Editor’s Column

“I can’t write that kind of stuff!” This proclamation of humility, which I quote without permission, 
issued from the lips of a highly respected, extensively published, and uncommonly articulate colleague 
in the Slavic field. What produced the utterance was my urging that he send his next essay to PMLA. 
The unexpected response led me to ponder, as my predecessors in the editor’s chair have, just what is 
the stuff of which PMLA is made? What, if any, is its right stuff? And what keeps some members from 
sending us their stuff? I confess that my scrutiny of our journal’s pages, past and future, has led me 
to no perceptions as clear and definitive as those of the Camus scholar whom I reproached for neglect-
ing PMLA. Her response was a confident measure of the journal’s contents: “I haven’t written any-
thing suitable.”

Suitability presumes a fit with an inscribed pattern, yet the statement of editorial policy defines the 
ideal PMLA article as broadly as possible: the best of its kind, whatever its kind. Significance, clarity, 
concision, readability, interest are expressed desiderata, but the journal’s openness to a variety of topics 
and to all scholarly methods and critical perspectives is the stuff of its identity. No quotas of any sort 
govern acceptances; and while referees inevitably bring their private ideological and methodological 
biases to their readings of manuscripts, the very play of disparate convictions among readers tends to 
prevent the favoring of one approach or the exclusion of another. Those who serve on the PMLA advi-
sory committee and the editorial board on a rotating basis come from as many persuasions as the as-
sociation’s membership. The executive council defines its nominees for these posts by field, period, and 
genre (the classifications are invariably narrower than their bearers), but it does not deliberately seek 
out a critic of a particular stripe. True enough, an eavesdropper on the editorial board’s huddles would 
not always hear judgments untainted by subjectivity or partiality. In one reader the word diegesis may 
cause a reaction more glandular than rational; to another modes of production seems better suited to 
the Wall Street Journal than to PMLA. It is a healthy sign of the maturity of our profession’s critical 
enterprise that we no longer feel born to the task, that we learn to adopt positions and working methods, 
and that we develop convictions. The sacrifice of passivity and neutrality and sometimes even of our 
academically decorous tolerance is the price we pay for flourishing debates. The interplay of disparate 
commitments and expectations and the occasional contentiousness among the nine or ten readers of 
a manuscript ensure not only reasonable fairness in PMLAs evaluation process but variety and disparity 
in the final selections. PMLA receives and judges articles with a collective open-mindedness, and no 
single procedure or ideology has a jump on any other.

The only possible response to the questions I have been asked—What is PMLAs critical orientation? 
What methodology does the editorial board prefer?—is a gesture of embrace. Summon to mind any 
two journals that you consider at opposite ends of the critical horizon, and we would be happy to compete 
with their editors for your favors and your articles. Peruse the pages of our journal, and you will most 
likely identify essays that could readily have gained entry into one or the other of your discrepant pub-
lications.

A further self-effacing explanation for nonparticipation, “I’m too traditional for PMLA,” appears 
to echo the sentiments of a number of readers. Some of the essays—and now and then an entire issue— 
may well fan such a perception. Last October’s number, for example, was heavily slanted toward the-
ory and the ways of modern critical analysis. It offered an essay on Bakhtinian dialogics, a metacriti- 
cal examination of literary convention itself, an application of contemporary narratology and gender 
criticism to a series of nineteenth-century novels, poststructuralist readings of a Henry James novel and 
a sixteenth-century poem, and a figural analysis of Coleridge’s writings. As the long-lived scholarly organ 
of a vast community rather than the voice of a coherent minority, PMLA is as much mirror as it is lamp. 
It reflects the state of our art. Inevitably, it collects the winds that blow through our profession, the 
vocabularies in vogue, the theorists most in the news or in the footnotes.

These modes and names, however, hold no proprietary rights over today’s PMLA, as the contents 
of any succession of issues and yet another disclaimer will prove: “I’m not erudite enough for PMLA.” 
If the responses to my invitation carry a touch of contradiction and distortion, the explanation proba-
bly lies with PMLAs very multifacetedness. At the same time learned journal and literary review, as-
sembled mostly from what comes in over the transom (as John Fisher put it in the centennial issue), 
PMLA holds no brief for any given stance. Modernity and tradition as well as the tensions that divide 
them are appropriate stuff for a PMLA article, as they are of our convention sessions and of our mem-
bership’s profile.

The articles in this issue differ from October’s collection and from one another. Several of them es-



chew canonical texts. Reed Way Dasenbrock, treating a subject that appears too rarely in our pages, 
grapples with the critical apprehension of Anglophone literature by African, Indian, Chinese Ameri-
can, Chicano, and Maori writers. Susan Crane’s close look at Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale suggests 
fresh juxtapositions of history and fiction, satire and romance, semantics and society. Phyllis Rackin’s 
provocative exercise in feminist criticism focuses on three Renaissance dramatists as it considers gen-
der in the context of theatrical representation. Donald W. Foster’s witty piece of detective work based 
on Elizabethan rhetorical conventions offers a startling solution to a mystery that has long puzzled 
Shakespeareans. In David Laurence’s article the historical and rhetorical analysis of Bradford’s Of 
Plymouth Plantation shares space with an important consideration of the subtleties of the sublime. Fi-
nally, Lee Clark Mitchell deftly deals with language, gender, and the social structure in the American 
western along with questions of reader reception. The articles that we have on hand for future issues 
are equally varied in subject matter and methodology: a metrical analysis, with feminist overtones, of 
Emily Dickinson’s poetry; a cultural history of a dramatic genre of the Italian Renaissance; an assess-
ment of the new historicism; a feminist interpretation of a Hitchcock film; an intertextual reading of 
a Spanish pastoral poet; a pair of inquiries into James Joyce, one a model of eclectic criticism that ad-
dresses language, politics, origins, and authority, the other a Lacanian reader-oriented reinterpretation 
of a Dubliners story; and a trio of textual analyses of medieval English verse that draw from the ar-
senals of semantics, Marxism, and hermeneutics. Some of the referees’ responses to these articles— 
“sheer joy,” “quite unlike PMLA’s usual fare,” “will set many fertile bees buzzing in the critical bon-
net,” “a refreshing alternative to the older pedantry” —suggest that readers and potential contributors 
can find in PMLA opportunity without circumscription. Indeed, modes of production and codes of 
seduction can cohabit harmoniously in today’s PMLA, while sources and intertexts can both find sus-
tenance around PM LA’s, table of contents.

PMLA, in the heterogeneity of its ingredients, reflects the pluralism of the act of interpretation to 
which its contributors devote themselves. The polemics between valid interpreters and creative critics 
refuse to subside, but the perpetrator of the notion that interpretation is the projection of self on data 
may not have been entirely off the mark, as readers from Don Quijote to Norman Holland’s quintet 
have demonstrated. Few who ply our vocation would agree with Emerson’s dictum, “The trait and test 
of the poet is that he builds, adds and affirms. The critic destroys.” Critics are governed by the same 
anxieties as poets. If they destroy anything, they destroy their own critical forebears while subsuming 
and transcending received interpretations. That continually evolving process, with its constants and its 
innovations, is the stuff of which PMLA articles are made, of which all our articles are made.

Surely, then, the young critic fresh from a tenure victory is misguided when he retreats from my call 
to try PMLA with his next piece of work: “I wouldn’t dare'.” I ask myself: What are the risks to body 
or soul, to personal equilibrium or professional status that a submission to PMLA entails? The ulti-
mate in my collection of excuses for noncollaboration with our publication is a duo of responses that 
came from colleagues in the same department—English, if the truth must be told—and that aptly de-
scribe the constructive tensions within PMLA-. “Oh, PMLA is too modern for me!” said one; “No, 
PMLA isn’t yet modern enough for me!” said the other. As Blake put it, “Both read the Bible day and 
night, / But thou read’st black where I read white.”

John  W. Kronik