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This paper has as its main concern a reexamination of Stephen Gray's 1977 poem "Hottentot Venus" in the light of two events that occurred after the poem's publication: first, the return of the remains of Sara Baartman (Gray's Hottentot Venus) to South Africa and their ceremonial burial; second, the publication of a biography of Baartman by Clifford Crais and Pamela Scully, a work that has much to say on the production of knowledge and the uses made of this. The paper compares Gray's poem with a poem on Baartman by Diana Ferrus and with Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, focusing on the attribution of agency or its absence. This discussion leads into an examination of the ethics of representation (especially the representation of the Other and of suffering), surveying, first, historical studies of the representation of Khoekhoe, Bushmen, and other marginalized peoples of southern Africa, then novels that attempt such representation or that problematize this by Dalene Matthee, Yvette Christianse, and Zoe Wicomb, and addressing views on the ethics of representation by, among others, Antjie Krog, Susan Sontag, and Alice Walker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues against the historicist tendency to grant interpretive priority to a text's narrowly construed, originary historical context, and in favor of greater attention to historical processes and acts of de- and recontextualization. Taking as my example ''The Charge of the Light Brigade,'' I explore the uses to which this quintessentially topical poem was put in Frederick Douglass' Paper, where it was reprinted and mobilized in African American debates over antislavery violence and the relationship between race and culture. Interesting in their own right, these deployments of ''The Light Brigade'' shed light on the poem as well, relocating it within Tennyson's oeuvre and making visible its own strategy of deracializing recontextualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent scholarship insists that the four poems W.B. Yeats wrote touching the biography of Major Robert Gregory are classic representations of elegy. Yet, throughout these four 'elegies' - 'The Shepherd and the Goatherd,' 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,' 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,' and the unpublished 'Reprisals' - one can detect veiled (as well as shockingly naked) criticisms of Gregory. This paper explores the complicated, often thorny relationship between Yeats and Gregory and seeks to challenge the notion that Yeats ever cared to glorify Gregory in any of the four poems. 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,' in particular, which is commonly read as a kind of ars poetica tribute to Gregory, is in fact an anti-war poem written by one of the era's most outspoken disparagers of anti-war poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is written from an Israeli point of view, a point of view of dual responsibility resulting from belonging to the state that both caused the Palestinian Nakba and took in and rehabilitated survivors and refugees of the Shoah. This position is marked by Jacques Derrida as the state of the aporia of taking responsibility. Avot Yeshurun's poetry about the Nakba and the Shoah struggles with assuming responsibility as an Israeli for the consequences of both. In his poem "Passover on Caves" especially, Yeshurun develops a discourse of heterogeneous identities enabling the Jewish Israeli to assume both responsibilities by developing "multidirectional memory" of both traumas without constituting one identity at the expense of the supposedly opposed other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the implications of the book `Cultural Studies,' edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treicher. Relevance of language to the credibility of the book's essays; Comparison of the book's focus with a paper of philosopher Jacques Derrida; How the academic sector can incorporate the concepts of the essays.

Provides an update on the literary community in 1991. Details on the literary conferences; Information on the call of papers issued by the International Association of Literary Semantics; Reason for establishing the George Borrow Society.