Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.

ONCE, AS A JOKE, some friends and I invented advertisements for university positions in nonexistent disciplines. We divided these disciplines into four departments: adynata, or impossibilia, containing sciences that were historically impossible, such as history of the wheel in the pre-Columbian empires, history of painting on Easter Island, Aztec horse racing; oxymoronica, containing sciences that were self-contradictory and analytically impossible, such as nomadic urban studies, institutions of deviance, binary logic of the included middle; byzantinica, containing sciences of utter uselessness, such as potiosection, or the art of cutting broth; and tetrapiloctomia, or the art of quartering a hair, containing sciences of excessive subtlety, such as microscopy of indiscernibles.

Recipes, whether in cookbooks or in other texts, exemplify embedded and gendered discourse. In the 1951 edition of Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking, Marion Becker's editorial altering of the proportions between “bed”—the narrative that frames the recipes—and recipe erodes the bed and erodes as well the usefulness of the recipes. More cognizant than Becker's text of the importance of this bed, E. F. Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia both embeds the recipe for those masculine—whether male or female—readers unaware of the recipe's social significance and establishes a connection between recipe with-holding and narrative. Nora Ephron's Heartburn uses the recipe and its social meanings to play with notions of reproducibility both literary and culinary and thereby elaborates a connection, implied in the early versions of Joy, between recipe sharing and narrative production and consumption, a connection that “Recipes for Reading” itself attempts to reproduce.

The name Oscar Wilde has become one of the best-known indexes of late nineteenth-century male homoerotic desire. To situate Wilde's emergence as “a homosexual” in late nineteenth-century literary contexts and thereby explore the ways that sex-gender ideologies shape specific literary works, I focus first on Teleny, a novel widely attributed to Wilde and one of the earliest examples of male homoerotic pornography. Then, by analyzing the more celebrated and yet manifestly “straight” text The Picture of Dorian Gray, I illustrate that, even in the absence of explicit homosexual terminology or activity, a text can subvert the normative standards for male same-sex behavior. In considering how these works challenge the hegemonic representations of male homoerotic experience in late Victorian Britain, I suggest that textual depictions of male same-sex experience both reproduce and resist the dominant (hetero)sexual ideologies and practices.

The Essay that Follows was Prompted by a Session at the 2004 MLA Annual Convention, “Ten Years Since Queering The Renaissance,” organized by Madhavi Menon and chaired by Jonathan Goldberg. The other panelists were Jeffrey Masten and Richard Rambuss, two of the contributors to the 1994 volume, and Laurie Shannon. The papers ranged widely from theoretical questions about the activity of queering to the practices of glossing texts, from relations between queering and gendering to the ways in which queering might also throw into question the human-animal divide. The essay below picks up on some of the broadest theoretical questions raised by the panel, emphasizing the need to continue the work begun a decade ago and suggesting some methodological problems and challenges to be faced.

We approach a centenary not, perhaps, wholly undeserving of notice on the part of this learned company. It was apparently in 1824 that those respected citizens of La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre, MM. Dupuis and Cotonet, began an enterprise which was to cause them, as is recorded, “twelve years of suffering,” and to end in disillusionment—the enterprise of discovering what Romanticism is, by collecting definitions and characterizations of it given by eminent authorities. I conjecture, therefore, that one of the purposes of the Committee in inviting me to speak on this subject was perhaps to promote a Dupuis and Cotonet Centennial Exhibition, in which the later varieties of definitions of Romanticism, the fruit of a hundred years' industry on the part of literary critics and professors of modern literature, might be at least in part displayed. Certainly there is no lack of material; the contemporary collector of such articles, while paying tribute to the assiduity and the sufferings of those worthy pioneers of a century ago, will chiefly feel an envious sense of the relative simplicity of their task. He will find, also, that the apparent incongruity of the senses in which the term is employed has fairly kept pace with their increase in number; and that the singular potency which the subject has from the first possessed to excite controversy and breed divisions has in no degree diminished with the lapse of years.

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future

takes shape

too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving

—Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”

Conserving This, Conserving That

Just a few lines from jorie graham's poem “sea change” evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living “sustainable.” Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as “manufacturing plants for wood,” epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader “municipal housekeeping” movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as “turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash.” Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer's wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground 63–70).

In contemporary literary and cultural studies, little attention has been paid to the lower middle class, described by one scholar as “the social class with the lowest reputation in the entire history of class theory.” This article discusses the representation of the lower middle class in literature and scholarly writing. George Orwell's novels of the 1930s and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia offer some illuminating perspectives on the British lower middle class, though Orwell's novels also reveal a conspicuous disdain for their subject. This disdain is echoed in much of the scholarly writing on the lower middle class. Decried for its reactionary attitudes by Marxists, the “petite bourgeoisie” also poses problems for a contemporary cultural politics based on the idealization of transgression and on the romance of marginality. Rather than embody an outmoded or anachronistic class formation, however, the lower middle class may offer an important key to the contemporary meaning of class.

Histories of race and empire have shaped the field imaginary of species studies from its inception. Politically, the field's animal-activist heritage models its critique on movements for racial justice. Historically, this move links to Enlightenment conceptions of animals that relied on the same objectifying methods used to represent slaves and the poor: sentimentality, representations of cruelty, humane manifestos. Epistemologically, the taxonomic tools that name the objects of analysis have been deployed to define non-Europeans as subspecies or independent species. Geographically, the field's intellectual production is centered in the United States, Australia, and Britain, tied to neocolonial institutions of animal advocacy, and slow in recognizing internal critiques of animal and ecological movements by activists of color.

How does language operate as an instrument of warfare? Leaving behind the idea of violence as beyond words, this essay seeks out terms for a reflection on linguistic violence and the weaponization of language in warfare. Using theories of war and examples from current United States engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, the essay examines language as an essential element of violent action and as military weaponry under such rubrics as psychological operations, interrogation, morale building, force multiplication, and cultural awareness. The essay reflects on the semantic work of making warfare and violence meaningful to those who sacrifice for them and on the language predicaments that states of war create and cannot solve.

In the name of “homohistory,” “queer temporality,” and “unhistoricism,” some early modernists have accused queer historicists of promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. These early modernists announce their critique of the “straight temporality” allegedly caused by a framework of teleology as a decisive break from previous methods of queer history. Using the accusation of teleology as an analytic fulcrum, this essay scrutinizes these scholars' assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change. Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept queer, as well as homo and hetero, in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake are not only our emerging understandings of the relations between chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but also some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.

De-oedipalizing the Animal Other

The animal has ceased to be one of the privileged terms that indexes the european subject's relation to otherness. The metaphysics of otherness rested on an assumed political anatomy, implicitly modeled on ideals of whiteness, masculinity, normality, youth, and health. All other modes of embodiment, in the sense of both dialectical otherness (nonwhite, nonmasculine, nonnormal, nonyoung, nonhealthy) and categorical otherness (zoomorphic, disabled, or malformed), were pathologized and cast on the other side of normality—that is, viewed as anomalous, deviant, and monstrous. This morphological normativity was inherently anthropocentric, gendered, and racialized. It confirmed the dominant subject as much in what he included as his core characteristics as in what he excluded as other.

The enormous twenty-seven-nation post-Soviet sphere—including the former Soviet republics and the former “East Bloc” states—is virtually never discussed in the burgeoning discourse of postcolonial studies. Yet Russia and the successor Soviet Union exercised colonial control over the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics, and Central and Eastern Europe for anywhere from fifty to two hundred years. The present essay interrogates the possible postcoloniality of the post-Soviet sphere, including Russia. The investigation is complicated by Russia's seeming Eurasian status and its history of perceived cultural inferiority to the West. A broad range of theoretical, historical, cultural, and geographic positions are examined, and figures such as Curzon, Conrad, Lermontov, and Shohat are addressed. In conclusion the essay argues against the current occidentocentric privileging of Western European colonization as the standard and proposes a fully global postcolonial critique. Overall, it critiques both too narrow post-Soviet studies and too parochial, too Anglo-Franco-focused postcolonial studies.

The phenomenon of “embedded reporting” seemed to emerge with the invasion of iraq in march 2003. it is defined as the situation in which journalists agree to report only from the perspective established by military and governmental authorities. They traveled only on certain trucks, looked only at certain scenes, and relayed home only images and narratives of certain kinds of action. Embedded reporting implies that this mandated perspective would not itself become the topic of reporters who were offered access to the war on the condition that their gaze remained restricted to the established parameters of designated action. I want to suggest that embedded reporting has taken place in less explicit ways as well: one example is the agreement of the media not to show pictures of the war dead, our own or their own, on the grounds that that would be anti-American. Journalists and newspapers were denounced for showing coffins of the American war dead shrouded in flags. Such images should not be seen because they might arouse certain kinds of sentiments; the mandating of what could be seen—a concern with regulating content—was supplemented by control over the perspective from which the action and destruction of war could be seen. Another implicit occurrence of embedded reporting is in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The camera angle, the frame, the posed subjects all suggest that those who took the photographs were actively involved in the perspective of the war, elaborating that perspective and even giving it further validity.

A letter to the hero in Daniel Deronda offers an interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, an account of its rhetorical principles: the Deronda plot discloses not the “effects of causes” but the “present causes of past effects.” This metaleptic plot structure contradicts the linking of origin, cause, and identity affirmed in the story of Deronda’s Jewish birth. The story must shift between constative and performative conceptions of language and must finally invoke the notion of an actual, nonlinguistic fact or act. The relevant referent is Deronda’s circumcision, which the novel must occlude; otherwise the story of discovering identity could not unfold. The scandal of this referent is its status as an exemplary signifier, alluding to the divine pact with Abraham, a story of the institution of signification. Circumcision is an emblem of the novel’s allusive or citational mode: the narrative makes its starting point, not a subject, but a rhetorical operation.

This question of disciplinary meaning—which I ask from the viewpoint of the humanities generally—is larger than the question of disciplinary identity now preoccupying “DH” itself, as insiders call it. Having reached a critical mass of participants, publications, conferences, grant competitions, institutionalization (centers, programs, and advertised jobs), and general visibility, the field is vigorously forming an identity. Recent debates about whether the digital humanities are a “big tent” (Jockers and Worthey), “who's in and who's out?” (Ramsay), whether “you have to know how to code [or be a builder]” (Ramsay, “On Building”), the need for “more hack, less yack” (Cecire, “When Digital Humanities”; Koh), and “who you calling untheoretical?” (Bauer) witness a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion not unlike that of past emergent fields. An ethnographer of the field, indeed, might take a page from Claude Lévi-Strauss and chart the current digital humanities as something like a grid of affiliations and differences between neighboring tribes. Exaggerating the differences somewhat, as when a tribe boasts its uniqueness, we can thus say that the digital humanities—much of which affiliates with older humanities disciplines such as literature, history, classics, and the languages; with the remediation of older media such as books and libraries; and ultimately with the value of the old itself (history, archives, the curatorial mission)—are not the tribe of “new media studies,” under the sway of the design, visual, and media arts; Continental theory; cultural criticism; and the avant-garde new. Similarly, despite significant trends toward networked and multimodal work spanning social, visual, aural, and haptic media, much of the digital humanities focuses on documents and texts in a way that distinguishes the field's work from digital research in media studies, communication studies, information studies, and sociology. And the digital humanities are exploring new repertoires of interpretive or expressive “algorithmic criticism” (the “second wave” of the digital humanities proclaimed in “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” [3]) in a way that makes the field not even its earlier self, “humanities computing,” alleged to have had narrower technical and service-oriented aims. Recently, the digital humanities' limited engagement with identity and social-justice issues has also been seen to be a differentiating trait—for example, by the vibrant #transformDH collective, which worries that the digital humanities (unlike some areas of new media studies) are dominantly not concerned with race, gender, alternative sexualities, or disability.

Black studies is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution and on its edge; Its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth. The cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency in which the poor trouble the proper, is our open secret.