Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America 

About: Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America is an academic journal published by Modern Language Association. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Literary criticism & Poetry. It has an ISSN identifier of 0030-8129. Over the lifetime, 5707 publications have been published receiving 48133 citations. The journal is also known as: PMLA.

The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction

Abstract: Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his “audience” to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point. All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers. In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real—not imagined—fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative

Abstract: Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

What Is New Formalism

Abstract: This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.

The New Modernist Studies

Abstract: In our introduction to bad modernisms, we traced the emergence of the new modernist studies, which was born on or about 1999 with the invention of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its annual conferences; with the provision of exciting new forums for exchange in the journals Modernism/Modernity and (later) Modernist Cultures; and with the publication of books, anthologies, and articles that took modernist scholarship in new methodological directions. When we offered that survey, one of our principal interests was to situate these events in a longer critical history of modernism in the arts. In the present report, we want to attend more closely to one or two recent developments that may be suggestive about the present and the immediate future of the study of modernist literature. Part of the empirical, though certainly far from scientific, basis of our considerations lies in our recent service on the MSA Book Prize committee (Walkowitz in 2005, Mao in 2006), through which we became acquainted with dozens of recent contributions to the field.

The Encyclopedie Methodique

Abstract: EVEN BEFORE he had brought to completion the great thirty-five-volume Encyclopidie?by the publication in 1776-77 of its SuppUment in five volumes, and in 1780 of Pastor Mouchon's Table analytique et raisonnie in two volumes?a now relatively forgotten Parisian bookseller, publisher, author, and translator, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, had already begun preparations to put out a new Encyclopidie, to be called the Encyclopidie mithodique, ou par ordre de matieres. Unlike Diderot's original, this Encyclo? pidie was to be composed of a collection of in? dividual "dictionaries," each one dealing with a different subject. Although the entrepreneur was aware from the start of the magnitude of the task, he could not foresee the many difficulties and delays which were to beset the undertaking before it was to be finally completed by his daughter, fifty years later, as "la collection la plus vaste qu'ait jamais produite la librairie francaise."1 It might seem that the purchasing public's "fermentation encyclopedique"2 would have al? ready been satisfied by the publication of seven distinct editions of the Encyclopidie?with variiant forms?in France, Italy, and Switzerland,3 but Panckoucke, fortified by the "habitude" which he had gained "des grandes entreprises de librairie," had resolved to attempt the "effrayante" undertaking after having "tres murement pense" about it, and after having "considere la possibilite de son execution sous toutes les faces" (MerF, 1 Dec. 1781, p. 148). Just when work began on this ambitious scheme is not known, but Panckoucke said in his Mer cure de France of 1 December 1781, that "il y a trois ans qu'on s'occupe de cette entreprise" (p. 153),4 thus putting the date of its inception within the year 1778. The royal privilege was granted on 7 June 1780,5 and by 1 December 1781, according to the publisher, one volume of plates was already engraved and at least twelve volumes of text were ready for the printers, with "aucune partie qui ne soit tres avancee" {MerF, 1 Dec. 1781, p. 153). Neither is it entirely clear whether the idea for a new encyclopaedia, arranged by subjects, was originally Panckoucke's. In the above-mentioned notice in the Mercure de France Panc? koucke stated that a certain M. Deveria had previously accepted subscriptions for an En? cyclopedie par ordre de matieres, to be published in Amsterdam and Liege at a price of 546 francs. This planned publication was apparently never carried out, for Panckoucke announced that those subscribers to Deveria's work who were not sat? isfied with a new proposal whereby he would furnish forty-nine volumes?a half more than promised by Deveria?for 672 francs, could request reimbursement for their advance payments "par les personnes chez lesquelles ils ont souscrit," or by M. Deveria himself, then in Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques near the Val de Grace. The fact that Panckoucke carried this state? ment in Deveria's behalf would seem to indicate that he had arrived at some sort of an agreement with him. It is not impossible that the latter ound himself incapable of carrying out an undertaking of this magnitude, or was in financial difiiculties, and that he had turned over his idea and materials to Panckoucke. At all events, Panckoucke and his associate, Plomteux of Liege?who was to share in the enterprise for some ten years?had, by 1 Decem? ber 1781, a clearly formulated plan of the project, which they outlined in the notice of the Mer cure de France, using much the same wording as was to appear in Panckoucke's prospectus for the new encyclopaedia, two forms of which appeared dur? ing the following year, and which may be seen in the Bibliotheque Nationale.6 After stating his main thesis?that it was ab? solutely necessary that a new form be adopted, that i , that the new work be arranged, not ac-