A recent wave of commentary on Sophocles's Antigone by critics from Judith Butler to Bracha Ettinger to Simon Goldhill has begun to emerge from the shadow of two paradigmatic interpretations: Lacan's reading of the title character in splendid structural isolation and Hegel's dialectical opposition of familial and political spheres. Even the newer criticism, however, continues the critical elision of Antigone's siblings (particularly her sister, Ismene) and of her relationship to them. This oversight is emblematic of the problematic omission of the sibling from theoretical discourses in general. The neglected sibling is a model that allows us to move beyond both self-other dualisms and the mother-child dyad, which form the only grounds for intersubjectivity in contemporary debates. Sibling logic recognizes the subject as embedded in a transsubjective network of partial others, whose subjectivities are nonetheless partially, though differentially, shared. This article thereby provides a new approach to poststructuralist debates on subjectivity and the political.

A friend, long deceased, once told me how he had decided to specialize in Japanese literature. In the early 1970s, he heard a talk by a well-known Japanologist, who contrasted China study and Japan study by citing the opening lines of two primers for foreign students. The Chinese primer began with the line “I am hungry”; the Japanese one began with the line “The cherry blossoms are falling from the sky.” My friend chose to go the way of the cherry blossoms.

Made of recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, and felled trees, Bibles in Renaissance England were filled with visible traces of ecological matter, remainders that remind one that words on a page are thought fused with—and inflected by—matter. This essay places Henry Vaughan's poem “The Book” in a broader conversation about the poetics of paper: the rhetorical effects of the varied colors and qualities of paper used in the production of the vernacular Bibles that transformed reading practices in Renaissance England. Historical writers and readers, who were directly involved in a flax-to-rags-to-paper economy, recognized and commented on the natural resources from which cheap, widely distributed Bibles and other texts were made. Further, this essay models a reading strategy that attends to the natural history of books, to both the function and the form of the organic matter used to mediate human ideas.

Good evening, colleagues and friends. Tonight I have the honor of talking with you about my decided passion, narrating lives.

Emerging from dispersed global locations, circulated for difering purposes, life narration moves along predictable and unpredictable routes to publics and to archives near and far. High forms and low forms. Long forms and short forms. Lyric forms and documentary forms. Narrated lives in the irst, second, third, and plural persons. Life stories in print, comics, photography, ilm, and Second Life.

From the first publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829 through its incorporation into the contemporary literary canon, readers have recognized it as a fiery indictment of slavery and of the contradictions in Christianity and in the United States' founding. Yet the striking typography of Walker's Appeal has become invisible in our critical focus on the text's relation to African American oratory and even in considerations of the pamphlet's significance in early black print culture. An analysis of this graphic text reveals how it materially registers Walker's impassioned voice and argument and how it visually directs readers to voice his call to the illiterate. Walker attempts to resolve the opposition of the spoken and the printed word by exploiting his text's typography.

In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

Introduced at the start of The Prioress's Tale but then dropped as an overt topic, usury nevertheless informs that anti-Semitic text. This essay situates Chaucer's narrative in the complex and contradictory history of medieval lending as a theory and a practice. I stress the architectural ironies of usury in the tale and in medieval English history. The tale demonizes Jewish usurers by associating them with the most abject of built environments, the latrine, and celebrates Christians through their links to the exalted space of the church. But, in a move that reflects the flow of capital throughout Christian society, the tale ultimately undermines the opposition of church and pit. Analyzed not as fixed entities but as contingent, fluid spaces joined through the usurious infrastructure of the tale, the minster and the privy suggest a materialist critique of efforts to conceive of a purely religious space.

The early-twentieth-century Russian debate on the place of tragedy in Dostoevsky's novels included interventions by the leading figure of the symbolist movement in Russia, Vyacheslav Ivanov; by the philosophically minded literary historian Lev Pumpyansky; and by the author of the most formidable analysis of Dostoevsky's poetics to date, Mikhail Bakhtin. From the perspective of a certain widespread vision of modernity, the project of thinking the modern novel and tragedy together is paradoxical. It is thus noteworthy that such a project seemed urgent to major Russian intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s and that it frequently relied on the articulation of an implicitly exceptionalist narrative about Russian modernity and its proper forms. Additionally, staging the three-way debate among Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin allows us to see that Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky as a modern novelist par excellence is conceptually tied to the largely occluded theory of the tragic.

The seventeenth-century royalist book Eikon Basiliké (1649), probably the most successful political tract of the English revolution, was unlike any other royalist work published in the period. Its unique qualities suggest that it did something genuinely new. Those qualities may be best appreciated from the perspective of celebrity. While celebrity is ordinarily considered a modern phenomenon, the reception of Eikon Basiliké shows that the idea of celebrity arises in the early modern period, when a new relation between text and audience presented a commodified image of a famous person, an image that was consumed by its audience in a democratized marketplace. Ironically, Eikon Basiliké achieved commodification by relying on the traditional techniques of the art of memory—the fourth part of rhetoric—to create the illusion of closeness between king and subject that converted the king into a celebrity.

This essay considers questions of Dalit historicity in terms of narrative time. Largely a product of the last two decades, Dalit (“untouchable-caste”) literature in Hindi is often read as an uncomplicated expression of Dalit consciousness, an ethnographically revelatory body of writing. I suggest that Dalit literature might be read differently, as coding a distinct meaning of the historical. he model of narrative time configured in Dalit writing poses a problem for critics of postcolonial and subaltern studies because it challenges underlying assumptions regarding the “historical”—assumptions largely inherited from studies of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, in which subjects are defined by their place in history. Unlike the bildungsroman, Dalit texts posit a model for the narrative construction of the subject that does not rely on the category of historical knowledge and the historical event. By introducing the terms event-fulness and unreading, I argue that the Dalit text challenges the putative relation between history and the narrative recovery of self. Dalit writing therefore creates a realism whose origins lie not in the bourgeois historicism of the European novel but in the humanism of a protest literature.

This essay proposes the celebrity of fictive bodies and seeks to understand how, and how far, certain fictional characters can stimulate an audience response analogous to that elicited by the flesh and blood. One of many “celebrity characters,” Shylock is useful to this discussion in regard to the historical development of his fame: Shylock on the eighteenth-century stage begins a new kind of fascination with this character. Seeking to explain that fact, the essay outlines aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical practice that enabled audiences to consider character apart from actor and then, to showcase this shift, develops two valences of the eighteenth-century response to Shylock—the tendencies toward judgment and conversion. Both responses demonstrate how a dramatic character invokes (and complicates) the tensions between public and private life that theorists have used to define celebrity appeal.

Recent psychoanalytic theories have the historicizing potential to rearticulate discourses relegated to the shadows of institutional and popular psychosocial knowledge. In particular, they can illuminate a shadow discourse secreted in the history of gender politics: a form of masochism that produces political solidarity by mobilizing narcissistic gratifications. Such solidarity derives from masochism's ability to idealize perceptions about collective power—a process legible in first-wave feminism and in the jingoistic imperialist ideals of masculinity that opposed it. This essay argues that feminism has lost sight of a nonsexual form of masochism vital to its own history that could energize its ongoing political projects. Recent relational psychoanalysis emerges as a fertile source for techniques of reading that produce revisionary historicist interpretation. Moreover, reactivating psychosocial dynamics obscured by the historical conflation of masochism with sexuality can reconnect feminism and other political movements with important strategies they may have prematurely disavowed.

Lyric poetry's investment in structural delimitation has been read as a commitment to the exclusion of otherness and more specifically of other people. But delimitation need not be synonymous with exclusivity. Giorgio Agamben suggests that lyric closure and the satisfaction it affords may be a model for achieving peace with the other—a model of how we might find, in or with another, not merely alterity but contentment. Wallace Stevens offers examples of how such contentment might be realized between text and reader, as an effect of the bounded aural intensity of lyric language. Agamben's poetics and Stevens's poems complicate our assumptions about the sociality of lyric structure. In addition, they offer a provocative alternative to the Levinasian models that influence much of our current thinking about ethics.

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).