...Jonathan Arac Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995) demonstrates the work a novel can do in speaking (up) for the human in the current life of the United States, even though the novel as an institution has become residual, as print literature yields to other media forms. Through his epigraph from...

... to abolish slavery is the most recent object that his interpreters have invoked to represent this contention. But the crisis with which I shall be primarily concerned took place within the speaker of Emerson’s “Experience.” Although this speaker articu- lated it in an idiom that was implicated...

.... Vivid in this picture is the poet’s meditation on life’s inevitable journey toward death. The speaker’s longing for his diseased father is given a ghostly shape in the third stanza: It was my father I saw this morning waving to me from the trees. I almost called to him, until I...

... speaker recognizes his “own” commu- nity, however uncomfortable the identification, but though Morrissey’s poem reinscribes the “unwieldy” features of Mahon’s Belfast, there is resolutely no “we” (Mahon 1999: 13). Morrissey’s poem renders labor invisible by ascribing agency to shops and the city...

... shifting edge between life and death, enchantment and disenchantment, what was and what could be, so that when this lineage of imaginary speakers asks as if one—What will happen after I’m gone?—we realize we will have arrived at that moment of being truly together only when we are able to maintain...

... a certain observable truth to it. Modern Greek is, of course, a “small” literary language, with, relatively speaking, a minuscule number of speakers and readers. But, with its connection to the prestige of classical Greek, appropriated in northern and western Europe since the eighteenth century as part...

..., in his great book on Arabic grammar, al- Kit b, explains al- mubtada is about that which is articu- lated in the dynamic interrelation between the speaker and the auditor, and so it s a dynamically changing positionality. The beginning is in the commu- nicative act. There can be no speaking subject...

... romantic although often cleverly dubbed “post-Romantic.” The subject’s pronoun can be vague—a plural “we” or a dissociative “one,” sometimes the third-person personal “he” as the speaker—but is always consistent. The speaker is a poet-figure evolving over the course of poems: a modern person...

..., extending the formal possibilities of rhyme and meter in Dickinson, and the materiality of words, through philosophical reiterations, in Stein. Both of them address issues that keep distance from the hypertrophied speaker of canonic poetry, which centralizes in himself the totalizing vision of the world...

... be said to be a “native speaker”? And if one is not a native speaker of any language, what kind of speaker is one? 4. Perhaps a nonspeaker? A silent speaker? A clairvoyant? 5. The spirits are telephoned. Who invented it? DADA (Dada Excites Every- thing, 1921 6. Hannah Weiner presents us...

... perspective in a poem from 1922, which first appeared in her Lunar Bae- deker collection from that year. ‘‘Der Blinde Junge’’ dramatizes an extraor- dinary transaction that occurs when the speaker comes across a blind war victim busking on a Vienna pavement. The dam Bellona littered...

... that alarmism fostered concerning performative public discourse. The supposed danger of actual invasion is the poem’s superficial topic; as the speaker contemplates the underlying causes of the crisis, he reflects on various modes...

... between the speakers about the human scale of knowledge (“the world must be measured by eye”) instead of the absolute knowledge of any deity results in a string of superlatives (Sidney says those who defend poetry will “dwell upon superlatives The quoted negations transform the given...

...: Heinemann, 1975), 55–62. 14. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera = The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 81. 164  boundary 2  /  Fall 2009 of American culture and the concerted efforts of educators to stamp it out, suggests that it is less a matter of Pidgin speakers...

...- illiterate speaker of nonstandard language, allowing no mediating figure of cultural authority and standard usages to come between the reader and the orally modeled voice of Huck. In his author’s “Explanatory” note on the book’s language, Twain’s point was that he used seven different varieties...

... it: When I got out into the field (in Australia) I found that I actually understood very little about how language is structured, Dixon writes. But I learnt, little by little, by undertaking analysis of texts, attempt- ing grammatical generalizations, and checking these with speakers (Dixon 1997: 136...

... speaker observes the reaction of a specific reader of the “wise book”: the “Graikos” of the original text, who of course is not just a Greek, as unfortunately rendered in the translation I quoted above. This term “Graikos” in Cavafy's poetry usually connects the modern Hellenic diaspora in the East...

... in his aesthetic development, marking a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the dominant, ‘‘romantic’’ literary ethos of the times.9 Thus, in the latter poem, the dominant mood is set by the speaker’s asking the beloved not to ask for the kind of love formerly givenpahli si mahabbata singular love...

... fif- teen herself; neither of us is sure how old he was, but most likely seventeen or eighteen. She never told me what he ordered; she never told me what they talked about. But she did tell me that the car he had driven to Kmart had speakers embedded in the wheel wells, so at some point she...

...,” hence likely an acquired language, more so given the reference to his “Egyptian feeling.” The speakers addressing Raphael, the Hellenophone, represent the altogether un-Hellenized Egyptian indigene: they are Copts, hence non-Chalcedonian and doctrinally in opposition to Byzantium, again, the church...