Editor’s Column

V
ARIETY IS the spice of PMLA, as it is of life, and this issue 

offers yet another proof. Its contents cross national borders, 
straddle two centuries, scrutinize poetry and prose, apply diverse methods, 

converge on both text and context, honor ideology as well as creativity, 
search out tradition and innovation, and play out a range of concerns. 
The period, the area, the approach missing from this issue may be found 
in an earlier or a later one. At the same time, the collection of essays 
that follows reflects our efforts to give voice within each number to the 
internal dialogues that spring fortuitously from our backlog.

Such a happy conjuncture of accepted manuscripts allows us to cel-
ebrate a constituency whose presence in PMLA has not matched the 
prominence of its culture or of its impact on modem literary theory. We 
hope that the modest increase of submissions in the Slavic area represents 
a new trend and that the cluster of articles printed here will, like previous 
clusters and special topics, stimulate further contributions in the same 
field. These Russian voices should also help to dissipate any suspicions 
that hegemonic forces control PMLA's pages. We are indebted to Gary 
Saul Morson for his collaboration with us in the preparation of this 
grouping and for the lucid introduction that accompanies it. Morson’s 
review of the Slavic field, in which he situates the three essays on Russian 
literature, and his observations about the interface among social values, 
life experiences, and cultural expression are especially provocative in the 
light of recent political events in Eastern Europe. Along the way he invites 
careful reconsiderations of Bakhtin and of Slavists’ unique confrontation 
with literary theory.

Joseph Brodsky, an MLA Honorary Fellow and a Nobel Prize winner, 
joins the Russian array with thoughts, strongly fastened to the artist’s 
vantage point, about the relation of poetry to modem consciousness and 
about the play between poetic language and social responsibility. Brodsky 
introduces to his readers a Lithuanian author whose career is inseparable 
from the political vagaries and upheavals that have brought various Slavic 
cultures and languages into fusion. The scenario of a Russian writing in 
his own tongue in North America for the Polish translation of a Lithu-
anian poet seems to give testimony to the ravages of historical displace-
ment. But writing a mere three years ago, Brodsky could not have foreseen



that the Baltic states would themselves, with astonishing speed, achieve 
the autonomy that he claims for the poet. We are deeply grateful to 
Joseph Brodsky for allowing us to print an English version of his intro-
duction to Tomas Venclova’s poetry. I would also like to express special 
thanks to Roslyn Schloss and to Ann Kjellberg for their mediating roles 
in our contacts with Brodsky.

If “ideology,” in one sense or another and variously applied, often 
dominates today’s literary discussions, it also makes its presence felt in 
this issue, having thrust itself into three of the titles. Benjamin figures 
prominently and Marx, Balzac, and photography sit in unexpected but 
productive juxtaposition in Lynn Wilkinson’s article, which reaches far 
beyond Le cousin Pons as it examines the nature of representation and 
the very connotations of ideology. Whether or not readers agree with her 
thesis as they are invited to ponder varying kinds of interpretive activity, 
they are certain to find stimulating this conjunction of social history, 
mechanical reproduction, and the novel. “Ideology is one of the slipperier 
words in our political vocabulary,” Wilkinson admonishes as she strives 
to divest it of negative implications. Applying the term rather than scru-
tinizing it, Elizabeth Langland shifts across the Channel, from French 
to Victorian fiction and from technology to domesticity. At the inter-
section of sociology and literary criticism, of class and gender, Langland 
returns with fresh baggage to the “Angel in the House” icon and offers 
interesting perspectives on how to read a nineteenth-century novel. She 
extracts from a series of texts, and from discursive practices in the widest 
sense, the character of female agency and the special significance of the 
private sphere that women of the time occupied. Readers might extrap-
olate from her observations about dress, etiquette, social conduct, and 
spatial arrangements conditions that apply to other national literatures 
as well.

Modernism, too, is a charged term, and it graces two of the titles in 
this issue. Fortunately, it doesn’t fall to my lot to define the concept in 
this column, but both Helen Sword’s “Leda and the Modernists” and 
William Lyne’s “Signifying Modernist,” along with forthcoming essays, 
such as one on Chinese modernism and another subtitled “Post/mod- 
ernism, Gender, and the Canon,” led one Editorial Board member to 
observe that writers and the critical community appear to be in the process 
of redefining modernism. Sword, after surveying the Leda-Zeus myth’s 
iconography and literary variants, explores the effect of gender on the 
creative imaginations of several twentieth-century writers of various na-
tionalities. How gender bears on the transmission of knowledge and how 
violation relates to inspiration are major concerns in her essay. Sword 
concludes that Leda, having become a troubled and troubling source of 
poetic inspiration, a site for male disquietude, has produced in modernist 
poets some unexpected responses, marked by the fragmentation in which 
modernism itself invests much power and meaning.

While Sword can confidently take the modernism of her case studies 
for granted, William Lyne enters into the debate over Ralph Ellison’s



presumed “modernist proclivities.” In fact, Lyne bounces Invisible Man 
off James, Eliot, and Dostoevsky in order to uncover in the novel a 
disruptive subtext that reveals Ellison’s antimodernist stance. Where 
others have read allusion and homage, Lyne finds critique and resistance, 
a paradox that he attributes to the “double consciousness” of the black 
artist in white America. Lyne explains the tragic quandary of a writer 
like Ellison and simultaneously offers a lively and perceptive reading of 
Invisible Man. Kun Jong Lee discovers in the same novel, which he also 
reads with sharp insights, both an echo and a revision of the American 
thinker whose names Ellison shares, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lee’s bold 
thesis is that the question of race lies at the heart of Ellison’s critical 
reinterpretation of Emerson and that readers have failed to grasp the 
novel’s ambivalence toward Emersonianism, a philosophy that Ellison 
both affirms and negates in an act of constructive subversion. The op-
portunity to unite in a single issue a pair of essays about Ellison is a 
measure of his importance on the contemporary American literary scene. 
The coincidence is also a product of the continuing flow of contributions 
on African American literature that PM LA’s special issue on that topic 
has spurred. We welcome this development and encourage further sub-
missions in the African and African American areas.

This issue closes with an essay by the MLA Honorary Member Hans- 
Georg Gadamer, published here for the first time in English. Part of our 
occasional Criticism in Translation feature, “The Expressive Power of 
Language: On the Function of Rhetoric for Knowledge” inserts the tra-
ditional notion of rhetoric into the modern debates about language and 
touches directly on our trade as teachers. Gadamer’s piece speaks to all 
MLA members, regardless of their interests. The other essays are more 
specialized, but their authors clearly know enough about the expressive 
power of language to speak persuasively to a battery of readers. Recent 
submissions presage equally varied and stimulating fare in the future.

JOHN W. KRONIK