The sottie is a popular dramatic genre of the late Middle Ages which seems to have developed from the comic debates that players often used to gather an audience. In its developed form it resembles the contemporary Theater of the Absurd. The most meaningful approach to a comparison of the two theaters is by way of the thought embodied in the plays. They are both to a certain extent didactic, though they represent different outlooks and value systems. Both theaters utilize clowns and clowning techniques, and both are closely linked to the dream. The two historical periods concerned are presented in the plays as times when cultural ideals have become illusions out of tune with reality, and the accompanying alienation is expressed in powerful images of waiting. One of the most suggestive areas of resemblance is language, which has been cut from its rational moorings. The language of the sottie still has a creative vigor, while that of the Theater of the Absurd is moribund. Both, however, are languages of protest. Each theater creates a new norm against which to judge its society, thereby exposing those who would mask their venality with pretense.

Although instinctively formalistic, modern criticism has avoided the basic problem of interpretation: not what a universally valid method should be, but why there should have to be any interpretation in the first place. Whence the first principle of metacommentary: each interpretation must account for the necessity of its own existence. Russian Formalism is the model of a criticism which refuses to interpret: it is unable, however, to deal with diachrony, and in particular with the novel as a form. The second principle of metacommentary: the fact that a work needs no interpretation (as in the novel of plot) is itself something to be explained. Thus, the possibility of plot reveals a wholeness in the society that produces it. To the evolution of the plotless novel corresponds the structuralist hermeneutic, with its reading of the work as a single sentence or as a system of binary oppositions. Structuralism can be transcended by the realization that its abstract mental categories are in reality historical moments. The ultimate model of metacommentary is one which, distinguishing the manifest and latent contents of the work, then seeks to account for this distinction (or repression). Since the latent content is an experience, the elaboration of the work corresponds to a question about the possibilities of Experience itself, and the disguises of the content to an attempt to conceal the causes of the limitation of experience in the social situation.

The magic and holy number seven, sum of the noumenal and phenomenal (3 plus 4) is at the very center of Thomas Mann's novelistic work since Der Zauberberg. It determines the structure and offers a clue to the meaning of his “educational novel.” This meaning becomes fully apparent in Mynheer Peeperkorn, synthesis between Christ and Dionysos. This synthesis is by no means weird and even less blasphemous, as has been often contended. Peeperkorn is the embodiment of Incarnation, and as such subject to the Passion, in both the Christian and the pagan sense. Through the life and death of Peeperkorn, Hans Castorp comes face to face with the highest Lebenswert. It is the great experience, anticipated in the chapter “Schnee,” by which the spell of and sympathy with death is broken. In the triangular covenant Peeperkorn-Mme Chauchat-Hans Castorp, caritus and eros, noumenal and phenomenal, are joined, pointing toward the “Third Humanism” of Thomas Mann's biblical novels. The number game, elucidated in numerous instances, is structure and meaning in one.

Our profession is brought to a crisis of self-scrutiny by the current malaise among students and within ourselves. The malaise is real and must be reckoned with however we may account for it: whether as a profound shift of sensibility resembling that which took place at the Reformation or as an equally profound unsettling of our central American myths of concern. How shall we respond? Some urge retreat–into professionalism. Others proclaim defeat–on the ground either that literature is irrelevant to a world trying to educate its minorities and its poor, or that literature is merely supportive of the status quo. None of these arguments will bear inspection. A more practical and wiser response for teachers and scholars in our discipline is a program of outreach: toward (1) the schools, (2) the disadvantaged, (3) the general community of educated men and women, (4) the mass media, (5) more inventive collaborations with each other, (6) new arrangements of literary study; and, above all, (7) the larger tasks to which our calling commits us in purifying the language of the tribe, disseminating the world's great literature, and helping to reconstruct by the power of imagination a fully human world.

Scholars have long noted the influence of Russian writers, particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, on the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós. However, in an interview granted to the Russian journalist la. Pavlovskii in 1884 (only recently published in the West) Galdós acknowledges an indebtedness to an earlier Russian master, Ivan Turgenev, referring to him as “my great teacher.” A close reading of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Galdós' Doña Perfecta suggests that the Russian masterpiece may have inspired the well-known Spanish work. The novels share a common theme (the conflict between generations), and in each the hero is a young man trained in science who makes an extended visit to the provinces. In both works the protagonist dies a tragic, untimely death. There are other important similarities between the two books, but significant differences as well, particularly in the authors' attitudes toward the conflict itself. Galdós believed completely in Pepe Rey's cause, while Turgenev was ambivalent about the forces his hero represented; thus, in tone and structure each novel reflects its author's feelings. There appears to be no doubt that Galdós knew Fathers and Sons and made use of certain of its ideas in creating his own independent and highly personal interpretation of the conflict between generations.

Sexuality is a powerful element in Valéry's poetry, but also a dangerous threat. Valéry resolves the threat in ambiguous imagery and this ambiguity has poetic value. His poetry utilizes nineteenth-century themes, but Valéry transforms them through his physiological awareness. His sexual imagery gains force by exclusive focus on physical passion and all possible aspects of the flesh, and by the use of elaborate developments containing an accumulation of related words. But the interests of “poésie pure” impose limits on his realism. Negative attitudes also influence Valéry's choice of imagery. He minimizes sexual languor and excludes intellectualized eroticism from his poetry while significant words in manuscripts and finished poems reflect his critical attitude. There is no celebration of the woman in Charmes and no union with her. Significantly, Valéry prefers words such as “abandon” and “dons” and the breast image to represent the female body rather than hands, lips, eyes—all of which imply union. Préciosité is also used as a defense against sexuality. In the ending of La Jeune Parque, however, sexuality seems to triumph, but this ending is complex, and is far from being as sexual as it first appears.

Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) has been ignored by criticism largely on the ground that it fails structurally. But the poem has an architectonic pattern that provides insight into Melville's lifelong philosophical problems. The work is developed tropologically, drawing its basic pattern from the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The poem is, however, an anti-gospel in which the questor-hero, Clarel, acts out his own “passion” in and around Jerusalem. Employing the motif of the three Magi with Christological and Zoroastrian star imagery, Melville carries his hero into a search for an existentially authentic faith. But Melville fails to find this faith, discovering instead through Clarel the ontological ground of existence itself. This discovery is brought about by a genuine awareness of the condition of death, a condition which destroys belief in absolutes. Death is the central theme of the poem and shapes the narrative and the characters' actions. The Epilogue presents, therefore, a forced and unconvincing affirmation of immortality, an affirmation belied by the poem s overwhelming thrust of existential despair.

The traditional treatment of the adverb has posed problems of classification in the three languages under consideration. English very has traditionally been classified as an adverb, and the efforts of structural linguists to reclassify it as an intensifier may be extended to French très and Spanish muy as well. However, the three intensifiers do not pattern in the same way, for very patterns with adjectives and adverbs, but not with verbs or nouns; très and muy pattern with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and with the past participle of verbs. The patterning of très and muy with nouns raises the question of the basis for differentiating adjectives from nouns. While the distinction between these two form classes in English is sometimes arbitrary, the line separating them is even less clear-cut in French and Spanish, languages in which nominalization is more widespread than in English. The unsatisfactory treatment of the three intensifiers in bilingual dictionaries of the French- English and Spanish-English type is due to the failure of lexicographers to link illustrative phrases and sentences to relevant structural features of the languages concerned, a practice all too common in dictionaries not compiled in accordance with scientific principles of lexicography.

Joel Thorpe of The Market-Place is Harold Frederic's most complex character. Thorpe is portrayed as the psychological product of two worlds, the type of the financial buccaneer, and a moral double. In a full-length portrait, subjective as well as objective, Frederic renders Thorpe's character in dramatic terms and integrates his behavior in public and private life. Most important, he offers a moral probing of Thorpe's type. Frederic judges him morally both through the remarks of reliable characters and through his own ironic implications. Yet both plots, the terms in which the economic battle is defined, and certain sympathetic aspects of characterization all work against the assumption that Frederic wholly condemns Thorpe. If Thorpe is shown to sin according to traditional moralities by fulfilling his impulses, he is likewise shown to sin according to his own understanding when he ceases to exercise his own peculiar impulse to power. The ambiguity of Thorpe's portrait deepens his characterization but obscures the moral statement of the novel. This ambiguity may be explained in part by autobiographical factors and in part by an ambivalence toward the tycoon that Frederic shared with other nineteenth- century American writers. Specifically, Frederic's preoccupation with the type, his questioning whether self-interest and the public weal may both be served by such a figure, and his failure either to damn Thorpe wholly or to show how coexistence between the buccaneer and society might actually occur may all point to an imaginative source for The Market-Place in Emerson's essay on Napoleon.

Broch's novel trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, has a pattern of apocalyptici magery and symbolism which appears at all important junctures of the work and permeates much of its texture. This pattern merges with a pessimistic theory of history, entitled “Disintegration of Values,” and it converges on a hostile portrayal of the German revolution of 1918. The essential function of the apocalyptic symbols is to frighten the reader into an attitude of acceptance toward the philosophy of the work. This philosophy contains an embryonic “theory of revolution” whose main thrust is counterrevolutionary because revolutions are viewed as manifestations of irrational impulses directed against rational institutions. The Epilogue, the prophetic message of the work, projects a curious double or triple vision: (1) apocalyptic fear of the destruction of values by Communism, (2) chiliastic hope for the rebirth of values with the coming of a Messiah (Führer), and (3) a Nietzschean faith in the eternal recurrence of history. Broch's entire oeuvre is apocalyptic or chiliastic with several modifications. He shares this tendency with many writers in the twentieth century, the new apocalyptic age.

No previous study of John Marston's The Malcontent (1602-03) has focused upon the play's central structural and thematic symbol, the traditional Wheel of Fortune. Structurally, The Malcontent uses a rising and falling pattern that reflects the medieval “formula of four.” Both Pietro and Mendoza seem to be Regno at different points in the action, but fall from Fortune's Wheel and become Regnavi. The deposed Duke Altofronto (alias Malevole) is at first Sum sine Regno, but soon becomes Regnabo, and finally Regno by Act v. The Malcontent concludes with this “happy reversal” because it is a tragicomedy according to the definition in Guarini's II compendio della poesía tragicómica (1601). The play's basic themes and main characters also support a tragicomic vision, as Mendoza and Malevole demonstrate. Mendoza, like his master Machiavelli, believes in the proverb Audaces fortuna juvat. Malevole triumphs because he combats Fortune not with fortitude but with prudent Stoic resignation and Christian spiritual devotion. The inevitability of “heaven's impos'd conditions” leads to the restoration of order and either the spiritual regeneration of the sinners or their rejection from the new society.

Despite a recent tendency to consider the Merchant's Tale outside the dramatic context of its prologue, and to read it primarily as a broadly humorous, if discordant, piece of anti-feminism, the tale is actually unified by a consistent narrative point of view that successfully accommodates the apparently incongruous themes, tones, and styles of the poem. The final effect, moreover, is not comic at all, but rather sardonic, a dark and unsettling view of an aspect of man's experience. The Merchant's Prologue, though probably written after the tale, is carefully adjusted to the climate of the tale, and must be considered in any critical account, especially since it is through the strong, viable presence of the narrator that the tale is held together. Two features characterize this narrator, one tonal, the other attitudinal. The first is the cool, acidulous voice we hear narrating the story, the expression of an ironic intelligence deeply at odds with the world. The second is the narrator's heightened awareness of sex, particularly in its more grotesque and violent forms, which gives the tale its unsavory atmosphere. These marks of a single unified narrator, together with the ironic finale of the plot, result in a literary mode that is not finally comic, but which suggests comparison with the so-called “problem comedies” of Shakespeare.