Shifting our critical perspective on Sweeney to encounter it temporally rather than spatially (New Critically), we discover an existential content embodied in an Anti-Aristotelian form remarkably similar to the drama of the absurd. Its thematic pattern is that which finds its paradigm in the myth of the Furies and its most articulate phenomenological description in Heidegger: the paradoxical flight from death and, ultimately, Nothingness (the Erinyes) that ends in the saving recognition that death is a benign agent (the Eumenides). The flight, characterized in existential philosophy as the self-deceptive “domestication” of death, is epitomized in the wastelanders effort to transform Sweeney's tale of murder into a well-made detective story. But this impulse is thwarted by Sweeney's refusal to draw a distancing conclusion. This becomes Eliot's formal strategy. Like the Anti-Aristotelian absurdists, he “decomposes” the “time-shape” of his microcosm to prevent the audience from objectifying the dreadful contingency of the world of his play. Eliot's Anti-Aristotelianism, however, is ultimately different from that of the “humanistic” absurdists. Whereas the latter project an absolutely discontinuous “time-shape” grounded in a vision of a radically discontinuous universe, Eliot, who sees the macrocosm as a Nothingness that may be the obverse of Somethingness, projects a discontinuous (circular) “time-shape” that contains the possibility of linear direction.

When Hermann Hesse received the Nobel prize in 1946 he was virtually unknown in this country. The critics who reluctantly turned to the new celebrity found his works threadbare and derivative. Today there exists a veritable Hesse cult in the United States among the dissident and the young. The affinities between the German author and the disaffected youth in America are many. They share similar attitudes toward adolescence, sex, drugs, the Orient, the nation, the state, the church, the military, the schools, and authority in general. A glance at the rebellious students in Hesse's native country, however, reveals that he is held by them in the same low esteem they reserve for the entire Romantic tradition of inwardness of which they regard National Socialism as an ultimate version or perversion. This contradiction of values held by sociologically and ideologically comparable groups puts the lack of a viable theory of literary evaluation into sharp focus. While traditional literary scholarship is reticent on the subject, its acts of criticism and historiography are replete with unreflected value judgments. A theory of evaluation based on the careful analysis of an author's reception, such as of Hesse's posthumous fortunes, could combat prejudice in scholarship and further the understanding of the historical dimension in the literary work.

“The American Scholar” (1837) grew organically out of Emerson's thinking about his own vocation after he left the pulpit and began secular lecturing in 1833. The scholar described first in his journal is like Emerson himself at the time, an inactive observer or “Watcher” preparing himself for some still-undefined public service. Later, Emerson developed his ideal figure of “the true scholar” as a writer and teacher who actively guides and inspires mankind, just as he hoped to do when composing his first book, Nature, in 1836. The scholar as Emerson draws him is successively the “intellectual” or “spiritual” man, “the great Thinker” who “thinks for all,” and finally the type of Emerson's Universal Man. As “Man Thinking” the scholar is neither a narrow specialist nor the parrot of other men's thoughts; he exemplifies “the active soul” by creatively transforming temporal events into timeless truth. It is self-reliant originality and creativity, the objects of Emerson's own dedication, that became the central themes of the oration as he shaped it during July and August of 1837.

Stirrings of protest within the MLA during the past year challenge many received ideas about the structure and functioning of the Association. For example, we need to consider constitutional revisions transferring power from the Executive Council to a more representative legislative body. There is a basic disagreement within the MLA between conservatives who believe that the study and teaching of literature should be and can be “objective,” and radicals who maintain that such a claim is fraudulent because if the scholar fails to denounce the existing social and economic order, he is in effect an apologist for it. Although the Foreign Language Program has been characterized as merely an adjunct to American imperialism, it has operated primarily to increase study of major European languages long a part of the liberal arts curriculum. The Faculty Exchange, which has been vigorously criticized, is highly useful to small departments; the question of its abolition requires careful study. These various controversies are generated by conflicting notions of how the MLA should serve society. We must resolve the basic issue if we are to maintain the integrity and effectiveness of the intellectual enterprise to which our profession commits us.

Unlike their counterparts in socialist countries, American literary scholars and critics are generally unaware of an ideological dimension to their work. This very unawareness, however, is suited to the requirements of advanced capitalism. While our literary studies rarely exhibit the patent ideological bias to be found in the social sciences, they are dominated by ideologically congenial habits of mind. The scholarly ideal of shedding prejudice would seem to be well served by a critique of those habits, which often yield implausible or trifling conclusions.

From the cognitive statement that it was raining, we infer that the street got wet. In fiction, we cannot infer that the street got wet (nor that it did not): we cannot make the implicit explicit by applying causal laws. Historical events are implicitly posited in relation to the here and now. Fictional events are not. Thus, the implicit meaning of tenses changes when we turn from history to fiction. In both cases (causality and temporality), a gain in esthetic resonance can correspond to a loss in cognitive reference.

In Walden and his other mature writings Thoreau often approaches the social problem of poverty not through the directly assertive rhetoric of the Transcendentalist reformers, but by associating certain poor men with the Aristotelian quality of “greatness of soul”. This American, democratic, magnanimous hero lives quietly close to nature, but he is “a prince in disguise”, reincarnating “the worthies of antiquity”, the gods and heroes of classical mythology and history. Walden contains both a sharp awareness of how the Protestant ethic leads to economic hypocrisy in the New Englander's attitude toward the poor and a highly imaginative art of characterization, through which Thoreau transforms the innocent poor into heroes like those of contemporary American romances. But his political essays of the 1850's, particularly those on slavery and the heroic revolutionary activities of John Brown, reveal the limitations of Thoreau's art. His mythopoeic characterization of Brown comes too easily, emerging from a simplistic, abstract, merely polemical response to evil. “Magnanimity” becomes sheer brute force. Thoreau's characters thus lack the dimension of tragic magnanimity; his account of Brown has none of the mysterious innocence of Melville's Billy Budd, whose life and death present striking parallels to Brown's.

Earlier writers have erroneously assumed that Symbolism exercised a significant influence on the Imagist aesthetic. Hulme and Pound derived their conceptions of the image from the writings of French psychologists and philosophers. In the empiricist-associationist psychological tradition (represented in the writings of Taine and Théodule Ribot), I'image corresponds to David Hume's “impression”: it is the mental representation of sensory experience, the virtues of which are clarity, precision, and complexity (as opposed to the vagueness and simplicity of ideas). Hulme read works by Taine and Ribot, and his “Notes on Language and Style” embodies their theory of the image. Pound's conception of the image is similar to that contained in Ribot's Essai sur I'imagination créatrice. After 1908, Hulme adopted Bergson's organicist theory of the image; for Bergson, l'image was the linguistic embodiment of intuition. Imagism was not the culmination of the Romanticist aesthetic, as some critics have argued; it was the first attempt to transcend the subject-object dichotomy of nineteenth-century poetic theory.

The recurrent euphoria of the lyric speaker who addresses the mysterious beloved in La voz a ti debida establishes love as the keynote of the work. The poet strives for and falls in love with love itself. Reacting against a tangible world which has no meaning for him, he seeks instead the mysterious and the ineffable, musing on his beloved's reality, searching for that reality, and struggling against a void. This conception of love is manifest in the theme, structure, and images of each poem. In the first verse, “Cuando tu me eligiste” the three moments–before (chaos and confusion), now (vital plenitude and enthusiasm) and after (deception and return to gray uniformity) –are distinguished by varying images and poetic tones. Joy is dominant in the second offering, “Qué alegría vivir / sintiendose vivido!” and is thematically justified because the lyricist's amorous fulfillment prevents the anguish of nothingness and the threat of death, and affirms love's power. The poem's structure is parallelistic, based on the two types of existence. His is unreal and banal; hers is real and meaningful. The movement of the poem leads to the joining together of the lover and the beloved and culminates in their mystic union at the poem's center. The images are ethereal and provide an example of a “poetics of verticality.” (In Spanish)

Gottfried von Strassburg, in his Tristan, substitutes for a description of the knighting of his hero a digression on certain contemporary authors, both of romances and lyrics. This digression has often been called “Gottfried's literary criticism,” but in fact it is a discussion of the various means of literary expression which were available to him for telling the story of a hero whom he believed to be unique and hence set apart from the knights of courtly romance. Gottfried examines both the visual (romance) and aural (lyric) types in a very specific order and finds both wanting, although he sees more potential in musical than in purely verbal forms of poetry. He decide? that the romance, in spite of its deficiencies, is the best available type but only with the proviso that the reader look beneath the surface and not be deceived by the form into thinking that Tristan was a “normal” courtly hero. The literary digression thus proves to be no digression but an integral part of the work, since Gottfried regards it as impossible to think of any story without considering the means by which it is told.

As teachers of literature we find ourselves involved with and compromised by the contemporary world. The events of the December 1968 Modern Language Association meeting made our dilemma painfully clear. The dissidents of the MLA have shaken the organization out of its lethargy. We must assess the extent of our responsibility and the nature of our commitments on two levels, the personal and the professional. To teach literature effectively and communicate with students themselves intensely aware of contemporary realities we must ourselves be responsible and conscious. The present disagreement within the MLA concerns the mode of our responsibility: shall we act as private individuals on social and political questions or shall we assume that precise and uniform political involvement is our best course? The course proposed to us by the dissidents of the MLA would endanger our position as critical intellectuals free to determine our own responsibility and to assume it. To politicize the MLA would be to institutionalize bad faith precisely at the moment when we realize most acutely the necessity of good faith and ruthless honesty with ourselves if we are to survive as a meaningful organization.

In Absalom, Absalom!, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's concern is with the individual's subjective apprehension of the palpable world of experience. In the latter novels he distinguishes one character's point of view from another's by means of significant variations in language and style in those sections which present a different individual consciousness. The distinction among the four narrative perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!, however, is not stylistic, but formal. Faulkner differentiates the viewpoints in the novel by shaping each perspective after a different literary genre. It is a skillful adaptation of form to meaning, for the selection of these particular genres expresses, structurally, the imagination's subjective act of re-creating history, engaged in by four narrators emotionally involved in either Thomas Sutpen or the Southern myth: Rosa Coldfield, haunted by the moral “outrage” inflicted by the “demonic” Sutpen, shapes her narrative to the Gothic mystery; Mr. Compson, convinced of the epical proportions of the South, relates his narrative as a Greek tragedy; Quentin, obsessed by Henry's relationship with Judith because of his own involvement with Caddy, presented in The Sound and the Fury, expresses his narrative in the framework of the chivalric romance; and Shreve, the detached, intellectual Northerner, relieves the intensity of the preceding viewpoints by means of the ludicrous humor of the tall tale.

In the Perlesvaus the conquest of the Grail Castle and in the Prose Lancelot the conquest of the Castle of Dolorous Guard both serve to establish the supremacy of the hero. The succession of events in the two recitals contains many parallels proving that they are closely related. The details of the Prose Lancelot are such as to show a probability that it used the Perlesvaus as a source. For instance, the despair of the besieged, but noncombatant, lords, demonstrated on the walls of their castles, is carried swiftly to suicide in the Perlesvaus, reduced to flight and suicidal behavior in the Prose Lancelot. Again, the three shields that give Lancelot marvelous strength and that differ in appearance only through the number of bands that decorate them celebrate nothing, though the whole episode stands as the crowning step in the process by which the Lady of the Lake brought the child whom she educated to acceptance as the best knight in the world. In the Perlesvaus the various supernatural aids all manifest la vertu de Deu in harmony with the sole purpose of that romance, the exaltation of Christianity.

In Michael Kohlhaas, Kleist brings two kinds of law, human and extra-human, into conflict with each other. Kohlhaas, denied the protection of the written law, is driven to rebellion. Simultaneously, he gains the aid of the laws of fate through the gypsy soothsayer, who is an agent of Nemesis, goddess of justice. Kohlhaas is associated with the animal figures in the work, the horses and the stag, in his virtual death at the hands of men and his return from the dead with the aid of supernatural law to wreak his inhuman vengeance on the Elector of Saxony. The latter is depicted as a pragmatist whose attempts to deal with Kohlhaas within the rational written law are doomed from the start. It is the basic tragedy of the work that the rational ruler and his passionate subject are drawn into mortal conflict with each other because each operates according to a different kind of law. This underlying conflict between human and extra-human justice accounts for the paradox and irony, as well as for the complex plotting, of the work. Kleist creates an ambiguous world in which all the figures, including the judges and the judged, are at once innocent and guilty.