WHEN members of an institution debate, it may seem that they are arguing about fundamental principles, but it is more often the case that the truly fundamental principle is the one that makes possible the terms of the disagreement and is therefore not in dispute at all. I am thinking in particular of the arguments recently marshaled for and against blind submission to the journal of the Modern Language Association. Blind submission is the practice whereby an author's name is not revealed to the reviewer who evaluates his or her work. It is an attempt, as William Schaefer explained in the MLA Newsletter, “to ensure that in making their evaluations readers are not influenced by factors other than the intrinsic merits of the article” (4). In his report to the members, Schaefer, then executive director of the association, declared that he himself was opposed to blind submission because the impersonality of the practice would erode the humanistic values that are supposedly at the heart of our enterprise. Predictably, Schaefer's statement provoked a lively exchange in which the lines of battle were firmly, and, as I will argue, narrowly, drawn. On the one hand those who agreed with Schaefer feared that a policy of anonymous review would involve a surrender “to the spurious notions about objectivity and absolute value that … scientists and social scientists banter about”; on the other hand those whose primary concern was with the fairness of the procedure believed that “[j]ustice should be blind” (“Correspondence” 4). Each side concedes the force of the opposing argument—the proponents of anonymous review admit that impersonality brings its dangers, and the defenders of the status quo acknowledge that it is important to prevent “extraneous considerations” from interfering with the identification of true merit (5).

All discourse evolves in all three dimensions of verbal practice: doing, making, and meaning. While there are special links between speaking and action, between writing and creation or production, and between quasi-verbal thinking and signification, we should avoid reducing any instance or type of discourse to nothing but action, creation, or signification. The analogous triad of intersubjective culture, objective nature, and subjective identity likewise points to three complementary modes of existence: the social, the physicobiological, and the personal. At any given time, we tend to experience human beings, including ourselves, in just one mode: as players of socially assigned roles, as physically situated and genetically determined organisms, or as free and responsible selves. Yet we should not turn any of these ways of experiencing into a master doctrine designed to debunk the other two as mere delusions.

Mateo Alemán's Ortografía castellana ‘Castilian Orthography’ (Mexico City, 1609) is one of many little-studied Renaissance treatises on correct spelling. It offers a modest scheme for reforming the representation of spoken Spanish sounds in writing, argued with elaborate artifice and based especially on the claim that written letters communicate thanks to inherent Pythagorean harmonies. The treatise includes a full illustration of these reforms in an appendix called the “Problem,” which tells how two courtiers inconclusively debate whether speech or writing possesses “greater excellence.” By offering arguments composed entirely of topoi, establishing a rhetorical paradox, and employing devices of admiratio, the “Problem” achieves a fusion of “intersubjectivity” and “intertextuality” that identifies as a single reading experience the wonder of the paradox posed with the success of the improved spelling.

Rereading the canon in the light of recent theory and criticism can turn into a subversive project when one finds that a novel long considered easily accessible and safely categorized may be neither. Such is the outcome of this essay's reading of Theodor Fontane's popular Effi Briest (1894–95). Incomplete stories in the text lead to a reassessment of its ending, of the heroine's position, and of the text's political implications. What emerges is a modern, self-reflexive, incipiently feminist Effi Briest that resists the standard readings and instead moves closer to “shocking” texts of the time (such as Wedekind's first Lulu play and Freud's Studies on Hysteria) than to those texts with which it is traditionally compared.

Mikhail Bakhtin's concern with the dialogic nature of the fictional text and of the self serves as an important precursor to more recent theoretical work on “the problem of the subject.” Bakhtin's dialogism is an especially useful tool with which to approach the familiar problem of point of view in The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” A dialogical reading of this novel reveals a polyphony of ideological voices out of which the “I” narrator, who emerges only on the final pages of the novel, is born. Conrad's novel lays bare this function of ideology, the construction of individual subjects. Recalling Conrad's preface, we might say that this process is what the dialogically attuned reader is made to “see” or “hear.”

The 1828 appointment of Thomas Dale to the Chair of English Language and Literature at London University (England's first) was also the first attempt, inculcated by the powerful Henry Brougham and University Council utilitarian allies, to institutionalize the university study of English literature. The “search committee” deliberations, the record of how Dale taught his courses, and the reasons for his premature resignation should be weighed in discussions of the ideological impact of formative nineteenth-century English literature programs on literary theory, on the socialization of literature, and on the development of the literary canon. The founding impulse behind Dale's appointment was social reform rather than ideological control or the academic investiture of culturally desiderated readers and was primarily the result of Brougham's desire to democratize literature and encourage national literacy by popularizing and legitimizing the “reading habit.”