The miniature portrait in Molière's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire is a memento the romantic heroine preserves in token of her absent love. Fainting under the strain of resisting her tyrannical father's efforts to compel her to marry another man, she loses the miniature, which falls into the hands of Sganarelle's wife. Mme Sganarelle's possession of the portrait provokes jealous suspicions in Sganarelle, and the comic fallout challenges the classical theory of images and the theory of signs to which classical culture assigns images. More specifically, in subjecting the portrait to the thingly logic of comic theater, the miniature's circulation explodes the dualist premises on which French classicism depends. Analysis of the farce's plot mechanics thus occasions critical meditations on classical semiotics (in Pascal's Pensées and Arnauld and Nicole's Logique de Port-Royal), classical aesthetics (in the writings of Piles), royal portraiture, and classical theology.

What might the Mass resemble among a people who never experienced the Fall? Montaigne's most famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” emerges as a radical response to this question when examined in the context of his time's religious polemic, a context from which the essay borrows much of its imagery. Unlike Protestant controversialists who disparaged Catholic eucharistic rites as barbarous, Montaigne suggests such religious prejudices prove little better than the cultural ones under which New World natives labored. He elects to pursue a line of religious inquiry opened up by Renaissance speculation that Amerindians might constitute a non-Adamite race in order to conduct a personal exploration of alternative practices of faith. This two-mindedness with regard to religion suggests that characterizations of Montaigne need to step beyond the categories of believer and unbeliever. Abandoning tendencies toward denominationalism and, more generally, toward affixing labels to heterodoxy allows for an investigation of the fully idiosyncratic experience of early modern belief.

This essay explores the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O'Hara‘s “Personism: A Manifesto” and his personal poetry. Though these works have recently been celebrated for their candid expression of homosexual desire during a cultural moment set on silencing queer voices, I argue the inverse. Focusing on O'Hara‘s ambivalent relation to a calcified poetics of impersonality promoted by New Critics and confessional poets, I suggest that O'Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry. He instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a fantastic space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience. Apparent in poems such as “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) and “Personal Poem,” this project enables the poet to fashion an intimately imagined queer community that facilitates impersonal identifications. Through personism, that is, O'Hara fabricates an alternative public sphere in which public individuals paradoxically become visibly invisible.

This article explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity. In the modern uncoupling of identities from fixed homelands, the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated. In an emerging configuration that interrogates the subject-centered perspective of occidental humanism, we are invited to consider the transit of language, whether in literary expression, television realism, or musical rhythm, as the site of an ongoing elaboration that is irreducible to a single point of view or to the transparency desired by a unilateral politics. Where no culture, history, or identity remains immune to the interruptions and interrogations of a multiple modernity that no longer merely mirrors the First World, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship need to be reconsidered radically.

Imported material forms were central to the settlement of Australia as a penal colony, beginning with the “discovery” of the continent by James Cook, who took possession of New South Wales in 1770 by naming Possession Island. The first part of this article traces the intersection in early journals and legal records between material instability and naming, arguing that as Aboriginal peoples and convicts challenged the social meaning of objects, the ability to refer to those objects became essential. The second part explores failed naming in David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon (1993), set on the early-nineteenth-century frontier, whose central character calls himself a “B-b-british object,” stuttered words that evoke the historical importance and the vulnerability of imported goods during colonization and settlement in Australia.

Milton's “Lycidas” deploys a variety of matrimonial references—classical and Christian—within an elegiac context that simultaneously manifests anxiety over feminine sexuality. The result is a poem whose erotic investments, coexisting as they do with a general preference for masculine over feminine companionship, tend to settle into patterns of same-sex attachment. These culminate in the “unexpressive nuptial song” of the poem's conclusion, which figures spiritual consummation in matrimonial terms while implicitly positioning Lycidas in the role of bride.

Many Romantic poets were fascinated by the idea that a special historical sense could hear the cultural difference of remote epochs in the sound of the sea or of the wind. This essay traces that fascination back to late-eighteenth-century attempts to imagine a new kind of secular afterlife that fused nature and history, thereby combining the permanence of a natural process with the consoling collectivity of social existence. The most influential parts of James Macpherson's Ossianic poems were the ostensibly archaic ghosts who literalized Enlightenment fantasies about this form of historical immortality. In poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Felicia Hemans, historical sensations function as intimations of immortality and as signs of culture's primacy over other forms of class distinction. The essay closes by suggesting that late-twentieth-century film and literary criticism continue to promise their audiences a similar kind of earthly immortality.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility. References to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. In this heady environment, new technologies promise ever-increasing powers of transformation and transport—applied to information, business, and self—and the benefits of surveillance and tracking. More and more in this context, the concept of a person or of human beings appears to depend on the attenuated possibilities of cyberspace. If the heavy, even immovable, facts of embodied existence can be ameliorated or discharged through the creation of new identities on the Internet, for example, or through new collective personas or communities, then what or who counts as a person becomes transformed.