Although it is known that Heine attended Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelian-inflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heine's early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel's geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel's philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophy's progressive development relies.

Scholars in American studies are generally skeptical of the notion of working within or for the nation-state, for three primary reasons: the alleged eclipse of the nation-state by multinational capitalism, the undesirability of limiting American studies parochially to the study of the United States, and the history of collusion between United States intellectuals and the Central Intelligence Agency during the cold war. This essay argues that although contemporary American studies has done well to reject the American exceptionalism that once defined the field and is rightly averse to engaging in covert international propaganda operations, scholars in American studies need to ask whether the field's rejection of the nation-state might not coincide with rather than resist the movements of global capital and thus to reconsider the importance of the state (in the United States and elsewhere) as a site of intellectual engagement and activism.

It's hard to think of resisting without imagining there is something to resist. That's the tough part, conjuring up the attack, the opposition. The OED lists many depressing meanings for resist and resistance, but they all assume that something we want to keep out is trying to come in. In calico painting, for instance, a resist is a preparation applied to those parts of the fabric you don't want colored. I didn't know that, and I bet you didn't either.

Critics' imagining of Victorian history has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogies. Yet Foucault's famous account of modern discipline is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its “liberal” disdain for state interference. Discipline and Punish offered a mid-1970s response to Marxist dilemmas and to the problems of twentieth-century welfare states. In the early 1980s, Foucault discerned the resurgence of liberal economic ideologies, including neo-Victorian beliefs in free trade, self-help, and laissez-faire. Foucault's later essays on today's neoliberal “governmentality” therefore provide better critical tools for the study of nineteenth-century Britain than does Discipline and Punish. Literature offers a key context for this reimagined history. Works by self-consciously progressive writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill elucidate a distinctive liberal quandary: the quest for a modern governing or “pastoral” agency that would be rational, all-embracing, and effective but also antibureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory.

Everyone knows that the concept of form has outlived its usefulness in discussions of literature, the arts, and media. The word does not appear in the recent handbooks of critical terms in art history and literary studies issued by the University of Chicago Press (Nelson and Shiff; Lentricchia and McLaughlin), and it appears in Raymond Williams's classic glossary, Keywords, only in its derivative (and mainly pejorative) form as an “-ism,” as in the phrase “mere formalism.” Formalists, as we know, are harmless drudges who spend their days counting syllables, measuring line lengths, and weighing emphases (Trotsky), or they are decadent aesthetes who waste their time celebrating beauty and other ineffable, indefinable qualities of works of art. If form has any afterlife in the study of literature, its role has been completely overtaken by the concept of structure, which rightly emphasizes the artificial, constructed character of cultural forms and defuses the idealist and organicist overtones that surround the concept of form.

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.

For years scholars have been required to pay photography and permission fees associated with their monographs and journal articles, although publishers' guidelines state this requirement in different ways. The scholar's responsibility for securing images has been made clear in nonpartisan sources like The Chicago Manual of Style for twenty years: “The author is responsible for any fees charged by grantors of permission to reproduce, unless other arrangements are made, in writing, with the publisher” (13th ed., 4.55; 14th ed., 4.70). Though there are variations and exceptions, by and large publishers have successfully off-loaded this expense.

In recent years, North American literary studies has been marked by a double movement: outward from the Euro-American sphere toward the entire globe and inward within national traditions, in an intensified engagement with local cultures and subcultures. Both directions might seem natural stimuli to comparative study—most obviously in the transnational frame of global studies but also in more local comparisons: a natural way to understand the distinctiveness of a given culture, after all, is to compare it with and contrast it to others. Yet journal articles and job listings alike have not shown any major growth in comparative emphasis in recent years. Is the comparatist doomed to irrelevance, less equipped than the national specialist for local study and yet finding the literary globe expanding farther and farther out of reach, accessible only to a multitude of, again, local specialists?

This article reads the work of F. W. Maitland, a foundational figure in medieval legal scholarship, as an extended meditation on the theory and practice of writing history. Because Maitland's scholarship not only occupies a central place in two disciplines (law and history) but also negotiates the competing demands of an older, narrative form of historiography and the newer, scientific discourses of sociology and anthropology, his writing illustrates the persistence of certain epistemological and methodological questions. In particular, it reveals a deep interest in the modes through which history is figured. Recognizing that history is epistemologically constructed through and by tropes—metaphor, metonymy, analogy—each with its own conceptual and practical logic, Maitland turns to a notion of metaphoric history to productively sustain the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the part, that haunts nineteenth-century history writing.

Let me begin with a confession. I accepted Tilottama Rajan and Linda Woodbridge's invitation to take part in this panel less from an eagerness to talk about history and its imagining, though I will certainly get to them, than from an eagerness to talk about a particular text. That text, as described in its lengthy original title, is “A Discourse Written by One Miles Philips Englishman, One of the Company Put on Shoare Northward of Panuco, in the West Indies by M. John Hawkins 1568. Conteining Many Special Things of That Countrey and of the Spanish Government, but Specially of Their Cruelties Used to Our Englishmen, and amongst the Rest to Him Selfe for the Space of 15. or 16. Yeres Together, until by Good and Happy Meanes He Was Delivered from Their Bloody Hands, and Returned to His Owne Countrey. An. 1582” (Philips 398).