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This essay focuses on how Helene Cixous’s mourning for Algeria, in “Mon Algeriance” and Les Reveries de la femme sauvage , is linked to the death of her father, buried in Algiers. Cixous’ suffering (“malgerien:” a neologism to express both the evil and the illness -“le mal”- of Algeria) stems from her metonymic constellation of Algeria retrospectively viewed as “evil” during the Vichy regime, and also as the carrier of illness that contaminates the father. Cixous’ “malgerien” is also the experience of mourning the defunct father whose fatal illness becomes in her imaginary Algeria an allegory of the situation of the Jew during the Vichy regime in occupied Algeria. The father’s illness also allegorizes other fatal conflicts for Cixous, such as the relationship between Jews and Arabs, French and Jews, as well as colonizer and colonized in Algeria before 1954. The essay explores Cixous's fracturing of memory occasioned by her departure from Algeria in 1954 and draws out the meaning and implications of the metaphors of suffering and illness in relation to the father’s tuberculosis.

Renzo, the protagonist of Manzoni's "I promessi sposi", travels twice to Milan and back home. Both journeys are important, but it is the investigation of the second homecoming in particular that seems to provide us with a telling allegory of the "juice of the whole story" : by showing the imperfect circle described by the character's journeys, as well as his reflection on the problematic relationship between happiness and memory.

This article analyzes the key function and meaning of Dante's imitation of God's creation through three Books of revelation (Scripture, Nature, History-Memory), as elaborated in Singleton's major critical works on Dante written between 1949 and 1958 (An Essay on the "Vita Nuova;" Dante Studies 1. "Commedia:" Elements of Structure; Dante Studies 2. Journey to Beatrice). It also aims to connect Singleton's investigation of Dante's use of allegory and symbolism to the Judaio-Christian tradition as primary source as well as to the American philosophical tradition from Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism to George Santayana's thought which served as a foundation for the American Dante Scholar.

The problem of genre in Beowulf has long been subject to intense scholarly debate. The remarkable diversity of the poem's generic makeup allows for a wide range of interpretations, which argue both for and against the traditional definition of Beowulf as heroic epic. The generic aspects to which the critics assign primary importance in the poem include fairy tale, elegy, heroic lay, oral-formulaic poetry, historical and legendary narrative, and Christian allegory (Tolkien 28; Irving 7; Earl 134; Greenfield 126; Klein 141). This essay will discuss the possibility of reading Beowulf as a romance. Besides providing new insights into the relationship between modern critical approaches to interpretation and medieval texts, reading Beowulf as a romance also has practical significance for current genre scholarship. First, it questions the assumption that genre is a uniform category. This means questioning the validity of analyzing a work of literature in terms of its predominant generic component alone, as the traditional definition of Beowulf as epic implies. Second, it calls for reconsideration of literary genre as a category inextricably tied to a particular historical period, since the romance aspects of Beowulf predate the emergence of continental romance by at least two centuries.' The claim that genre is a flexible category both in terms of historical period and formal features has an important consequence for the practice of literary interpretation: it allows critical approaches traditionally conceived of as modern to be used, with some modifications, for reading medieval texts. If epic can be described as a narrative of society, then romance is a

The presence of Renart material, and to a lesser degree branches of the Perlesvaus, in Chantilly MS 472 has in the past perplexed critics, including myself. No other anthology of Arthurian romances in verse includes the Renart or the prose Perlesvaus, which usually appears elsewhere as a single item manuscript.' In this paper I propose to reassess my consideration of the structure of this collection, begun in an article entitled, "The Formation of a Gauvain Cycle in Chantilly Manuscript 472."2 I am going to focus on the implications of the Perlesvaus and the Renart material for an understanding of the attitude regarding chivalric ideals implicit in the entire collection. I

It is nothing new to point to the historical indebtedness of literary criticism to European Romanticism.* The beginnings of Golden-age histories, historical theorization and periodization of literature, and the opening of a progressive model of history in Romanticism are well known and well worn themes. So, too, is criticism's "romantic heritage," well marked by endless references to Coleridge, theories of the symbol and allegory, organic totality, expression and mimesis. The next fold-the critique of organicity and its role in theories of history, the "demystification" of the naturalness of tropes, and the attempted break-up of romantic narrativity-are by now also standard fare.

It may seem surprising, or even paradoxical, that one should dwell on a subject such as silence in a poem in which noise has always been underlined. To quote only from two relatively recent studies: "The Orlando Furioso is certainly a noisy poem," begins a 1988 article by James W. Mirollo which bears the title "On the Significant Acoustics of Ariosto's Noisy Poem";l and C. P. Brand, some fifteen years ago, wrote in a fine book of his on Ariosto: "How noisy that sylvan paradise must have been with those mountains of armour and muscle forcing their way through the undergrowth!"2 On the other hand it is well known that, almost in opposition to all this noise, an island of silence, "a great oasis of silence and oblivion," to use Attilio Momigliano's words, is found explicitly described towards the middle of the poem. I am thinking of course of the brief allegory of silence in canto XIV, of which the same Momigliano emphasized the "musical malice."3 Actually it could be interesting to analyse the ambiguous valorization of the noise/silence opposi

For more than a decade, since the publication, in 1975, of Laura Mulvey's essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo has been at the vortex of critical debates about the fundamental structures of classical narrative cinema.1 Psychoanalytic, formalist, feminist, post-structuralist, and Marxist readings of the film have multiplied, making it one of the most frequently analyzed films in the Hitchcock canon, if not in cinema history in general. I will not attempt to explain why Vertigo has been thus honored by critics, though I hope that the intrinsic interest of the film will become obvious in what follows. This is, rather, a critical review of the essays on Vertigo that seem to me most relevant to feminist theory. My aim is to identify certain fundamental problems in some of the most interesting of these readings: to point to, for example, a nostalgia for an empirically-based history, the essence of which is an unproblematized set of references, upon which

One of the most pressing questions opened, or reopened, by the Poststructuralist problematization of representation concerns the concept of history. Ever since Claude Levi-Strauss first gave prominence to Structuralism as a movement of thought by attacking Sartre's notion of historicity as uncritically ethnocentric and teleological, the status of history-whether as object, discipline or method of investigation-has been a primary focus of attention, debate and controversy. The temper of this controversy is reflected in the title of one of the first articles purporting to give a general theoretical assessment of the movement of thought it called "The Structuralist Attack upon History." If Alfred Schmidt's study, published in 1968,2 articulated the position of the "first" Frankfurt School, its self-proclaimed successor, the "second" Frankfurt School of Jirgen Habermas, has added some nuances to this position, but in the end hardly altered it. In his lectures on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity3, Habermas

Underlying the title of the present essay is a fundamental methodological question about interpreting the "historical meaning" of Baroque texts, namely, where is "history" (society, politics, the "real") when it is said to be "in" literature? What would it mean to say that any particular "history" constitutes the "origin" of meaning in a literary text? In this essay, I interpret Christian Weise's Ein wunderliches Schau-Spiel vom Niederldndischen Bauer (1685) as an allegory of the absence of such an unambiguous origin of textual meaning "in history."' My reading has two parts. The first, briefer part explains how the possibility of such absolute origins is specifically excluded and rendered invisible in this play. Defining this absence sets up the need for the second part of the interpretation, which works out an alternative way of looking at

I want to examine Dante's handling in the Commedia of several themes that center around the relation between body and soul. I begin with Inferno XIII because it offers interesting access to ideas that recur significantly throughout the poem. These ideas, although they are found in intellectual contexts that deal with poetry, philosophy, and theology, reveal a passionate concern for "body" that has not, I think, been sufficiently recognized. The figure of Pier delle Vigne-chancellor for Frederick 11, renowned writer in the aureate style, suicide whose otherworldly body is a tree that bleeds when its branches are snapped-will open most of the questions of allegory, corporeal life, and immortality to be pursued in this discussion. The pathless wood of Inferno XIII is something of a paradox: there is actually a bewildering array of paths leading out of this canto, and I have had rigorously to abstain from pursuing several obvious connections-e.g., with Brunetto Latini, Cato, and even Virgil himself-and some not so obvious ones, in order to keep the paper to a manageable length. A sense of Dante's conception of Pier perhaps best emerges from studying his transformation of the Polydorus material of Aeneid 111, which "Virgil" himself identifies with the fate of the suicides. In the Polydorus episode, Aeneas becomes frozen in horror as he uproots some myrtle shoots for the purpose of making a sacrificial wreath, both because of their oozing blood and