Modern Language Quarterly articles from December 1992

Modern Language Quarterly archives from December 1992

Troubling waters: the feminine and the Wife of Bath's performance.
December 1, 1992... Chaucer's construction of the Wife of Bath's performance depends heavily on associations of water with women. Surprisingly, though, only Robertson and Weissman have attended to them meaningfully. Weissman's discussion provides us with an...

Written and writing bards in eighteenth-century lyric.
December 1, 1992... The ode-writing English lyric poets of the mid-eighteenth century made considerable use of the name and figure of bard, taking with a new seriousness an old tag name and a literate poet's gesture toward singer-ancestors as old as Virgil's "arma...

Sublime politics: the end of the party line.
December 1, 1992... THE POLITICS OF THE SUBLIME An interest in the sublime is conventionally considered somewhat reactionary. Was it for nothing that Burke wrote on behalf of the sublime and against the French Revolution?(1) In general, such criticisms of the...

"Lasciatemi morir": representations of the diva's swan song.
December 1, 1992... THE FADING OF THE FEMININE PERFORMER In her book on opera and the undoing of women, Catherine Clement highlights the seminal contradiction that in opera women are more than indispensable ornament and centrally occupy the staged scene, yet...

Between originality and indebtedness: allegories of authorship in William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury.'
December 1, 1992... As Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, his previous novel, Flags in the Dust, was facing its own dusty death in publishing offices, as yet unaccepted. The book of poetry The Marble Faun with which he began his published career had received...

Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars.
December 1, 1992... Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars is a nonbook. It is a selection of essays that addresses the subject of contemporary criticism from a number of angles and at varying levels of difficulty. There is a survey, which first...

The Office of "The Scarlet Letter."
December 1, 1992... Seven or eight years ago, in the conclusion to The School of Hawthorne, I raised the question whether this author, always so central to the construction of American literature in the past, could possibly retain his centrality in the...

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing.
December 1, 1992... Since the 1982 publication of But Some of Us Are Brave, the comprehensive anthology theorizing, detailing, and implementing black women's studies, numerous anthologies and single-author texts prepared almost exclusively by African-American...

The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel.
December 1, 1992... How good to witness a celebration of mimesis, so theoretically incorrect. In response to an exhibition I recently organized, entitled "Dickens's Homes: Fact and Fiction," a mischievous friend observed: "I think I know what you mean by...

Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation.
December 1, 1992... Stewart's subject is "the relations between subjectivity, authenticity, writing, speech, and the law". "Law" includes actual attempts to regulate or suppress some kind of writing--copyright laws, laws against graffiti or pornography, and the...