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Early in our careers, I suspect, many comparatists have had to ask, "What are we supposed to teach?" For me this issue first surfaced during a job interview with a university that was building comparative literature by piggy-backing new hires partly in established departments and partly in the new program. Somehow, in the confused weeks before the MLA, I learned that I was to interview with English but not that I should also do so with Russian. So there I was, just one step past graduate school (where we were able to move quite freely among the languages, philosophy, and history) and already entangled in the uncertainties concerning where I belonged, at least in the university's day-to-day role as a teaching institution. Does this story strike a chord? In my case, I soon found that unlike my research in French, German, and Russian, the two-fifths of me assigned to comparative teaching had to rely largely on translations. This situation even prevailed at an overseas campus in France, where students on a junior-year study abroad were generally taking third-year language courses and still not ready for much reading in French. Of course, issues of language and culture were directly relevant there, unlike at the home campus where they could seem vaguely pedantic. For comparatists in the U.S., I found, teaching and scholarship often had to exist in two separate compartments, even after the federally funded language programs of the 1960s. So, several decades after that initiation, with world literature now on our agenda, how much has the situation changed? Here I need to distinguish between comparatists like myself, trained when the English, French, and German triad reigned supreme, so that even my Russian seemed exotic in comparison, and those comparatists I admire as interregionalists. These are the scholars with a knowledge (say) of Arabic, Bengali, or Chinese (people in the mold of Said, Spivak, or Eoyang). I like to imagine that these comparatists, with their more-or-less equal command of a Western literature alongside their knowledge of another geocultural tradition, are better suited to teach world literature with our field's ideal of even-handedness. Yet if world literature as a subject for undergraduates must also mean, at its most basic level, the literature from a worldwide sweep of regions, even these comparatists must accept the challenge of moving out into a larger variety of traditions. Obviously, a good world literature course does not have to be that inclusive, and a well-focused case study that explores a smaller number of traditions at greater depth can do a lot to expand horizons. Nonetheless, "world literature" is a label that promises a breadth of coverage that students need to encounter in some form, somewhere. Lacking the interregional expertise just mentioned, I have still gradually edged my way from comparative to world literature. The first step in this direction was to accept the value of teaching works I knew only in translation. For several decades I have taught in an English department with established courses on Continental Fiction for majors and on World Masterpieces for the general student body. Both of them boiled down to the same thing: works from the Western tradition not originally written in English and hence taught in translation. These were ideal courses for someone with my training, given the power of the French and Russian traditions in the novel, the importance of some striking achievements in German, and the rise of modern drama. In time, however, I compromised my conscience as a comparatist by adding other figures to fill out the picture: Verga, Pirandello, and Calvino despite my limited Italian, and Ibsen, Garcia Marquez, and Kundera though I lacked meaningful Norwegian, Spanish, and Czech. The significance of this urge to "fill out the picture" in taking me beyond "knowing what you teach in the original" finally dawned on me several years ago. …

This paper will consider only a few aspects of Lincoln’s response to the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). It will not provide an account of the history of the case, or a reading of either Justice Taney’s majority opinion, or the dissenting opinions by Justices McLean and Curtis. It also will not discuss Lincoln’s use of the decision to advance the general slave power conspiracy thesis—the claim that slaveholders, in defense of slavery, must seek to dominate every polity of which they are a part, and to that extent must subvert democracy. Nor will it consider the special slave power conspiracy thesis Lincoln advanced in the 1858 “House Divided” speech, the claim that Stephen Douglas, along with Chief Justice Taney and Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, had been maturing a scheme to generate a “second Dred Scott decision” that would prohibit even the states from abolishing slavery since before Douglas authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Nor will it consider Douglas’s own interesting attempt to subvert the decision through the Freeport Doctrine. This paper will consider only the way Lincoln’s attempts to oppose and transform that decision raise some of the deepest questions about the role of underlying principles in politics and law. The central political problem Lincoln had to face in confronting the Dred Scott decision was that it ruled that the key plank of his party’s platform was unconstitutional, holding that the federal government could not prohibit slavery from spreading to the western territories. Lincoln responded to this argument in detail in the Cooper Union address in 1860, making clear that if one looks

Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature London and New York: Verso, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. Comparatists interested in issues involving world literature will recognize Christopher Prendergast as Mary Ann Caws's associate in putting together the HarperCollins World Reader (1994). This ambitious, wide-ranging editorial project represented one of the first attempts at giving a truly global scope to world-literature anthologies in the United States, which at that time were almost exclusively Western in emphasis. Prendergast, who was then affiliated with the City University of New York, has now moved to Cambridge University; and this collection of fifteen essays, ten of which have previously appeared elsewhere, reflects that itinerary. No fewer than six come from scholars at Cambridge, four more from New York and its environs, and two others from London, leaving two essays from Denmark and one by Stanford's Franco Moretti as improbably "exotic" additions. Possible doubts about a narrowly North Atlantic and Anglo-American agenda, however, are quickly dispelled by the book's broad range of topics. Taking its origin in Prendergast's divided response to Pascale Casanova's La Republique mondiale des lettres (1999), which he admires for its scope but which he contends defined world literature too exclusively in terms of national literatures competing for dominance in a global market, Debating World Literature avoids any single overarching thesis. Unlike David Damrosch, whose What Is World Literature? proposed the criterion of "works that circulate well in translation," or Sarah Lawall, who recommends attending to the acknowledged masterpieces from other cultures while recognizing that one's own culture must have some priority, Prendergast believes that world literature still has the same status that it had for Goethe: it remains a concept "open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate" (viii). In this spirit the essays in DebatingWorld Literature seek to critique at least four assumptions of varying orders of magnitude that have guided thinking on this subject. The most basic critique centers on the concept of literature itself. Reminding us in his own essay that the original republic of letters featured writing that would not qualify as literary today, Prendergast follows up with Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig's discussion of the distinctly non-belle-lettristic view of literature behind Goethe's famous coinage. Variations on this theme continue with Moretti's comparatist manifesto, "Conjectures on World Literature," with its iconoclastic call for a "second-hand" scholarship (151) that, instead of pursuing the hopeless goal of reading the world's literatures, would limit itself to synthesizing the conclusions of specialists from disparate locales and regions. Only by avoiding a traditional immersion in specific works might students of world literature come to learn the true nature of a field whose basic procedures still need to be established. Equally provocative is Simon Goldhill's "Literary History without Literature," whose case studies of Greek, Roman, and early Christian antiquity bring out their widely varying practices of "language production and consumption."He thereby suggests "the destructive poverty of the category of 'literature' " without even having to leave a familiarly "Western" terrain (196). A similar critique of narrowly literary definitions of verbal art marks Bruce Clunies Ross's "Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry." Ranging from the Caribbean to Australia, from Ireland to the United States, and through England itself (and addressing Indian or Nigerian bilingualism as well), Ross shows how variations in contemporary spoken English undermine the vision of poetry as purely written that was associated with older, imperial doctrines of standard English. Prendergast gives this point its fullest global reach when he acknowledges that "both historically and geographically, the oral vastly exceeds the written" (4). …

There are two varieties of Virginia Woolf studies. One variety, which includes the studies of Auerbach, Naremore, Leaska, and others, describes Woolf's technical experiments.' The other, represented by Marder, Heilbrun, Showalter, and Bazin, describes her ideology.2 The two varieties do not, however, represent opposing schools of opinion, for the authors of each type, rejecting the distinction between form and content, generously tend to derive the other type's conclusions from their own premises. Woolf herself lends authority to this procedure, for she equates the modernist novel with the androgynous sensibility she advocates, and argues that the Edwardian realist novel's dogmatism and concern with purely external detail is symptomatic of the moral and artistic decrepitude of the patriarchy.3 The equation of feminist content and modernist form is misleading, for it connects certain political ideas with formal principles within which those ideas cannot be argued with integrity. If the modernist novel, as Woolf insists, must not be tendentious, but must instead record the impressions that fall upon the mind like an "incessant shower of innumerable atoms," then advocacy, even of those values necessary for writing such a work, can have no place within its "semi-transparent envelope."4 Were Woolf to preach in To the Lighthouse, she would, apparently, flaw that novel no less than the narrator's outbursts, according to Woolf, flaw Jane Eyre. How is it, then, that To the Lighthouse can be, as it is, at the same time an example of a form that has renounced overt persuasion, and a powerful presentation of certain moral and political ideas that its author expects the reader to adopt? Form and content, it seems, are not only to be distinguished, they are to be opposed. Perhaps our mistake is to assume that form and content must be consonant with each other, when in fact their dissonance may reflect those contradictions that artists, like everybody else, must, and yet cannot ever, resolve. Phyllis Rose has lucidly argued that the androgyny Woolf advocates in A Room of One's Own is, essentially