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Artists usually design their works to be preserved for future generations. In the same way, we observe previous artworks in order to understand contemporary cultural productions. This twofold dynamic, which ensures both the survival of our artistic patrimony and a continuity of its production, is not as endemic to art as often thought. Artists can choose to break with traditions, or can refuse to follow artistic conventions. The phrase "I'd rather die than . . . " is often exclaimed by the artistic outcasts of this world. Think of Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 painting Drowning Girl, alternatively titled I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink, which is a thematic depiction of such an extreme refusal. Yet, I believe that there is one poet in particular who-surprisingly-enriches our engagement with these questions of artistic production, queerness, and survival.Marianne Moore, feminist and queer poet, was a meticulous observer, an obsessive collector. Throughout her life, she believed that to feel deeply one had to see clearly, and she perceived the world with precision and critical acuity. Above all, she collected with equal dedication the written materials from that observed world. Gathering quotations from a diversity of sources, most often nonliterary or even quotidian, it was the rule rather than the exception that she twisted the quoted material's original phrasing or meaning. Her experimental poetry contains catalogues of collected fragments and is representative of collage. It is a testimony, an archive of what she considered valuable and worthwhile for future remembrance. Yet, I argue, her poetic archive, which has a rather atypical design, testifies against the ideology of survival. Even though her poems have often been called "acts of survival," Moore does not look at the past as a talisman for the future, and her queer archival poem-collections attest to anxiety over-rather than faith in-inheritance, continuity, and memory.1As the most impersonal and cagey of her already impersonally modernist generation, Moore figures as an exceptional representative of queer archival poetry. As I will indicate, hers is a poetics that opposes the legacy of the closet and queer literature's subsequent urge to "come out," "open the box," and "break the silence" via personal testimonies. Her writings are not confessional-let alone autobiographical-and there is not even a critical consensus about Moore's queerness in the first place. She never married, nor did she have any lesbian relationships, and her personal letters attest only to a couple of inconsiderable college crushes. However, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's definition of queer as "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically" (1993, 8).In multiple ways, Moore lives and writes according to this less rigid model of sexuality. Not until her mother's death in 1947, when Moore was already sixty, had she ever lived on her own, or written a poem without her mother's consent. During her childhood and continuing in later family correspondence, a playful game of animal nicknaming began, in which Marianne masculinized as "Gator," "Basilisk," " Weasel," "Uncle (Fangs)," "Mouse," or "Rat." She would later adopt this purposefully cross gendering practice into her poetics. In her poetic menagerie of queer animals, the dragon is the most remarkable. Moore herself once admitted in "O, to Be a Dragon" that she would like to be one, "of silkworm size or immense," preferably "almost invisible" but a decidedly "felicitous phenomenon" (1967, 177). This dragon, as a nongendered combatant, offers a clue to the eccentric woman who thrives behind the tame, reserved exterior. It is this visible-invisible and gendered-nongendered discrepancy that contributes to Moore's idiosyncratic queerness.A "queer archive," as established by Ann Cvetkovich, refers to any mechanism that collects information and is "composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science" (2003, 268). …

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial, citizens in a remarkable graphic menagerie that speak, sometimes forcefully, sometimes joyfully, to what he termed "hard truths." Tigers, signifying the artist as well as a much larger world of African American masculinity, romp, stalk, and carouse in his early works and on through the 1990s. Fish metaphorically course and dapple through themes of lust, love, and femininity in his "fishing for love" works on paper. Bare-breasted women, southern sirens all, entice viewers with fish painted red, blue, green, and gold. And, as he noted in conversation, fish also spoke to personal histories of "making do" in times of want. He recollected the weirs and fish traps he fashioned and how he huckstered his catch to his Bessemer neighbors. Sometimes there were too many fish; sometimes there were not enough. Still, birds fascinated Mr. Dial in truly magical ways. When he passed, I like to think the birds mourned. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Thornton Dial," Paul Arnett wrote, announcing the death, was a "painter and sculptor whose improbable life's journey led him from a sharecropper's shack in Alabama's Black Belt to recognition by many of the world's leading museums." "Dial's art, by turns ferocious, witty, tender, and incisive," Arnett continued, "developed during many decades of complete obscurity, during which he created 'things' clandestinely--unaware (as he explained later) of the Western concept of 'art' as a special category of human activity--due to apprehensions about how his socially critical and racially conscious work would be received; he broke apart and recycled much of his work as he went along. Only in 1987, at the age of 56, did he come to the attention of the art world and embark on an artistic career that lasted nearly thirty more years and brought him international renown." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Reflecting on the course of his art and its reception in 2008-2009, Mr. Dial produced a series of mixed-media compositions entitled The Birds That Never Learned to Fly. Each of the pieces consisted of a large abstract painting across the face of which Mr. Dial affixed a length of wire or thin metal piping. He wound white rags, caked with dried black paint around coat hangers and hung their stiffened forms from the wire. The hardened knots were discarded homemade artist brushes made roughly fifteen years earlier for a run of abstract paintings on recycled wall-to-wall office carpet. At the time of their making, there was no interest in Mr. Dial's engagement with abstraction and so he rolled the paintings up and placed them in a storage closet along with his ad hoc brushes. Years later, Mr. Dial came across the old work and, inspired by the brushes he had made, he undertook The Birds That Never Learned to Fly. Each brush, a bird, hangs motionless from its perch, a seemingly dead thing denied the liberation and joy of flight--except that it appears against the backdrop of a second iteration of abstract canvases. Birds, Mr. Dial explained, always need someplace to roost. No matter how the birds might fly, their freedom is always conditional and their return to the earth inevitable. …

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopo litical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of sovereign power over the objectified beast. The stakes of Derrida’s ar gument are as significant as its history is burdened. It returns to elements of the longstanding polemic between Foucault and Derrida over madness and history, complicated here by Derrida’s reproach of Agamben’s own, more recent cruel admiration of Foucault. It engages with the question of historical thresholds, regarding both the development of biopower and the history of the menagerie. If we read the Eleventh Session on zoological gardens together with the Twelfth on biopolitical thresholds, their implications for contemporary thinking about human-animal relations become clearer. I will suggest, contra Derrida, that the modern history of zoological gardens does indeed cross important thresholds of biopolitical novelty. While he is no doubt right to insist on the persistence of a human sovereignty that reigns over beasts, his argumentation obscures the emergence, specificity and significance of biopolitical care. Being able to understand and critique contemporary relations of power between humans and animals requires genealogical attention to the particularity of this dispositif. Derrida’s lectures on the beast and the sovereign are erudite and provocative, if incessantly recursive. As he explains in the summary provided for the Ecole’s yearbook, his aim was

Contributing to an intercultural understanding of American and European theatre during the postwar era, this essay explores the significance of the Swedish publisher and producer Lars Schmidt for the introduction and spread of US plays and musicals on his side of the Atlantic. Schmidt’s innovative publishing strategies and production methods, in addition to his skills as a cultural translator, made works like The Glass Menagerie , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and My Fair Lady commercially viable and intelligible to audiences in various national contexts. In the process, he was largely responsible for the emergence of the individual producer in Europe, a position that was perceived as foreign and, at times, vehemently dismissed as too commercial and too American.

IN THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU (1896), H. G. Wells spares none of his characters. If there are no fully human characters in this post-Darwinian novel, then there are also no heroes in this story of imperial collapse working against the grain of those standard adventure tales that had gained popularity in nineteenth-century England. Typically, such colonialist stories featured upper-class or aristocratic heroes bringing progress and civilization to their perceived animal-like primitive Others in the outposts of a growing empire. Unlike the idealized heroes of British adventure fiction, the upper-middle-class characters of this narrative are coded as degenerates, failing to establish productive relations with any of the non-European natives or the lower-class members of British society in the tropics. In this analysis of Moreau, which is often studied as a science fiction (1) work that stages a cross-species conflict between a vivisector and his grotesque Beast-Folk, I argue that the portrayal of British sailors in this narrative deserves more critical attention for the twinned purpose of understanding their class-inflected animalization and involvement in the overseas trade of exotic animals. Gothic studies critics of Moreau have produced thought-provoking commentaries on the racial and gendered implications of degeneration encoded here. The arguments of Kelly Hurley in The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-de-siecle (1996) and Cyndy Hendershot in The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (1998) first drew my attention to the recurring topic of degeneration in the Gothic studies strand of Wells scholarship. Like Hurley, Hendershot has incisively examined the ways in which the first-person narrator, the scientist, and his assistant are all figured as decadent Englishmen, struggling to maintain their masculinity and imperial authority in a tropical outpost. Hurley and Hendershot offer useful insights on the treatment of race and gender in Moreau, but their readings do not tie the central human-animal problematic to the critique of animal trade that is conveyed in the novel. By focusing on the representation of British sailors who are associated with such trade, I build on the analyses of these scholars. In what follows, my goal is to link the animalization of British sailors to the role played by them in the reification of exotic animals in the tropics. Initially, exotic animals of this story are not just objects of scientific research or aspects of an anarchic feminized nature. First and foremost, they are presented as trade goods. I argue that the novel employs animal representation paradoxically, both to critique the capture and commodification of exotic animals and to sustain alienating views about animals and human animality, and this is most clearly revealed in the portrayal of the representatives of British commerce and imperialism. Imperial Menagerie The paucity of criticism on the narrative function of the sailors is surprising, given that the first quarter of the novel focuses exclusively on their encounters with the shipwrecked narrator Edward Prendick. The opening five chapters urge us not to read the central setting of the story--an unnamed tropical island in the South Pacific--as a self-contained space. Most critics misread the novel in exactly this way. For example, in her 2003 article "The Unholy Alliance of Science in The Island of Doctor Moreau," Roslynn Haynes claims that "it is clear from the outset that Moreau embodies several stock characteristics of the alchemist. Thus he lives in such rigorous seclusion that he even intends to deny the shipwrecked Prendick access to his island (itself a physical symbol of his isolation), and his work is conducted in the strictest secrecy in a locked laboratory" (56). Haynes continues, "Moreau, like Frankenstein, has cut himself off from the humanizing influences of society" (57). The main problem with this reading is that it conflates the island with the scientist inhabiting and governing that island. …

The soul is an elusive thing, and anyone who wants to describe it must do so with metaphors, painting it in a picture of words. A geography of inside and outside, of walls and boundaries, is the expression in metaphor of a conception of human beings as creatures whose essence is the capacity for deceit and self-deception. Can we tear down the walls of this defamatory self-conception, this portrayal of the natural condition of persons as being one of hiding? With its rich fictional menagerie of angels and ghosts, daemons, witches, and specters, talking bears and impersonal but sentient matter, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials invites us to do just that.

At the end of his life, Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams was haunted by his inability to recapture the success he found early in his career, the period in which he wrote some of the most famous plays of the twentieth century including The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). The epitome of a prolific writer, Williams drew upon his yearning to reclaim his place as the premiere American playwright, a drive that led him to create over one hundred full-length and one-act plays, the majority of which were written after his last Broadway success with The Night of the Iguana (1961). Despite the quantity of production, there was one story that remained for Williams to tell, one story that had haunted him since his earliest days as a writer, one that he had been unable to bring himself to put down on paper. Here he was, the great innovator of the stage--celebrated for his creativity and originality--and the story that now occupied his every waking thought was the product of someone else's imagination. In 1981, just two years before his untimely death, Williams began work on his adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull entitled The Notebook of Trigorin. One of his final dramatic texts, the play was the product and culmination of a lifelong interest in the artistry of Anton Chekhov and a particular fondness for the Russian writer's masterpiece. Like much of Williams's later works, the play has been largely ignored both by academics and by individuals or theater companies seeking to produce a Williams work. Only a small handful of productions, both professional and amateur, have arisen since the play premiered and only James Fisher's now ten-year-old article takes the play as its primary subject. (1) In these respects, the play has proved unsuccessful as it has failed to claim the kind of critical or scholarly attention given to Williams's earlier works such as The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. The lack of scholarly and production interest in the play only supports the bias toward adaptations often ignored by critics and scholars on the basis of their "derivative" nature. (2) At first glance, the stereotypes associated with adaptations--works that are secondary, derivative, and somehow diminished--seem applicable to this particular drama as it is a rather straightforward retelling of the classic Chekhovian narrative; yet upon further analysis, hugely significant differences begin to appear that make the play entirely unique. Despite the originality that Williams brings to the narrative, the majority of criticism surrounding the text (when it appears at all) as well as the criticism toward the occasional production mimic the suspicion surrounding adaptation in general. As a result, the text has been woefully overlooked, dismissed as an unsuccessful play that fails to live up to the brilliance of the Chekhov original, or the renown of much of Williams's other work. Such a critique is in keeping with the general bias toward adaptations; fidelity and proximity to an original source text have long been considered measures of success by audiences in regard to these works, a phenomenon that the field of adaptation studies has attempted to overwrite with new models that refrain from belittling a text simply because it does not faithfully reproduce the original and live up to some imaginary standard of authenticity. (3) Because the general academic trend is to devalue adaptations, this study seeks to bring attention to this unstudied play and appreciate it on its own terms as an adaptation. (4) This involves not only recognizing its relationship to the Chekhovian original but acknowledging the new directions Williams creates within the narrative and attempting to understand the American playwright's motivations for the changes he makes to the text. In the first part of this study, I examine the history of the adaptation by investigating Williams's affinity for Anton Chekhov as well as his special interest in The Seagull. …

think he is still a phoenix and not a cooked goose." This positive outlook is also at the center of the tragic universe of his plays. He knew from experi ence that "it takes guts and plenty of them to be an artist in this inartistic world." He himself was such an artist and his art created finely tender char acters who nursed their values in a coarse materialistic world. The deeply sensitive Laura (Menagerie), who never gives up her expectation of a long delayed lover, and the dreamy Blanche (Streetcar), who despite everything still clings to the idealistically beautiful even when she is led away to an asylum, are poetically uplifting figures. When his best contemporary critic, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, criticized the unrelieved gloom of Camino Real, Williams told him that, in fact, the play is life-affirming. It celebrates sensitivity. It depicts the "tenderness, humanity of feeling?'the violets in the mountains'?[which] give the dying animal a sort of after-life, or triumph over death." He changed the title of the journal of his last years to "Mes Cahiers Noirs Et Blancs" because he did not "intend to restrict [himself] to comments of a dark nature" only. And, looking back, though he sometimes thought that he was never "meant to exist," he found justification for his life in the fact that otherwise his "created beings would have been denied their passionate exis tence." That has also been the judgment of his readers and admirers. When at Williams's death scene his lawyer Michael Remer said to a policeman, "It's sad, isn't it?" the policeman replied, "Not really. Think of what he left us."

This paper explores the symbolism of "Jewish looks" in the writing of Jewish-American Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Beginning with Stein's early college writing about Jews as a distinct race, and her literary treatise on human categorization, The Making of Americans (written 1903-1911), I trace the shifts in Stein's thinking about Jews forward to her most famous work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Written in fairly conventional prose that was a dramatic break from an already immense oeuvre of extremely experimental writing, The Autobiography presents readers with numerous enigmas nonetheless. In particular, the references to Jews in the book, both crude and carefully coded, provide a textual puzzle that sheds light on Stein's striving to fully understanding human nature and her concerns about how such understanding might be compromised by the practice of portrait writing. (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes text stops here in original.) Because Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas1 is largely about two Jewish American women, one might expect Jewish identity to play an important role in the book. Gertrude Stein was born into an established family of German-American Jews and raised in Oakland, California, and Alice Toklas grew up as part of the well-to-do Jewish community of fin-de-siecle San Francisco. In The Autobiography, despite its account of both their family histories, their Jewish roots are conspicuously absent. Instead, as critic Phoebe Stein Davis notes, there is an almost obsessive use of nationality to describe the vast menagerie of artists, writers, and other chatacters appearing in the autobiography.2 Not surprisingly then, among this cosmopolitan circle of internationals in Paris, Stein and Toldas ate most often described as Americans, never as Jews. Stein's writing about the role of Jews in modern society was latgely oblique: she made infrequent, coded, and puzzling references to Jews and Judaism throughout her writing career, and, in fact, The Autobiography is no exception. While it is not difficult to find allusions to Jews in Stein's earliest writings, manuscripts, and correspondence, and a Jewish lexicon appears in even her most absttact work, these references form neithet a consistent sutvey nor a coherent whole. Instead, as critics such as Maria Damon, Priscilla Wald, and Barbara Will have shown, this oddly constant feature of her work shifted with the many experiments in genre and style over the course of her career. Generally, however, her writing about Jews moved from a facial to a performative undetstanding of Jewish identity, and the latter behavioral identification is what one finds in The Autobiography. The shirts in Stein's writing about Jewish nature, while consonant with the shifts in her ideas about human nature in general, illuminate the impot tance of het concrete ties to early social sciences of race and, later, alert us to the lingering racialism underlying an otherwise anti-essentialist view of human nature. In Tbe Autobiography, her most public book, Stein mentions jews only once with the epithet "He looks like a Jew" (p. 11). This comment is made in reference to Albert Barnes, the wealthy Philadelphia art collector who was not Jewish. Despite its oddity, this Jewish reference to a non-Jew in the non-Jewish-appearing autobiography of rwo Jewish women firmly establishes the import of Stein's interest in Jewish identity on her radically experimental oeuvre. In fact, the Jewish reference to Albert Barnes is part of the formal challenge of the book as a whole. For although the prose is relatively sttaightforward, Tin Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas famously breaks with the traditions of autobiography and biography, first and foremost as an autobiography written by someone other than its titular subject. Stein writes the book in the narrative voice of Toklas recounting her relationship with Stein and the arc of Stein's literary career alongside the careers of Picasso, Matisse, and other contemporaries. …

Though Baudelaire's "Dedicace Arsene Houssaye" provides a dubious manifesto of the prose poem genre, (1) it more importantly builds a network of repeated images and allusions from which, along with the other prose poems in the collection (Le Spleen de Paris or Petits Poemes en prose, 1869) the reader may piece together the prose poems' poetics. Of these, the presence of the snake, and the invitation to perform multiple surgeries on it, are among the most intriguing. Now exceedingly familiar to readers of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire's serpent might be considered, in literary circles at least, a dead metaphor. Yet by reading beyond the anticipated symbolic power of the snake (the power of evil, the power of the phallus), and of surgery (a masculine vocation, an act of precision), one begins to understand the serpent as not just an ambiguous simulacrum of the prose poems, but a simulacrum of the prose poems' ambiguity. In Le Spleen de Paris, modulations of recognizable and ostensibly masculine acts and images not only erode articulations of gender throughout the prose poems' narrative, thematic and metaphorical systems, but in so doing, accentuate the genre ambiguity implicit in the poeme en prose. Baudelaire's serpent has become a well-known figure in the French literary menagerie, playing a crucial, metaphorical role in the characterization of would-be textual operations in Le Spleen de Paris: Mon cher ami, je vous envoje un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu'il n'a ni queue ni tete, puisque tout, au contraire, y est la fois tete et queue, alternativement et reciproquement. Considerez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodites cette combinaison nous offre tous, vous, a moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper ou nous voulons, moi ma reverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; carje ne suspens pas la volonte retive de celui-ci au fil interminable d'une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertebre, et les deux morceaux deette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister a part. Dans l'esperance que quelques-uns de ces troncons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j'ose vous dedier le serpent tout entier. (OCI, 275) (2) The versed reader has already encountered sundry endangered species in Baudelaire's metaphorical bestiary, among them the tortured albatross, the displaced swan, the mentally imprisoned cat (Miner 1997, 105) and the disoriented bat. It is tempting at first to rely upon this serpent, passively waiting to be clinically segmented and reattached by the reader cum surgeon, as a viable if vulnerable analog of the prose poem collection. Baudelaire's serpent appears to embody vital signs for reading the genre and the text. In fact, the characterization of the serpent and reader is at first so convincing, one easily forgives a zoological inaccuracy: while some small worms (planaria) will regenerate if cut lengthwise, no snake could survive the sort of vivisection Baudelaire prescribes. Poetic license justifies such biological imprecision, yet the figure of the serpent still conceals the anatomy of the prose poems. For the reader who approaches Le Spleen de Paris as a group of poems, the metaphor of the serpent seems in itself superfluous, more a decoy than a model for reading the collection. While Baudelaire did specify in a letter to Vigny that the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal had a beginning, an end, and a lexical order, (3) readers do not necessarily feel bound to follow poetry collections methodically from the first poem to the last. Baudelaire's references to the serpent and to the "interminable thread of a superfluous plot" represent a rejection of the boundaries normally imposed upon prose, not poetry, specifically the narrative prose of the novel and the short story. Even if we consider each element in the collection to be a short prose piece, the suggested dynamics of surgeon and snake, reader and text, are not obvious. …

karin ueltschi, La Mesnie Hellequin en conte et en rime: Memoire mythique et poetique de la recomposition. Nouvelles Bibliotheque du Moyen Âge 88. Paris: Honore Champion, 2008. Pp. 780. isbn: 9-782-745317-45-2. 120. Karin Ueltschi has produced an impressive volume that studies all the traditions, texts, and parallel retellings pertaining to the 'Mesnie Hellequin,' more familiar to Anglo-Saxon readers as the 'Wild Hunt.' From the beginning, the author underlines the difficulty of such a study, since the tale of the chasse sauvage does not exist in its entirety anywhere: all writers who allude to it select some aspects or details that prove useful to their argument, but take the whole story for granted, as if everybody at that time knew exactly what it was all about. And that was probably the case, during the medieval period at least-even though later renditions suggest part of the tradition got lost over the centuries. The scope of the study is indeed staggering: Ueltschi starts with the early medieval attestations of her material, which she, as well as most readers of Arthuriana, is the most familiar with, but then she follows the tracks of her query until its contemporary appearances-and in so doing, she also widely enlarges her geographical field of study, to the New World and Quebecois folklore. She combines an extreme attention to texts, and words, with an anthropological approach that allows her to make sense of seemingly scattered elements. Her goal is to reconstruct a myth, from its first implementation into the Western imaginary to its late rewritings, and to study the grammar that it uses to develop a wide web of meanings and correlations. The first Chapter, arguing with Philippe Walter that 'le mythe est le discours commente du nom proper,' focuses on the name of the leader of the Mesnie-not as easy a task as it might at first appear, considering how many variants of this name do exist, and how prudent the author chooses to be before accepting a specific variant; from Hellequin to Abonde, to Herne or Erla or Arcturus/Arthur, from Latin texts to vernacular tales, one slowly sees emerging the blurred shape of a rather disturbing, ambiguous figure, connected to death, hell, and supernatural punishment, but presenting also burlesque and iconoclastic aspects, to some extent, in the vernacular occurrences. Chapter two draws the literary map of the semiotic elements that build the background that allows the Mesnie to function, whether it is the 'menagerie' that surrounds the leader, the various appearances of this leader himself (and especially the uncanny resemblance between Hallequin and Merlin), or the way time itself becomes 'elastique' in the vicinity of Hellequin's retinue-or its simpler, more mundane manifestations. …

Parole et silence dans " The Glass Menagerie ", " Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ", " Suddenly Last Summer "

We live in an instant age. Everything from the most complex information to giant buildings, from vast networks of electric circuitry to blenderized gourmet meals, can be produced or made available in a flash. It should be of little wonder, then, that we also tend to create instant major figures in the arts; and our theatre has been no exception. Of the five most important Americans writing for the theatre in the twentieth century Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee only O'Neill's reputation and stature were built cumulatively over a long period of time. And of the five, only O'Neill (and possibly Williams) approached the prodigious productivity of their continental counterparts. Each of the other four achieved the status of "major" playwright with the professional production of his first or second full length play. (Wilder: Our Town first, 1938; Williams: The Glass Menagerie second, 1945; Miller: All My Sonssecond, 1947; Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? first, 1962). Having such a large international reputation can be a heavy burden for an artist to bear at any time, but it is particularly difficult when it is thrust upon him early in his