...Stephen G. Nichols Copyright © 2010 The Trustees of Columbia University 2010 Stephen G. Nichols PHILOLOGY AS BLOOD SPORT: THE ROMANIC REVIEWS FIRST DECADE I t is not exactly fashionable today to call our field Romance philology. Describing a colleague as a "philologist" in fact might well...

... to long-standing disputes over innate character versus belief to account for political differences; and how the notion of "stained blood"-the product of a peninsular vision of heresy-acquired new meanings as it was transported to the Americas. Evangelists proceeded to paint modern 8. Fernando de Avendano...

... and roam through the night, returning with her mouth daubed with blood, and landscapes littered with mutilated bodies, but also made so manifest that to read of the dawn replacing night becomes a nearly physical experience. "Les heures passerent. Peu apeu, insectes et crapauds-buffles se turent. Le ciel...

..., Children ofthe New World, published in French in 1962. The novel depicts not only the martyrs of the revolution, the "major operations"5 of the War of Independence, the blood spilled during the demonstrations of May 8, 1945 (119-21), but also public ceremonial burials such as that of the elderly Aicha...

... practice of bloodletting (or “surgery”), which was employed as the final recourse of treatment after “regimen” (accounting for factors like diet and environment) and drug therapy both failed to produce the desired result (Glick, Livesey, and Wallis 335). The treatment was thought to work because blood...

..., and Angela Davis and Leila Ahmed were commentators. 14 From Children of the New World, which should be read with Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth to gender Fanon's scene, to The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry, written in 1997, is a trajectory where fiction and historiography merge and the inevitable...

... syntax and familiar lexicon with an elevated style, Vallès-Vingtras uses a prophetic address to imagine the positive legacy of the present battle: the freedom and dignity of the next generation, represented here by the “gamin.” The imagined future freedom redeems the blood of martyred fighters whose...

.... The Horst Wessel Song sounds in the air and Jewish blood spurts from the knife . . . Jewish books are burning, a khumesh16 is burning, Sholem Aleichem17 is burning, the Prophets are burning. The Talmud is burning, Peretz18 is burning, Herzl,19 and Leyvik,20 Medem,21 Borokhov,22 and Karl Marx. Rambam23...

... confusion or lack of mastery over his desire ("D'un Creur" [1.1.120]) stems from the troubling presence of Andromaque in Epire. Racine creates a Pyrrhus whose feelings are no longer nationalistic or ethnocentric. The Greeks complain that Pyrrhus has forgotten "his blood and his promise" (1.1.69). By "blood...

... action, and its psychological connotations of dullness or lethargy extend the traumatic effect. The psychological condition of colonial trauma produces a confused ex-stasis of movement and stillness, in which light and blood are metonyms for a knowledge and presence of historical violence, yet each...

... that haunted him in your Edgar Allan Poe. In these correspondences that span the ocean there is a perpetual pledge, and one which needs no wars or alliances to reaffirm the living unity of our two peoples and of [sic] the impossibility of ever separating them without drawing blood from the whole world. Let us...

..., her female characters are shadows she invents. And like Odysseus who, before descending into the other world, had to sacrifice animals to animate and be able to speak to the dead, the author nourishes these shadows with her blood so that they can live their lives in the chiaroscuro of writing.9...

... is an allusion to the headless statue of Napoleon's first empress, Josephine de Beauharnais. It was "beheaded" covertly in 1991, and in later years spattered with blood-like red paint, but it still stands in La Savane, the popular seaside garden of Fort-de-France, Martinique. It so happens that Celanire...

... even mine]. For Agilulfo, the consequences are serious: in yet another biting parody of the "obscene underside of the Law," Calvino informs the reader that saving a virgin daughter of royal blood will earn you an immediate knighthood-saving an already deflowered daughter of royal blood, however...

... discourses traveled to the New World under policies that defined limpieza de sangre. Jews, Muslims, and Indians, she argues, had polluted blood that made them suspect even after their acceptance of Christianity. Silverblatt goes on to argue that this racial discourse constituted the geopolitical modernity...

...-biological, part-sociological construct that confounded notions of an individual character determined by genetics with one molded in the collective environment. As Klee puts it herself, the human being develops through the inscription of discourses into flesh and blood. Hence the body was thought...

..., and blood-­drinking involving Thyestes and Atreus, the u­ ncle and b­ rother of Homer s Agamemnon and Menelaos. Like Alfieri, Foscolo aimed at inspiring pity and terror in his audience by evoking the cruel grandeur of legendary times. As Walsh argues, his much ­later Ajace remains faithful to the same...

... to mediocrity. 9 Baudelaire once said: “I say Long live the revolution ! As I would say Long live destruction ! . . . Long live death ! . . . All of us have the republican spirit in our blood as we have syphilis in our bones; we have a democratic and syphilitic infection” (quoted in Benjamin, Charles 14...

... precise anatomical terms to describe the components of the eye's mechanism: iris, lens, vitreous body, retina-terms from the field of physiological optics that divide the organ according to its various abstracted functions. There is, in this description, a striking conjunction of living flow (of blood...

.... And in the metropole, where the cluster is more diverse, what we in our youth thought of as "postcolonial" is appropriated into an identitarian turf battle by academic culture. The culture of the academy is unrecognizable, like high blood pressure, and yet it transforms everything-it is, generally speaking, in most...