ISSN 0030-8129 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America January 1987 Princeton Nietzsche in Russia Edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Here presented are eighteen essays and a bibliography on the Russians' fascination with Nietzsche from 1890 to 1917, with glimpses of developments in the Soviet period. In this interdisciplinary volume scholars document Nietzsche's enormous impact on Russian cultural and political life—an influence that has until now been ignored, understated, or denied in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The contributors describe how key Nietzschean ideas brought about profound changes in Russian religiosity, metaphysics, ethics, social thought, cultural policy, literary theory and criticism, poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music, and popular literature. Also discussed are the reasons for the wide- spread renunciation of Nietzsche after 1908, even while Nietzschean thinking retained its effect on Russian culture. LPE: $19.95. C: $50.00 Ariosto's Bitter Harmony Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance Albert Russell Ascoli "I feel quite privileged to have read Albert Russell Ascoli's study of Orlando Furioso. It is the finest book-length study to date of this complex and elusive poem." —David Quint, Princeton University $40.00 New Limited Edition Paperbacks Thoreau and the American Indians Robert F. Sayre "By treating Thoreau's pervasive and lifelong interest in Indians, Sayre not only provides significant new approaches to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, the Journal, and The Maine Woods, and a convincing reassessment of the importance of the 'Indian books' to Thoreau's canon, but also enables us to assess the unity of that canon from a unique and most enlightening perspective." —Bernard Hirsch, American Studies LPE: $13.50. C: $26.50 Realism and Consensus in the English Novel Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth "...a model of conceptual clarity. She has utilized her reading of modern theory in an independent way to construct a view of realism that is all the more impressive for being built out of such simple materials." —Roger Moss, Times Literary Supplement LPE: $14.50. C: $28.00 At your bookstore or Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, NJ 08540 January 1987 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Volume 102 Number 1 PUBLISHED SIX TIMES A YEAR BY THE ASSOCIATION The Modern Language Association of America ORGANIZED 1883 INCORPORATED 1900 OFFICERS FOR THE YEAR 1987 President: Winfred P. Lehmann , University of Texas, Austin First Vice-President: Barbara Herrnstein Smith , University of Pennsylvania Executive Director: Phyllis Franklin Deputy Executive Director and Treasurer: Hans Rutimann EXECUTIVE COUNCIL For the term ending 31 December 1987 Houston A. Baker , Jr . University of Pennsylvania Elaine Marks University of Wisconsin, Madison James Olney Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge For the term ending 31 December 1988 Mary Louise Pratt Stanford University Frank J. Warnke University of Georgia Ruth Bernard Yeazell University of California, Los Angeles For the term ending 31 December 1989 Peter Elbow State University of New York, Stony Brook Joan M. Ferrante Columbia University Patricia M. Spacks Yale University TRUSTEES OF INVESTED FUNDS William O. Baker C. Waller Barrett Murray Hill, New Jersey Charlottesville, Virginia Joel Conarroe New York, New York PMLA (ISSN 0030-8129) is issued six times a year, in January, March, May, September, October, and November, by the Modern Language Association of America. Membership is open to those persons who are professionally interested in the modern languages and literatures. 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Membership applications are available on request. The subscription price of PMLA for libraries and other institutions is $80. A subscription including a bound volume at the end of the year is $195, domestic and foreign. Agents deduct 4% as their fee. Single copies of the January, March, May, and October issues may be obtained for $7.50 each; the November (Program) issue for $20; the September (Direc- tory) issue for $35. Issues for the current year are available from the MLA Member and Customer Services Office. Claims for undelivered issues will be honored if they are received within one year of the publication date; thereafter the single issue price will be charged. For information about the availability of back issues, inquire of Kraus Reprint Co., Millwood, NY 10546; (914) 762-2200. Early and current volumes may be obtained on microfilm from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Purchase of current volumes on film is restricted to subscribers of the journal. OFFICE OF PUBLICATION AND EDITORIAL OFFICES 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003 All communications including notices of changes of address should be sent to the Member and Customer Services Office of the Association. If a change of address also involves a change of institutional affiliation, that office should be in- formed of this fact at the same time. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing office. Copyright © 1987 by The Modem Language Association of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 12-32040. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Member and Customer Services Office, Modern Language Association of America, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003. Contents • January Editor’s Column 3 Notes on Contributors ........ 5 Forthcoming in PMLA ........ 6 Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English. Reed Way Dasenbrock ........................................10 Abstract. As new literatures in English emerge all over the world, literature in English is increasingly multicultural, but the criticism of these literatures has not fully come to terms with this multiculturalism. Specifically, a work read across cultures is likely to be at least partially unintelligible to some of its readers, and critics have seen this as a factor neces- sarily limiting the readership of these works. But intelligibility and meaningfulness are not synonymous. This essay analyzes moments of difficulty in four such multicultural texts, by Narayan, Kingston, Anaya, and Ihimaera, showing on Gricean lines that meaning can be created precisely by the struggle to make sense of the unintelligible. The work done in that process can lead to a deeper understanding of the text, and the reader who must do that work is therefore not excluded from a full understanding. (RWD) Alison’s Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. Susan Crane ................................................. ......... 20 Abstract. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath longs to counter the assertion of antifeminist satire that women’s authority over men is noxious and undeserved. At first it seems that for her tale she chooses romance as the genre that can imagine a worthy sovereignty of secular women, yet she undermines romantic elevation by frequently returning to satiric stances. The generic mixing in her tale signals that romance is inadequate to her argument and indeed that no conventional discourse sustains women’s sovereignty. Alison attempts to reach beyond the discourses available to her by destabilizing gender, genre, and gentillesse in her narration, intimating that these categories are flexible and open to new meanings. (SC) Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage. Phyllis Rackin ... 29 Abstract. Changing conceptions of gender and of theatrical mimesis can be seen in the representations of transvestite heroines on the English Renaissance stage. This paper com- pares their roles in five comedies: Lyly’s Gailathea-, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night-, and Jonson’s Epicoene. In each play the plot centers on marriage, the bride-to-be wears transvestite disguise, and the disguise plays a crucial role in the plot. In all five plays, the sexual ambiguity of the boy heroine is associated with the problematic relations between the male actor and the female character he portrays, the dramatic representation and the reality it imitates, the play and the audience that watches it. Increasingly rigid gender definitions and a devaluation of the feminine are associated with a rejection of fantasy, the development of neoclassical mimetic theory, and a deepening anxiety about the process of theatrical representation. (PR) Master W. H., R.I.P. Donald W. Foster ....................................... 42 Abstract. Thomas Thorpe’s brief greeting to “Mr. W. H.” in the 1609 Quarto of Shake- speares Sonnets has been one of the great conundrums of modern literary studies. But it is not Thorpe’s only such greeting to survive. His remaining epistles, taken together with the dedications in many other English books of the period, suggest that, unless Thorpe was here forsaking the conventions that elsewhere governed his and his contemporaries’ practice, scholars have been wrong about “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,” wrong about “Mr. W. H.,” and wrong about “our ever-living poet” and the “eternity” he “promised.” But in this they are not alone. The original compositor also got something wrong. If the evidence of other Renaissance epistles is to be trusted, the mysterious and celebrated “Mr. W. H.” is a misprint. (DWF) William Bradford’s American Sublime. David Laurence . . 55 Abstract. William Bradford’s tableau of the Pilgrims’ landing at Cape Cod supplies a con- ventional point of departure for American literature. Yet, in the customary ordering of liter- ary history, the passage is doubly anomalous. Written in 1630, it presents, at least one hundred years too soon, an example of what Kant later called the dynamical sublime; and it anticipates, some two hundred years too soon, episodes from the canon of nineteenth- century American literature that criticism describes as characteristically American. The essay considers the formal motives and rhetorical coercions behind this double anomaly to show how the sublime, as it emerges in Bradford, signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The level of aggression Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal lends his writing a recognizably American bent. The passage shows us a scene of writing at once singular to Bradford and distinctly Ameri- can. (DL) “When You Call Me That . . . Tall Talk and Male Hegemony in The Virginian. Lee Clark Mitchell ....................................... 66 Abstract. Owen Wister’s The Virginian, considered the prototypical cowboy western, only vaguely satisfies formula expectations. Encounters consist more of wordplay than gunplay, and physical conflicts rarely occur. Far from depicting a conventional male violence tamed at last by a feminized East, the novel celebrates the Virginian’s rhetorical triumph over the schoolmarm and the silencing of her feminism in favor of a “logic” of patriarchy. Why should this best-seller have established a formula it does not fulfill? One explanation may involve its setting in Wyoming—known as the “Equality State” for first having enfran- chised women. By opposing a thesis of sexual inequality to that setting’s implications, the novel could be read as two things at once: a paean to an older, masculine West and yet a brief for modern male hegemony. Readers troubled by a resurgent feminism could de- light unawares in the novel’s contradictions and read into it the formula western. (LCM) Forum ........... 78 Forthcoming Meetings and Conferences of General Interest . . 80 Index of Advertisers..................................................................... 81 Professional Notes and Comment 94 PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA Published Six Times a Year Indexes: Vols. 1-50, 1935; 51-60, 1945; 51-79, 1964 EDITORIAL BOARD Barbara Becker -Cantarino , 1987 Ohio State University Margaret Williams Ferguson , 1988 Columbia University Henry Louis Gates , Jr ., 1988 Cornell University ADVISORY COMMITTEE Richard Helgerson , 1988 University of California, Santa Barbara Peter Uwe Hohendahl , 1987 Cornell University James M. Holquist , 1987 Yale University Peggy Kamuf , 1989 Miami University Julia Lesage , 1987 Jump Cut Marjorie Beth Levinson , 1990 University of Pennsylvania Deborah E. Mc Dowell , 1989 Colby College James J. Murphy , 1989 University of California, Davis Margot C. Norris , 1990 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Susan Hardy Aiken , 1989 University of Arizona Martha Banta , 1987 University of California, Los Angeles Terry J. Castle , 1990 Stanford University Giovanni Cecchetti , 1987 University of California, Los Angeles Carol T. Christ , 1987 University of California, Berkeley Frederick A. de Armas , 1989 Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge Heather Dubrow , 1990 Carleton College George D. Economou , 1990 University of Oklahoma Daniel Mark Fogel , 1990 Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge Jean Franco , 1988 Columbia University Editor: John W. Kroner , Cornell University Editorial Supervisor: Claire Cook Assistant Editor: Bonnie V. Levy Herbert S. Lindenberger , 1988 Stanford University Domna Stanton , 1987 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Alexander Welsh , 1987 University of California, Los Angeles Jonathan F. S. Post , 1989 University of California, Los Angeles Mary Louise Pratt , 1987 Stanford University Gerald Prince , 1987 University of Pennsylvania Francois Rigolot , 1988 Princeton University Judith L. Ryan , 1987 Harvard University Naomi Schor , 1988 Brown University Wendy Steiner , 1990 University of Pennsylvania Eugene Vance , 1990 Emory University Tilly Warnock , 1989 University of Wyoming Thomas Russell Whitaker , Yale University George T. Wright , 1990 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Managing Editor: Judy Goulding Assistant Managing Editor: Roslyn Schloss Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Holland A STATEMENT OF EDITORIAL POLICY PMLA welcomes essays of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature. As the publi- cation of a large and heterogeneous association, the journal is receptive to a variety of topics, whether general or specific, and to all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives. The ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind; addresses a significant problem; draws out clearly the implications of its findings; and engages the attention of its audience through a concise, readable presentation. Articles of fewer than 2,500 words or more than 9,000 words, including notes, are not considered for publication. Translations should accom- pany foreign language quotations. The MLA urges its contributors to be sensitive to the social implications of language and to seek wording free of discriminatory overtones. Only members of the association may submit articles to PMLA. Each article submitted is sent to at least one consultant reader and one member of the Advisory Committee. Articles recommended by these readers are then sent to the members of the Editorial Board, who meet periodically with the editor to make final decisions. Until a final decision is reached, the author’s name is not made known to consultant readers, to members of the Advi- sory Committee and the Editorial Board, or to the editor. Submissions, prepared according to The MLA Style Manual, should be addressed to the Editor of PMLA, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003. An author’s name should not appear on the manuscript; instead, a cover sheet, with the author’s name, address, and the title of the article, should accompany the article. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author’s previous work, for example, should be in the third person.