The poetry of passenger flight, especially in the early years of the jet age, is exceptional in illuminating the perceptual, affective, and ethical confusions of the global perspective. Offering readings of James Merrill's “Flying from Byzantium,” Elizabeth Bishop's “Night City,” Amiri Baraka's “The Nation Is like Ourselves,” and Derek Walcott's “The Fortunate Traveller,” this essay integrates theoretical grounding in the phenomenology of flight (speed, distance, time, and perspective), the legacy of Romantic landscape meditation in contemporary poetry and the evolution of the literature of flight, and relevant historical background about the development of commercial air travel. The passenger's view in the period when flight was no longer thrilling and not yet tedious is a peculiarly apt trope for the difficulties of imagining the global and of registering the conundrum of globalization—in its most basic sense, time-space compression—from its repercussions in our private lives to the greatest humanitarian challenges of our time.

Charting the origin of romantic aesthetics in theories of the symbol, Tzvetan Todorov points to an eighteenth-century author who remains little known outside the field of German studies: Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93). Todorov locates the birth of the modern aesthetic of “intransitive signification” (162)—the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy, or the idea that works of art signify nothing outside themselves—in Moritz's essay “An Attempt to Unify All the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of That Which Is Complete in Itself” (1785). Surprisingly, even more than a quarter century after the publication of Todorov's book in the United States, Moritz's seminal treatise is not available in a complete English translation.

Labor was an analytic category in the long english eighteenth century, but was work equally so? Is there any point in discovering a difference between the two? Lawyers and high-court judges, philosophers, physiologists, and prelates worked hard at the business of defining labor, over many years. Their formulations provided the legal and conceptual underpinnings of a new form of society born of the era of revolutions (political, philosophical, industrial; American, Atlantic, French). Here was a template for social knowledge in an emerging class society. Society was divided into propertied and propertyless; the propertyless were compelled by material need to put their labor at the disposal of the propertied. The labor of the poor was a country's natural resource, like its soil and seas and mines; it fell to the propertied to deploy this resource for the national benefit. British philosophers and physicists analyzed labor as a form of energy, often drawing an analogy between it and another great resource of the nation, its horses. Working men and women and horses were bound together in the deep structure of political thinking about labor and the social order. For eighteenth-century theorists, legislators, and farmers, the horse was the immanent measure of labor power and labor time. A horse was a measure of labor itself. There were perhaps a million horses in England and Wales in the late eighteenth century, about half of them workhorses in farming. The contribution of their dung to cereal-crop yield is attested to by economic and agricultural historians (Wrigley, Continuity 35–46; Gerhold; Turner). Horses were one reason the nation was, by and large, able to feed an increased population out of its own natural resources and sources of labor power, unlike other European countries in the period 1660–1820 (Wrigley, Poverty 44–67). The importance of the horse to agricultural productivity seems assured, though some contemporary economists, in the face of harvest failures in the 1790s and ongoing crises of dearth, complained of too many horses and of the vast amount of grain and labor spent in foddering and caring for them (Crafts; Brooke 1–34).

In this essay, I take A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene as case studies that show how critical commonplaces may become so entrenched that they limit the horizons of what we can see in a given text, genre, or period. The essay has two purposes. The first is theoretical. I aim to make explicit the often unspoken (perhaps even unconscious) theoretical subtexts that have shaped readings of female sexuality, and I propose some historical reasons for the dominance of certain strains of feminism—those best known as “subordination feminism” and “cultural feminism”—in criticism of early modern literature. The second purpose is hermeneutic. I explore the alternative readings that become available if we approach Shakespeare's and Spenser's work through the lens of one competing strand of feminist thought, described by its practitioners as “prosex” or “sex-radical” feminism. In this essay, my reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene limits its interpretive frameworks to those offered by sex-radical feminism and the strands of queer theory that emerged from it. Drawing on these often overlooked frameworks, I explore the tensions and hierarchies among women in the play and the poem to challenge the assumption that women's relationships are always egalitarian and nurturing; I propose that homo- and heteroerotic desires are not mutually exclusive but may coexist in these works; and I argue that female masochism is not always a pathology that enables patriarchy but can be a legitimate form of desire that challenges traditional ideas of normal and proper female behavior.

Despite their tendency to metaphorize and disembody blindness, the sighted have used it to represent the body's experience of coming to knowledge in a world of things. The vibrant intensity of the attachment to things in Victorian literature makes this writing a rich site for exploring the way represented blindness comes to figure what a body articulated by materiality knows and does not know of itself and of the world. Reading works by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among others, this essay accounts for an impious strain in representations of blindness and examines how the Victorian literary imagination of blindness evinces a palpable desire for it, grounded in the fantasy that it permits enviable access to a way of knowing and experiencing things from among them rather than from the abstracting distance imposed by sight. Alongside its imagination of the buffeting distress of thingly encounters, blindness envy fantasizes an aesthetics of disorientation and surprise.

Many scholars know lola ridge (1873–1941) as a passionate, irish-born american poet and activist whose poetry was of-ten tied to American subjects, employed various traditional and avant-garde styles, invited a diverse readership, and “expressed a fiery awareness of social injustice” (Kay Boyle [McAlmon 15]). Her time as magazine editor, however, continues to be overlooked. In 1912 Ridge founded the Ferrer Association's journal Modern School and edited its first issue (Avrich 166). The periodical started as a radical, politically based newsletter for parents but soon became less political, publishing artistic and literary work by students of the association's school. Between late 1918 and early 1919, Ridge oversaw, along with several other associate editors, three issues of the avant-garde poetry journal Others. Ridge also organized the Others Lecture Bureau, which toured parts of the Midwest and hosted several literary parties for magazine contributors and supporters (Churchill 58). Ridge's leading editorial role occurred from February 1922 to April 1923, when she served as the American literary editor of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts. Broom was an elaborate magazine praised by many, including William Carlos Williams, who exclaimed, “What a magazine that was! Too expensive for its time but superb to hold in the hand and to read” (187). Although publications that discuss Broom largely marginalize Ridge, the correspondence between her and Broom‘s expatriate editor and publisher, Harold Loeb, in files in Princeton's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections labeled “Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, 1920–1956,” shows that from the New York office Ridge orchestrated the magazine's recovery, making it one of the most widely circulated privately owned literary magazines of its time. She also created the magazine's standout “all-American” issue, which pushed against European influences and presented modernism as an American project in its own right. Ridge's pivotal role at Broom is noteworthy because the disagreements she had with Loeb highlight prescribed roles female editors encountered, polarize the modernist debates on both sides of the Atlantic, show her confronting one of modernism's well-known artists, and demonstrate how the fallout over the American issue irrevocably affected Broom‘s future.

Because hit men in the twenty-first-century Mexican drug war engage in paid labor at the extreme end of dehumanizing economic relations, they expose the shifting notions of work, life, and ethics that support contemporary global capitalism. Hannah Arendt's distinctions between labor, work, and action structure this comparative analysis of two 2010 narratives featuring Mexican hit men: a testimonial text titled El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin and a feature film titled El infierno. These texts explore the subject-producing as well as the destructive effects of murder for hire. Alain Badiou's Ethics illuminates how when professional killing becomes a way of life, it provocatively complicates concepts of the good and the human.

My aim in this short essay is to make it possible to read these two passages together, but not in the way i think we'd typically do so in the literary humanities. The passage by Walter Benjamin is a canonical instance of left-literary writing that means to ground itself in Marx's account of capital by demonstrating that the struggle of oppressed peoples, even before the rise of capital, leaves traces in texts and in reading practices. Because of his use of the figure of “the Messiah,” it is possible to read the passage as evidence of Benjamin's messianism, though that is exactly what I intend to suggest we shouldn't do.

Much recent thought in the humanities has been devoted to understanding the contours and character of the global economic collapse approaching its fifth year (unless it is approaching its fortieth, a matter to which we will return). The interplay of social arrangements and political economy has of late taken on an urgency and inescapability impossible to overstate-not least because within higher education it is humanities programs that are most readily threatened with amputation, if not elimination, and are expected to prostrate themselves before economic rationales in their struggles for survival.

This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor's marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers find alternative means of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the commodities in their environments. At the same time, they ennoble such actions by modeling them on the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Whether in literature or in the broader culture, American rugged consumers thus mediate between the mythic models of self-sufficiency celebrated by the country's older, frontier capitalism and the postindustrial realities of the present. The essay posits four provisional categories of rugged consumerism, ranging from the hypermasculine weaponization of unlikely objects to the (re)creation of environmentally sustainable interior designs.

When i was invited to participate in this special issue, it was suggested that I meditate on a long-term research project I did in collaboration with the public-health scholar María Gudelia Rangel Gómez and the demographer Armando Rosas Solís, on people working in prostitution in Tijuana, a city on the United States–Mexico border. That work began in the 1990s and continued through the middle of the last decade, producing three articles on women and two on transvestite sex workers.1 Looking over the raw survey data and interview transcripts in preparation for this article impressed on me once again how these people are engaged in what Saskia Sassen calls “survival circuits” between the global South and global cities like Los Angeles and Tijuana, some of them located in the North, some not. These sex workers come from all over the Mexican Republic, migrating to Tijuana—a city both Third World and global—for reasons of economic necessity, and often their stories include low-wage labor in the United States as well as participation in the informal economy in the northern border area to supplement (or mask) their primary income. Regardless of other factors, the people we surveyed and interviewed express an understanding that to live means to work and that the work they are doing is precisely work: not organized labor, not a career path. They know that their bodies are made marginal or invisible and their voices go unheard. At the same time, while their lives may seem unimaginably harsh to many of us, in their stories they often present themselves as rational actors, making the best choices they can from among limited options for themselves and their families.

When diane middlebrook began the research for her biography of anne sexton (1928–74), she interviewed maxine kumin twice. Kumin and Sexton had been great friends and collaborators, and Kumin wrote the introduction to Sexton's Complete Poems (1981). The excerpt below is based on Middlebrook's typed transcript of a recording of a conversation that took place in Kumin's home on 9 October 1980. I abridged the transcript and submitted it to Kumin for her approval. The ellipses are part of the transcript, but the bracketed interpolations are mine. The complete interviews Middlebrook conducted for Anne Sexton: A Biography will be deposited in the Feminist Theory Archives of the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

Everyone has an interest in time, but historians are interested in it professionally. they have been remarkably fecund in devising ways to carve up and label the mysterious workings of time. They have named it after rulers or other leaders (what the great French historian of the Annales school Marc Bloch referred to tartly as “stumbling from reign to reign” [177]), so that students encounter periods called the Napoleonic, Jacksonian, Victorian, Meiji, and Wilhelmine, to give just a few examples from the nineteenth century I know best. Then there are the centuries, the building blocks of so many survey courses and textbooks that one can only wonder at the powerful hold of the decimal system on the historical imagination. Not least, of course, we find history divided into conceptual units. These may be variations on ancient and modern; they may be periods defined by a body of ideas and practices (Renaissance, Enlightenment) or by overarching political and social developments (the revolutionary era, the age of empire). Once we enter the terrain of conceptually defined eras, titles given by historians are limited only by the number of abstract nouns that can be employed after the phrase “age of,” starting with “anxiety” and continuing through the alphabet.

John Milton only enters Slavoj Žižek's in defense of lost causes through a passing reference—to Satan—but in the history of unlikely attempts to draw victory from the jaws of defeat Milton's response to the Restoration ranks high by any standard (345). In 1660, when almost everyone else associated with the revolutionary government was trying to look as innocuous as possible, Milton instead wrote The Ready and Easy Way, a defense of republicanism, published it, then republished it, even as Charles II was on his way back to England. Why make such a seemingly futile, potentially life-threatening gesture? The most interesting answer might be that The Ready and Easy Way is the political equivalent of Walter Benjamin's stunning assessment of art in “The Task of the Translator”: “No poem is intended for the reader …” (253). From this point of view, all great human gestures and accomplishments belong to eternity: they are enacted or produced because they intersect with truth. We can participate in their truth, but that is our good fortune, not their purpose.

In the wake of Foucault's influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of censorship theory emerged that was devoted to exposing and unpacking the paradoxically productive effects of censorious practices. This essay traces a particular strand of that paradox, labeled here the logic of scandal: the logic wherein discourse is authorized and amplified by feelings like shock and moral condemnation rather than stymied by them. To explore the ramifications of this logic for and within narrative art, I take as my subjects a novel written during the famously prudish Victorian era and a film produced under the famously stringent Production Code—W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve. In each the “scandalous” discursive acrobatics performed by the text's morally ambiguous heroine reflect the strategies of censorship evasion employed by the morally ambiguous artist who created her.

A close reading of Ulrich Seidl's Import Export (2007), a film on labor migration between eastern and western Europe, provides an international frame for revisiting the second-wave feminist debate on housework. In the last two decades, “women's work” has been outsourced transnationally on a large scale, leading to the emergence of an international private sphere inhabited by a new housewife figure. The feminist housework debate of the 1970s supplies the groundwork for a critique of autonomist neo-Marxism that foregrounds the role of language, translation, and visual gesture in the contemporary import/export of labor.