nast and Frank Crowninshield launched Vanity Fair in New York. Arnold Schoenberg's atonal symphonic works assaulted classical sonorities; Wassily Kandinsky elevated the purity of geometric form above the functional work of visual representation. Most crucially, 1914 saw the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War. Cutting a bloody, four-year swath across Europe, the war took almost forty million lives and rendered all subsequent formal innovation inseparable from cultural devastation: thus the intricate, ruptured literary architectures of The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927).

Philip Roth invented Nathan Zuckerman to manage the temporal dissonance between the gradual and frequently posthumous canonization associated with Roth's modernist forebears and the instantaneous and contemporaneous celebrity characterizing his own postmodern career. After the mass cultural renown precipitated by Portnoy's Complaint and the devastating attack on that text by Irving Howe, Roth decided to re-create his career on the model of his literary forebears—James, Flaubert, Proust, Malamud, Mann, and especially Kafka, who died young after having published little. The first Zuckerman trilogy and its epilogue absorb the charismatic powers of these ancestors, after which Roth kills his avatar in The Counterlife, catapulting him into a pseudo-posthumous Jamesian major phase. The entire Zuckerman cycle, then, is a unique but also historically symptomatic strategy for dealing with the problem of celebrity authorship under a postmodern dispensation.

Tragedy is a recurrent subject in recent constitutional law scholarship. But this scholarship theorizes tragedy through a single narrow model, generally applies it to a limited conception of the domain of constitutional law, and ultimately conceives tragedy only as a liability rather than as a positive potentiality of constitutional practice. This essay critiques one theoretical understanding of tragedy and introduces three more, to argue for an open-ended praxis of pluralist tragic engagement with the United States Constitution that is necessary for the sober, mature, demystified, and deliberative functionality of the constitutional system. Each of these four models of tragedy is paired with a domain of constitutional law: Aristotle's model with interpretation, Hegel's with structure and institutions, the radical Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal's with performance and public effects, and Nietzsche's with cultural and educational accessibility.

If it is true that legends never die but only grow and transmogrify, then the death of the African literary giant Chinua Achebe, at the age of eighty-two, on 21 March 2013, will do nothing to dim his assured status as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Two months after his death, he was buried in his hometown, Ogidi, in the state of Anambra, Nigeria, after a week of funeral rites in the national and state capitals, as well as at Nsukka University, where he worked as an academic in the early 1970s. The ceremonies marked Nigeria's sense that here was a writer whose vision had shaped not only the nation's understanding of itself but also, and as profoundly, anglophone world letters. In 2007 these contributions were justly acknowledged with the award to Achebe of the Man Booker International Prize, which recognizes the full trajectory of a writer's career and achievements.

Maurice Sendak was an artist who not only produced extraordinary art and memorable books but also expanded the range of children's literature, what it can portray. In doing so, he eagerly dealt with his own life, his anxieties and joys, and focused on the importance of art to a child's life.

The epilogue of Tony Kushner's Angels in America is often criticized as modeling a political capitulation, allowing vague spiritual promise to eclipse real political difference. This article reads Kushner's epilogue in dialogue with Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus as a negotiation with the tragic condition that intertwines the political and the spiritual, set in a ritual space of utopian transformation. The plays' tragic subjects, persisting past their expected demise and defined by their continued exclusion from the polis, demand citizenship as an act of reincorporation and an amelioration of suffering, offering transformative benefits to the state in turn. For Kushner, following Sophocles, the demand for citizenship is a demand for personal and political subjecthood, a precondition to all other politics and always a spiritual transfiguration.

The role composition plays in the contemporary American university, particularly in relation to the english department, has changed from the days when composition was not an expertise but a duty. Initiated on the college level in the 1870s, as John Brereton has argued, at a time much like our own, when the American college was “in danger of becoming irrelevant to a rapidly changing nation” (3), composition consolidated the many kinds of writing done in the courses (and in the extracurriculum) of universities into a required academic subject, positioned at the threshold of college education. It was charged with preparing students for the rigors of college study and for citizenship and professional life. For many generations of college English teachers, composition was an expected part of the job: everyone, whatever their specialty, taught first-year writing.

Composition studies concentrates on students, not texts. We in this field want to know who our students are. What abilities to use language do they bring to the academy? What new kinds of intellectual work are they able to do? What challenges does academic discourse pose for them? These are research questions we explore with rigor but also compassion and, sometimes, admiration. My favorite origin story claims that this field's modern iteration sprang from reluctance to use first-year writing courses, required at most universities, simply to eject the “boneheads.” Instead, we learned from Mina Shaughnessy and others to regard even the most struggling undergraduate writers as agents, operating among intersecting and competing discourse communities. For us, student writers are not solitary creators, nor are they intertextual blurs.

Modern tragedy faces a number of challenges, many of them compiled in George Steiner's classic study The Death of Tragedy. This essay will add one more to Steiner's list: a crisis of action inaugurated by the rise of capitalism and given its first and clearest discursive form in the works of the classical political economists. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggests that the prevalence of happiness or its opposite depends less on ethicopolitical actions than it does on economic production. Nations are wealthy or poor, and thus happy or not, according to how efficiently their populations make things, not how wisely or virtuously their members comport themselves. And for the individual, happiness comes to depend more on consumption than on the exercise of virtue, as it had formerly done in Aristotelian ethics. But if tragedy is, as Aristotle claimed, the imitation of an action, then the dethroning of action by production will simultaneously degrade the very substance of tragic drama. What happens to tragedy when the thing that constitutes it is diminished under conditions of capitalist modernity?

It would seem impossible to wrench dramatic tragedy away from humanism. In their encounters with fate, capricious gods, or a corrupt polis, tragedy's protagonists confront the injustice and futility of existence, and in their suffering and defeat they affirm the “indomitability of the human spirit,” the preeminent value of human life. Certainly this is George Steiner's view in The Death of Tragedy (1961), although his conservative hierarchies (no gods, no tragedy) have been refuted by critics who argue that there is profound tragedy in ordinary life (Williams; Eagleton; Poole) and that tragedy “continually adapts itself to the conditions of experience” (States 199). However, even Steiner's debunkers embrace his notion of tragedy as extremity, as an encounter with extrahuman forces and suffering far exceeding human guilt. So, I argue here, does the British playwright Caryl Churchill, who in 1994 produced a diptych of contemporary tragedy: The Skriker, first mounted in January 1994, and her translation of Seneca's Thyestes, staged just four months later. Taken together these plays absorb the “conditions of experience” of the mid-1990s in the West. Along with the horrors of the Bosnian War and continuing environmental and economic crises, such conditions might well include the widely touted mapping of the human genome, begun in 1990 and concluded in 2003, and, concurrently, a popular and scholarly fascination with affects, intensities, and “the lively immanence of matter” (Coole and Frost 9). What happens to the humanist foundations of tragedy when understandings of the human are subjected to these “new materialisms”? Churchill's The Skriker, along with her translation of Thyestes, invites us to imagine a seeming oxymoron, a posthuman tragedy.

Any modest attempt in comparative rhetoric to think beyond aristotle and beyond a single culture is enough to reveal Diversity in the use of language to converse, to instruct, and to persuade and in the concepts and theories developed to inform language practices. Since the publication, in 1971, of Robert Oliver's Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, one of the early studies that recognized the need for and benefits of studying non-Euro-American rhetorics, comparative rhetoric has made significant advances as interest in moving beyond Euro-American-centrism in studies of rhetoric steadily grows. Comparative rhetoric, committed to different ways of knowing and speaking and to different forms of inquiry, investigates across time and space communicative practices that frequently originate in noncanonical contexts and are often marginalized, forgotten, or erased altogether. Acting in response to globalization, comparative rhetoric aims to transform dominant rhetorical traditions and paradigms. As an interdisciplinary enterprise, it intersects with cognate studies and theories to challenge the prevailing power imbalances and patterns of knowledge production.