The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 was one of the first wars in history to be filmed. Yet despite its participation in the birth of American cinema, the war disappeared as a subject from the later archives of filmmaking. No major films chronicle the three-month war in Cuba or the subsequent three-year war in the Philippines, although films have been made about virtually every other war in American history. My paper is about that duality, about the formative presence and telling absence of this pivotal war in the history of American film.

Readers of Dubliners are usually well prepared for a leap out of the suffocating world Joyce displays there, for a promise, however ambiguous or mundane, of escape. But in a story like “The Dead” the production of a desire for escape at all costs may be the crucial interpretive problem, for it inevitably stimulates our mystified identification at the end with a character whose apparent awakening is itself socially conditioned. Unless interpretation radically reevaluates the cultural codification of reflective consciousness, we remain locked within a Christian paradigm of self-knowledge as truth that transcends material oppositions through selflessness—through the insistent generosity that punctuates this story. Gabriel's concluding “insight” and humility may then only reproduce an ideology that Joyce cruelly traces throughout bourgeois Dublin life: to escape his constant humiliation by others, Gabriel must finally humiliate himself.

Tennyson's In Memoriam suggests that poetic knowledge may precede and shape scientific knowledge. Struggling with the implications and possibilities of Victorian energy physics even as that science came into being, Tennyson anticipates not only the laws of thermodynamics but also many of the ways these ideas suffuse Victorian thought, from widespread anxieties regarding the death of the sun through religious invocations of the conservation of energy. In Memoriam at once evokes the roots of physical theory in Romantic elegy and suggests the elegiac structure and function of Victorian physical discourse; like In Memoriam, the laws of thermodynamics effect a reconciliation between the dissipation we observe and the conservation we crave. Moreover, as Tennyson reconceives waste as transformation in the natural world, In Memoriam also reveals a surprising relation between energy physics and another emergent science, evolutionary biology.

Familiar Landscapes are Today Challenged by Illicit Sea Journeys. The Southern Shores of Occidental Modernity are beached by the uninvited guest, by the arrival of histories and cultures that exceed its desires and augment its fears. Like a nemesis from the sea, the interrogative presence of the migrant, who announces planetary processes that are not ours to manage and define, draws Europe and the rest of the West to the threshold of a modernity that exceeds itself. In Isaac Julien's video installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007), the cruel passage of northward migration—across the inhospitable desert and perilous sea—proposes a dramatic poetics that seeks to force apart the conclusive framings of existing political, cultural, and historical narratives. Contorted black bodies gasping in the foam, abandoned on the beach in silver body bags among the sunbathers or writhing on the palace floors of European hierarchies replay the black Atlantic, memories of slavery, and racial oppression in the modern-day Mediterranean.

The nature and degree of George Eliot's commitment to a deterministic world view have been the source of considerable difficulty in the criticism of her work. Critics who concern themselves with the subject take, for the most part, the view either that her belief in determinism seriously marred her art or, on the other hand, that despite appearances she was not a consistent determinist. In both cases, however, determinism evokes extraordinary intensity of feeling, almost everyone agreeing that a commitment to it tends to be detrimental to the artist because it forces a distortion of the facts of existence (or at least a depressing interpretation of them) and leads to an underestimation of man's capacity for action and of his potential dignity.

With little Ottoman and less French, the tragicomic hero of an early Turkish novel, Araba Sevdasι (1896; “The Carriage Affair”), finds himself at a semantic impasse before a line in a French poem that reads, “[K]elime şeyi resmetmeye borçlu ise” (“[I]f the word could represent the thing”). Frustrated, he throws the poem away, grumbling, “[T]ous les poètes sont fous” (“[A]ll poets are fools”). This defiant gesture marks the beginning of the linguistic issue the Turkish novelists confronted during the first century of the Turkish novel (1870–1970). The reformist objective of these novelists was the employment of a vernacular style to appeal to the readership of an emerging print culture. The subsequent nationalist attempts to simplify the Turkish language led, in Geoffrey Lewis's words, to the “catastrophic success” of the “language revolution” of the republican era and had dire consequences for the development of the novel in Turkey.

Samuel Beckett, early in his career and on James Joyce’s advice, read Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache ‘Contributions toward a Critique of Language,’ the three-volume, 2,200-page work written between 1903 and 1923 by the Austrian philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner. Significantly influenced by the work, Beckett gave literary shape to several of Mauthner’s ideas: the correlation between thinking and speaking; the denial of any certainties outside language, even certainty about the existence of self; and the impossibility of overcoming the limits of language. Both authors place language at the center of their works, subsume all knowledge under it, and then systematically deny its basic efficacy, thus using language to indict itself.

This essay takes Habermas's early work as a point of departure for considering the place of humanism in contemporary debates about ideology and interested critical judgment. I argue that from the Renaissance to the present the humanist tradition demonstrates a continuity of reflection on the relation between knowledge and human interests. Habermas can be seen as the inheritor of those Renaissance humanists who argue for the possibility of political consensus based on a shared faculty of critical judgment. Machiavelli's critique of this consensual strain of humanism can offer contemporary critics another model of judgment, in which conflict and dissent are of paramount importance.

The House of the Seven Gables contains a contradiction that seems inherent in the form of the romance as Hawthorne defined it. While Hawthorne uses the form to shape a vision of the future by treating the possible, not the probable, he acknowledges that vision as a product of his imagination and thus undercuts its authority to represent an actual world. The romance we call America seems to contain a similar contradiction. The American dream, to shape an alternative society based on the vision of a possible world, rests on documents that declare self-evident truths and claim the authority of natural law. But Hawthorne's romance suggests that the foundation of authority for both his romance and his country is not natural but rhetorical. To explore this contradiction and the possibility of transcending it, I propose a social reading of Hawthorne's romance and a rhetorical reading of the American social system.

A critical rereading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature, suggests a need to invoke modernism as a historicizing concept and to rethink modern Chinese literary historiography. Contrary to the conventional view of Lu Xun's story as no more than a realist fiction, the new interpretation shows how the work persistently and ingeniously articulates a modernist sensibility of time as well as a modernist politics of language. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with a traditional gemeinschaft but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. At the forefront of the historical New Culture movement, this archetypal text of deconstructive reading simultaneously promises a critical and a productive discursive strategy. The work's modernism, finally, requires modernity to be understood as both a concrete historical experience and a global situation.

The space of women's writing is too often described in negative terms. In Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, as well as in other works by seventeenth-century French women novelists, what have been read as signs of effacement can be viewed as attempts to assume control of the fiction-making process. Thus Lafayette devised a dual authorial signature for her masterpiece; an external signature-the anonymity she used to protect her person and increase her authority-and an internal signature-her heroine's gradual determination to supervise the plot of her life and the publication of her story. Both Lafayette's choice of anonymity and the princess' renunciation of marriage and life in the world can be seen not as acts of avoidance but as affirmations of the woman writer's authority.

Dorothy Whitelock describes family and national feuds in Beowulf as “sub-plots” to the monster fights. But the theme of feud history is more complex than that. There are the Scandinavian fights, some of them perceived and all relevant within the heroic world of the story, and the Great Feud of sacred history, associated in its beginnings with the monster fights in Denmark and in its end with the dragon fight in Geatland. This cosmic feud, introduced in the “scripturizing” passages of the poem, is not perceived within the world of the story. By distinguishing between the kind of knowledge available in that world and the kind available to his audience, the poet foregrounds the theme of the Great Feud and aligns the noble pagans of the poem with God, thereby “redeeming” the cultural identity of an audience for whom the Scandinavian matter of Beowulf is ancestral lore.

W. H. Auden's transmutation of homosexual-colonial paradox into discrepant rhetorics of travel is hardly new. Yet the career mobility Auden initiated after his trip to China, culminating in his embrace of an ascetic Christianity after 1943, signals his principled adherence to a negative poetics of transitivity–by which I mean Auden's increasing commitment to writing experience beyond its material context, as well as to the motility of signs unmoored to national-symbolic traditions. This development appears initially in the poet's “Sonnets from China” (1938) as a rejection of colonialism in favor of English literary humanism (inspired by E. M. Forster), subsequently as the rejection of humanism itself in the face of an inscrutable Chinese other unresponsive to English cultural soundings, and finally (after Auden's decision to depart for the United States in 1939) as the transcendence of context altogether.

La vida de Lazarillo de Tonnes is a coherent and fully realized fiction. Its eccentric shape is craftily designed by its autobiographical narrator to serve his current needs by swelling the narration of his early years while masking the recent “Toledo Years” with wit, expedient renaming, and ellipses. By this apparently generous and certainly amusing “recontextualization” of his current involvement in a scandalous ménage-à-trois the narrator seeks to attenuate his culpability: his corruption merely represents Toledo's and his society's generally. The puzzling short chapters (iv-vii) are coded allusively to deceive innocent readers and amuse malicious readers in Lázaro's Toledo; these chapters are as detailed as they can and need be. The narrator exercises a freer hand in setting down his version of long-ago and far-away Salamanca; Lázaro exploits this advantage in the four fifths of the narrative that comprises Chapters i-iii.

When Jack London's human characters interact with dogs and wolves in texts such as the call of the wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), erotic fireworks often light up the wild. The love between the dog Buck and his human partner, John Thornton, in The Call of the Wild is characterized as “[l]ove, genuine passionate love. … love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (59–60). In White Fang, the half wolf of the title experiences a love for Weedon Scott that “manifested itself to [White Fang] as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamored to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god's presence” (244). Instead of reading these passionate nonhuman characters as “real” animals, literary and cultural critics often read them as “men in furs,” in Mark Seltzer's memorable phrase, leading to interesting and important discussions of, for example, homoerotic interactions between men.

Why should we care about genre?

Following a hint from Wai Chee Dimock, let us perform a conceptual experiment. Imagine that literature departments were to begin hiring faculty members primarily by their expertise in particular genres instead of (as is usually the case in the larger departments) primarily by their expertise in particular historical periods. Literary study, I hope you will agree, would very soon cease to exist in its present form. This prospect exposes something about literary study in its present form that might after all prove unworthy of being mourned, which is to say of being preserved.

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

The rise of the religious right in societies around the world has brought back the contentious issue of religion's place in modern life. The secularization thesis is constantly invoked to explain the historical devaluation of religion's function in society (at least in the Protestant world) from normative to nominal as religion is relegated to the private space of individual belief. While the subject has engaged historians, sociologists, and religious scholars for a long time, yielding a vast and proliferating body of work (Asad; Berger; Casanova; Connolly; Taylor, Secular Age; Wilson), the field of literary studies has not witnessed a corresponding breadth of scholarship. This may be partly due to literature's self-definition as a secular vehicle for ideas whose possible religious origins were subsequently effaced as religious sensibility became absorbed into aesthetic form and imagery, especially in modernist writing. Contributing in no small measure to the perception that literature represents an outgrowth of secularism is Matthew Arnold's influential claim that literature succeeds a depleted Christianity and contains the moral values and direction once supplied by a religious ethos.

Thomas Thorpe's brief greeting to “Mr. W. H.” in the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeares Sonnets has been one of the great conundrums of modern literary studies. But it is not Thorpe's only such greeting to survive. His remaining epistles, taken together with the dedications in many other English books of the period, suggest that, unless Thorpe was here forsaking the conventions that elsewhere governed his and his contemporaries' practice, scholars have been wrong about “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,” wrong about “Mr. W. H.,” and wrong about “our ever-living poet” and the “eternity” he “promised.” But in this they are not alone. The original compositor also got something wrong. If the evidence of other Renaissance epistles is to be trusted, the mysterious and celebrated “Mr. W. H.” is a misprint.