The categories of art and nature organize both elite defenses of poetry and popular discussions of women's use of cosmetics in early modern England. The two discourses, for all their diversity, can be seen to constitute a single debate that complexly associates the limits on creativity with the feminine. By tracing the shifting evaluations and interrelations of nature and art in the relevant texts and the changing ways in which the categories are gendered, I show how the identification of either as feminine often accompanies an insistence on constraint and impairment. When these discourses —whether they privilege art or nature—cast doubt on human creativity, they do so by allying it with female agency, which, while granted a role, is invariably constructed negatively. (FED)

Jean-François Lyotard has argued that the master narratives sustaining Western civilization in the past have been delegitimated and can no longer be presented. Although a sense of loss for these “missing contents” marks modernist and postmodernist literature, this sense seems more evident in texts written by men than in texts written by women. Women's texts that convey these missing contents do not look backward toward past master narratives. Rather, what is missing is the “not yet presented,” that which has not yet come into range. This pattern of bifurcation in modernism and postmodernism suggests that male texts are more readily adopted into the canon than female texts are because their nostalgic stance toward the past binds them, as female texts generally are not bound, to the long reach of the male Western narrative tradition. (EGF)

In “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,” a letter to a former confessor, Petrarch famously admits to having ascended a peak for no other reason than to admire the view. As a failed conversion narrative, the letter is ultimately as gratuitous as the climb it recounts. Noting a number of similarities between climbing the mountain and composing the letter, I argue that the literal ascent he describes is a figure for his literary ascent, through this letter and other texts, to fame and notoriety. In condemning the climb, Petrarch figuratively condemns the letter, censuring what he does even as he does it.

Nineteenth-century English and American travelers in Europe elaborated an “authenticity effect,” a rhetoric whose figures testify to the authenticity of sights seen and experiences undergone. Largely through the adaptation of picturesque conventions, visitors' gazes produced a touristic “Europe” consisting of distinctive, essential features that marked foreign places off from familiar domestic society. Acting out the evolving division of culture and society, the tour abroad defined home (England or America) as the increasingly anomic domain of work and compromised social existence, abroad (the Continent or “Europe”) as the compensatory realm of culture and, therefore, of human feeling, meaningfulness, and wholeness. In this figuration of (foreign but accessible) cultures as wholes expressing their essences in particular, instantaneously perceptible arrangements of parts, nineteenth-century tourism bridges Romantic-symbolist aesthetics and the professional anthropology of the early twentieth century. Placed at the center of the century-long bridge, the young Henry James wrote a series of travel essays in the 1870s that both forecast his later fiction and reveal the disquieting implications of the picturesque perspective. (JB)

Cecil B. deMille's Ten Commandments can be read as a major product of American cold war ideology, highlighting and localizing the foci of America's political, theological, and economic conflicts. The apparatus of wide-screen technology resolves these conflicts visually by mediating a series of gazes in an economy that equates God's perspective with American interests during the cold war and those interests with the rigidity of gender roles, the commodification of women, the representation of “true” Jews as proto-Christians, and the reclamation of the Middle East as legitimately within the American (Christian) sphere of influence. In making “truth” and “freedom” contingent on Christian doctrine, deMille distinguishes himself from the filmmakers investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, as the son of a would-be minister turned playwright, he also redeems himself for being a maker of false images by suggesting that the supplementary status of film can allow the true representation of God's Word.

The autobiographical novel Arabesques presents a complex double self-portrayal of an Israeli Arab as an artist. The narrator's gravitation toward the cultural center conflicts with his loyalty to his ethnic periphery. His search for identity as a minority writer intertwines with his search for identity as an individual. The tension of the unresolved identity split emerges in the work's fragmented structure and inconsistent story line. I argue that the centrality of Hebrew in Arabesques communicates the possibility of overcoming the split. Such reconciliation requires that instability and pluralism be accepted as forces that shape the lives of individuals and of nations. The use of Hebrew explodes both the cultural stagnation of the minority and the intransigence of the majority. The hybridization of language and lore destabilizes the definition of nationalism, bringing, for both the dominating and the dominated, the hope of cultural revitalization and of ideological rapprochement.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and “An Outpost of Progress” appropriate and subvert Herbert Spencer's influential “typology of civilization.” While these fictions invoke Spencer's crucial opposition of “militant” and “industrial” society, they ultimately undermine his progressivistic theory by expunging the difference between these oppositions. They accomplish this by showing that, in Europe's colonization of Africa, militancy and industrialism are mutually reinforcing tendencies rather than mutually exclusive ones and that Spencer's celebration of civilization and progress ultimately justifies imperialism and obscures the existence of a “military-industrial complex.” In addition, Lord Jim provides interesting alternatives to and modified examples of Conrad's intersection with Spencerian ideas. (BWS)

While a strong feminist tradition has virtually revolutionized the reading of Frankenstein, giving the work's feminine subject new visibility and centrality, this approach has simultaneously obscured access to the text's theatrical display of masculinity. Yet an understanding of the deployment of the male body (in the novel and in the cultural construction of Mary Shelley) might challenge current understandings of both the gendering of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's place in the gendering of literary history. The spectacle of masculinity haunts late-nineteenth-century Shelleyan iconography and informs the gendered narratives that shape such influential studies as James Rieger's twentieth-century textual and biographical reconstructions of Frankenstein and its author. Given this history, a feminist critique can profit from a reading of Frankenstein's insistent exhibition of masculinity, for the male spectacle unfixes gender hierarchies, illuminating the fractures and contradictions underlying masculine authority. (BL)

It is generally believed that the appearance of Racine's stage never varied, that all tragedies performed in seventeenth-century Paris were staged in a neutral, anonymous setting known as the “palais à volonté.” However, an inventory of stage settings kept by Michel Laurent, the décorateur at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where Racine's plays were first performed, shows that Racine, like Molière but unlike most other authors of tragedy, demanded visual backgrounds that were specific and appropriate to the action of the plays. Abstract and universal decors indeed had a place in the seventeenth-century theater, and they became common after Racine's retirement, but they were used for practical reasons that have little to do with the modern conception of “classicism.”

Barthes's principle of jouissance provides an erotics of reading that counters essentialist textuality. Yet much feminist inquiry has also found implicit phallocen-trism in the concept. I use the poetry and poetics of Frank O'Hara to reread Barthes's Pleasure of the Text. Gay male sexuality, I claim, offers a model that refuses to privilege the phallus. Moreover, O'Hara's poetics symbolically embraces the gay male body and demonstrates an absolute jouissance. I juxtapose O'Hara's poetry with an ironic myth of gay male sexuality, the “signifying clone.” The comparison shows that both this sexuality and O'Hara's poetry reconstruct “meaning” as an ex post facto decision—in contrast to traditional androcentric notions of meaning as an a priori truth. I suggest that the material experience of sexualities can provide a basis for a theorization that unwrites the homogenizing transcendence of the androcentric phallus. (GWB)

When read in the context of the European discourse on China since the Enlightenment, Kafka's “Constructing the Great Wall of China” (1917) and one of its likely sources, Dittmar's travelogue In New China (1912), reveal their political and cultural significance as early-twentieth-century conceptualizations of China during the late Ch'ing dynasty. Caught in the conflict between empirical observation and textual preconceptions, Dittmar manipulates orientalist discourse in his colonialist construction of Chinese progress guided by the Western powers. Surpassing his precursor in self-reflective insight into the rhetoricity of orientalism, Kafka appropriates the recurrent topoi of this field for an ironic exploration of the interactions among power, language, and sociopolitical stagnation. Kafka's story can be read as an intertextual subversion of Dittmar's Eurocentric ideology, as a response to the shattered hopes for revolutionary change after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and as a critique of orientalist discourse in general. (RJG)