WORLD LITERATURE: GLOBAL TAPESTRY

JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY^/1
 
 

{There is a tale told about a small village in Japan. One fine spring morning a man fishing saw a huge tidal wave far out to sea, and approaching fast. He ran through the village with frantic haste, knocking on doors and summoning the best spinners and weavers of the town, who came streaming after him holding their wheels and shuttles. There on the sand, they quickly spun a gigantic tapestry, rich in colors and patterns, that formed the picture of a peaceful empty blue sky and a calm green sea, alive with purple seaweed floating in the still waters, and silver fish at play. Not a sound was heard in the air until a little girl, sucking her thumb and staring at the cloth, said, "It's very pretty, but it's not real, is it?" Instantly the huge wall of water tore through the canvas and roared down upon the village, sweeping it out to sea. /2

   In doing so I am responding to my experiences at an English Institute held at Harvard in 1979, titled "Opening Up The Canon," at which Leslie Silko, who is Pueblo Indian, Edward Brathwaite, who is Afro-Caribbean, Denis Brutus, who is Black South African, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., who is Afro-American, spoke about the teaching of literature and the Canon./4 I am also responding to the furor at Stanford University where students objected to the Great Books Canon in toto. Weaving that together in a tapestry with the experiences of my students, I have been reshaping and revisioning our standard course so that it is both changed and yet the same. During the time that I have been changing the course I have been involving my faculty colleagues and members of the community in this revisioning by means of conferences, two of them sponsored by the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, and with publications.

   Our first conference was on the interdisciplinary multiculturalism present at the court of Alfonso el Sabio of Castile where that wise king in the thirteenth century had Arabs and Jews translate Greek texts into Latin so that Europeans could become less ignorant. I was able to show how that one individual, through multiculturalism and collegiality, was able to expand knowledge in law, astronomy, philosophy, ethics, poetry, history and many other disciplines. I was able to show how that explosion of knowledge was then transmitted from Spain to Italy, shaping Dante Alighieri's education and writings. This material, which has resulted in published essays, influences not only the Introduction to World Literature course but also the Medieval Studies Program's Introduction to Medieval Studies course I also teach.

   Our next conference was co-sponsored with Black Studies and was on the Roman African, freed slave, playwright Terence and his influence upon European literature, titled "Terence through Time." Present at that conference were members of the Eden Theatrical Workshop from Denver who have produced two of Terence's plays, the Adelphoi (The Brothers) and Phormio - and who this year will perform Aristophanes' Lysistrata. My World Literature students attended these plays and Lucy Walker, Eden's Director, came to Boulder and spoke with the classes about her productions, noting that it was difficult for twentieth-century Black American actors to be as impudent and insolent to their white associates today as Terence had his slaves be to their masters in the second century before Christ, that even a century after slavery in America there is still fear and restraint. Slaves in Rome were often more literate than their masters, could earn money and could buy their freedom, all of which is shown in these laughter-filled play texts. Students, both white and black, write excellent and perceptive papers about these tragi-comic differences. I use the Penguin text of the Phormio with its splendid cover of an Afro-Roman portrait of a young man, and my students read the play in parts, with laughter and understanding./5

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Later in the course we compare the trickster-saviour qualities of Phormio and the slave Geta, who really through his mischief saves everyone, with Pandarus in Troilus and Criseyde , with the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and with Mak in the Second Shepherds' Play, who are personae for the authors of these works in relation to their readers, discussing also Brer Rabbit, Cayote and Anansi the Spider stories./6

   As a result of this work with Terence I wish to write a scholarly book on the influence of Terence called Latin with Laughter: Terence through Time,/7 demonstrating his impact upon Augustine, another African writer, who attended performances of Terence's plays in the theatre at Carthage; upon the medieval German nun, Hrotswitha, and her plays; upon French and English monastic liturgical drama at Fleury and Winchester where there were fine illuminated manuscripts of Terence's plays; upon Dante Alighieri who titled his great work the Commedia after Terence's title for his collected plays, the Comedies ; upon Chaucer, whose dramatis personae of a General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is borrowed from that to Terence's works; upon Christine de Pizan, who read these texts in their beautiful manuscripts in the King of France's Library, then wrote her own beautiful manuscripts; upon the Wakefield Master, whose grumbling fifteenth-century Yorkshire shepherds are borrowed from grumbling and laughing Roman house slaves; upon Montaigne, who had Terence's line "Homo sum: nichil humani me alienum puto," "I am a man; therefore nothing human is alien to me," painted upon his study ceiling; upon Shakespeare's Comedies and those of Moliere; and upon Madame Dacier, who learnedly edited these works from the manuscripts in the King's Library. Because Terence's world is about a "world upside down," where slaves win their freedom and women achieve security, women especially have been attracted to his works. His Latin is exquisite and therefore medieval oblates and Renaissance grammar schoolboys all studied him. The word Humanitas was adopted by Cicero from that line in Terence's play and became our own "Humanities." But too often it is forgetten that it was said by a freed African slave to his white Roman masters, by a Black playwright to his white audiences.

   Our third conference was "Tales within Tales: Apuleius through Time" to which we invited the Eden Theatrical Workshop members such as Lucy Walker, its Director, and Newrise Battle, its star actor, who, for the conference, read Apuleius' Golden Ass. Apuleius was an Roman African lawyer and writer of the second century after Christ. His great novel, The Golden Ass, is a retelling of a Greek story about one Lucius who, curious about magic, finds himself transformed into an ass until he eats roses which turn him back again into a man. Apuleius says he writes the tale in Latin about Greece with a reed pen from the African Nile upon papyrus. He ends it by having the fair and grey-eyed hero Lucius become the dark African Apuleius and the transformation back into human shape takes place under the aegis of the Egyptian goddess Isis. While Lucius/Apuleius is in his ass-shape he hears countless tales and tales within tales; he witnesses murders, observes the conditions of slaves and beasts and participates in, then chooses to flee from, acts of bestiality.

New York, AMS Press. ISBN 0-404-64252-7

Constance Wright and I are editing the proceedings of this conference and I also include the text of Apuleius' Golden Ass in the Introduction to World Literature course whose students frequently vote it their favorite text - in competition with Homer's Odyssey and Sophocles' Oedipus. When I teach it, my students volunteer its similarity to the power of story-telling to teach and console in the publications of Leslie Silko. Now Leslie Silko had been a major speaker at the Harvard English Institute on "Opening Up The Canon." I had heard her there spellbind her audience with a Pueblo Indian tale about a mother and her daughter who dies, the mother in her grief throwing her clothes off the mesa which all turn into butterflies./8 Leslie has given us permission to republish that tale in our volume of essays, Tales within Tales: Apuleius through Time. It is a powerful analogue to the consolation tale told at the center of Apuleius' Golden Ass , of Cupid and Psyche, "Psyche" meaning both butterfly and soul. It is also, like Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, a Demeter and Persephone, mother and lost daughter story. After Leslie Silko told it to us, I spoke with her about the importance of what she was saying for those of us working with scribal texts which include oral narrations embedded within them, such as Dante's Commedia, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, and the Arabian Nights.

   This story, Leslie Silko says, is told when there is great sorrow. It is analogous to the story told in the Golden Ass where Lucius, metamorphosed as a donkey overhears a story he longs to write down, told by an old woman to a young girl. In the story within the story Psyche, whose name means butterfly and soul, is the third of three sisters, and is so beautiful that her sisters and even Venus are jealous of her and they all try to destroy her. However, Cupid falls in love with her. She, through curiosity, first tries to see him, awakening him, then must carry out impossible tasks to regain him, getting help from everyone with this. Finally their marriage is blessed by the gods and her child is born called Joy. But the old woman who has told the consolation story to the young girl now hangs herself and the robbers in the cave devour the supper she has prepared for them - just as we have devoured her story.

   Going backwards through time, through Laguna Pueblo and English, through Latin and Madauran, to Greek and Phoenician, is the story the disguised Odysseus (the king who seems a beggar) tells the swineherd Eumaios (the slave who was a prince captured and sold by Phoenician pirates). In the story he (who is really Odysseus) describes himself and Odysseus at night freezing with cold while spying on the Trojans. He says he tells Odysseus he has forgotten his cloak. Odysseus then tells a third soldier, "Run back with this message," the third doing so and dropping his cloak which the trickster Odysseus then tells the teller to pick up and put on. Eumaios, hearing the story, loans Odysseus his own cloak./9 Did the trickster Homer likewise win a cloak from the audience to whom he told this tale? Will I? So these have been some of the ways in which I have tried to develop the Introduction to World Literature course, attempting to bring it into the twenty-first century of a world as a global village in which we can share our stories with each other. Such a course has to be stories about stories. When Leslie Silko tells this story she also tells about its story-teller, her Aunt Suzie who went to the infamous Indian School at Carlisle and who sometimes uses those kinds of words, like "precipitous." One story about global village stories I tell my students is of a student, who as a freshman studied Old Icelandic, Arabic and Chinese, taking my Medieval Studies course and studying texts like the Dream of the Rood and Beowulf , the earliest poetry written down in the English language. Then he went to China to teach - and taught his Chinese students these stories and learned theirs to teach us.

   Last year I encountered in my classroom a disaster - and could only avert it with the truth of a story. I had in that class about fifty per cent Anglo students. I also had Chinese students, Japanese students, Black students, Hispanic students. None of my Anglo students knew the Biblical stories. That is almost always the case in America because of the Separation of Church and State. None of my Anglo students knew the Greek mythological stories. In the past I had been able to count on at least some of the students knowing these. For the last three years our Anglo students have even lost these stories. But worst of all, for the first time, none of my Anglo students knew the fairy stories. Only my students of color in this class, all of them, knew the Biblical, mythological and fairy stories. I asked the Anglo students, "Do you know, do you remember any fairy stories?" Finally one student said, "The Emperor's New Clothes?"/10

   As gently as I could, and laughing, I said, "We Anglos have become like the Emperor in his new clothes. We have become imperial. We have stripped ourselves of all our own stories that we need to console ourselves, to teach us wisdom. We are naked and shivering with cold and trying to pretend that everything is all right. What has happened in our culture has been that the stories have been lost and we have only been given things that have no stories, and therefore no real or lasting value, to take their place. Once everyone knew their own stories, old and young. Then there came a time when they were only believed suitable for children. And they had to be borrowed from other cultures. Now no one knows them." And I tell my students of the work of Iris Santos-Rivera who helped publish fairy stories in Spanish for bilingual literacy programs in schools./ 11

   That brings us to the story an Honors student in English gave as preface to her thesis on the shattering of tales in Shakespeare's King Lear, and which I gave as preface to this paper, where the child says the tapestry is not real, is it?, so it crashes into meaninglessness and cannot save the village. It is written by an Anglo student. It is set in Japan. It borrows from the tale written by the Danish Hans Christian Anderson, "The Emperor's New Clothes," but glimpses as well at his other story, "The Emperor's Nightingale."/ 12 The first story has a European setting, the second is about the Emperors of China and Japan. Lauryn Mayer has created a patchwork quilt of a story and made it global. Sometimes that is wrong. Edward Said in Orientalism has noted that Europeans borrow and plagiarize other cultures for their own fictions, maiming, crippling and distorting them in the process./13 But sometimes it is right. In stories we can say the truth if we distance it in time and space, setting it in the past or the future or in far countries or in dreams, because, if we said it in the present, giving it a "local habitation and a name," it could be too dangerous. And sometimes industrialized Europeans and Americans, by setting stories in peasant cultures of far away and long ago, are talking, almost consciously, about a cultural richness that we have lost, a shattered tapestry.

   Thomas More gave an inverted version of the "Emperor's New Clothes" in Utopia before the Hans Christian Andersen one we have today. To teach Utopians not to value gold and material wealth - in More's story - gold and gems are only given to children and slaves, and used for chamber pots, toys and criminals' chains. Ambassadors come from a far land and to impress the people they wear lots of golden chains and jewels. The adults struggle to be hypocritically polite but the children make rude truthful remarks./ 14 By the way, I hope you do this to this paper.

   With the coming of industrialization stories came to be only for children, for the nursery. In America in the thirties psychologists believed that not even children should be told stories because they were untrue. In privileged classes children therefore were deprived of stories. In peasant classes the stories and their wisdom continued unabated. Then Bruno Bettelheim, who survived the concentration camps of World War II, wrote "The Uses of Enchantment," in which he advocated story-telling as a means for encoding wisdom and healing the psyche./ 15 But once the golden chain of stories is broken it cannot be really healed. I see a major task in Introduction to World Literature - as did the Greeks with their theatre - as therapy, as consoling, as restoring what is lost, just as much as did the Egyptian goddess Isis gather up the fragments of her dead and dismembered brother Osiris, restoring him to life.

   Osiris, resurrected, however, lacked his manhood. Plato, in Phaedrus, has Socrates say that scribal literature is dead, only oral literature alive./ 16 Apuleius borrowed that dialogue for the opening of The Golden Ass. I discuss Homer's Odyssey and Iliad as having been oral tales for centuries, being written down by order of Peisistratos in the sixth century before Christ, when he, as tyrant of Athens, imposed democracy upon her./17 Our volume on Tales within Tales: Apuleius through Time is in two parts, I. Scribal, filled with eleven scholarly essays on Apuleius' impact through time on other writers, II. Oral, giving analogues to Apuleius' tales that are living and which are being told by Pueblo Indian, Hispanic and Gypsy women story tellers today. One is by Leslie Silko, another by Rose Cordova, another by Rose Lloyds.

   My teaching is based on two contradictory premises concerning orality and scribalism. In law what is spoken is only hearsay and therefore fiction, only that which is written is legally binding and true. In academic literature there has been a similar tendency to believe that written fiction is more true than oral story telling. But I actually believe that it is in our dreams and our stories, especially our oral stories, that we tell the deepest truths, holding up mirrors of healing to ourselves, but that when we write we lie, we write, in fact, "legal fictions." To introduce the students to these texts, I therefore also introduce them to their scripts, describing the impact of the technology of writing in human history. White pages are blank nothingness; it is the black inked texts that give to them stories and knowledge in their attempt to encode and inscribe upon them for eternity the now dead voices whose music, whose expressiveness, we have lost and with that half of the words' meaning. Writing is a fiction for speaking. Medieval books added red, rubrication, for emphasis and organization, and often used gold leaf or placed a yellow wash behind capital letters. White, black, red and yellow are not the real colors of people but we inscribe races globally in this manner as if writing bodies and books together, White, Black, Red, Brown, Yellow. These are the sacred colors in tribal rituals all over the globe, in Africa, Asia, Australia and America./18 Racism and sexism may well be an imposition of a code, a system of thought that is a fiction, a lie. I love Rose Cordova saying Hispanics are not "Brown," but "Wheat-Colored."

   Each semester I order one of the texts I teach in its original language, for instance Plato's Phaedrus in the Loeb Classic volume with the Greek and facing page English translation or the Allen Mandlebaum Italian text and facing page English translation of Dante's Commedia. Beside the ethics of the texts I delight in my students' delight in breaking through barriers, finding in these texts' alterity, otherness, oldness, a universal humanity./ 19 I ask my Spanish students to share with us their privileged knowledge of the meanings of names in Cervantes' Don Quixote and the jokes connected with them. I ask students who know other languages to share and contribute that knowledge so that we can code-switch and break through our assignments. Russian Formalists have taught us that what is strange, what is different, is what is beautiful, what has power. That is, after all, the title and purpose of the conference at which I presented this paper, Excellence of Diversity, Diversity in Excellence.

   In the World Literature course I talk about Plato, especially about two statements he made in his work the Republic. One of them was that he would banish the poets, the storytellers, from his ideal city, because they are not logical, they lie. There he sounds like the American psychologists in the thirties ordering parents and teachers to throw away fairy story books. Another statement that he made was that in order for his city to be managed efficiently one had to tell a lie, the myth of the metals, that one person was gold and the king, others were silver and masters, the rest iron and therefore only fit to be slaves. I valued a student who pointed out that Plato banished liars from his city but established his city on a lie. The myth of the metals is a myth and a lie. It is also sexism and racism. Plato's ideal city mirrors former South Africa and former Yugoslavia and former United States, and England even today. We do not need to accept the lie that because we are different we are inferior and must therefore work harder for lower wages. Remember Terence's line winning a standing ovation, Augustine tells us, in the theatre of Carthage, " Homo sum: nichil humani me alienum puto," "I am a man; therefore nothing human is alien to me." Can I edit it? " Mulier sum: nichil humani me alienum puto," "I am a woman, therefore nothing human is alien to me."

   Now for the course: Introduction to World Literature. I am struggling to reshape it and yet win approval from the various committees for it to be offered and supported. I proposed teaching it with graduate students from Classics, Comparative Literature and English, one of these being non-Anglo, in such a way that we would be teaching each other these texts as well as our students and through doing so enlarging our perspectives concerning them. I don't want to throw away the Greek canon of texts. These works are too splendid. They are a difficult heritage. For those who were free and participating in Athens' shortlived democracy as male citizens there was tremendous creative energy, the creation of new forms - which we continue to slavishly copy to this day. Women and slaves were outside of that energy - and the texts will sometimes observe this, Homer saying in the Odyssey (XVII) that when one is a slave Zeus takes half his manhood, half his energy, half his strength, away from him, and the Greek playwrights sense that their oppression of women is causing evil in the land but not quite understanding why.

   The Odyssey throughout emphasizes the religious and civilizing necessity to observe the guest rite, to honor the stranger, "the stranger in a strange land," the Jungian other or shadow who is really ourselves,/ 20 who is, in Greek civilization, under the godly protection of Zeus. I teach this as the Greek analogue to Civil Rights. I discuss Emma Lazarus' poem on the Statue of Liberty. I use the African Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka's translation of Euripides' The Bacchae because it pulsates with revolutionary liberationism./ 21 Roman Africans Terence and Apuleius are, of course, included in the course.

   For the medieval and Renaissance sections of the course I hope to include Japanese and Chinese texts such as Lady Murasaki's Tales of Genji and Lady Wen-chi's Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute; also, for the Americas, Dante's Purgatorio, which is set in America before its discovery, More's Utopia, Montaigne's "On Cannibals," Shakespeare's Tempest./ 22 I would teach Cervantes' Don Quixote . Parts I and II. Colleagues recommend that I use the Chinese novel, Monkey: Journey to the West to balance Herman Hesse's Journey to the East . I feel humiliated and deficient at not knowing Chinese and Japanese literature well and I sadly recognize that this exclusion hurts my Oriental students. For the modern semester I hope to include texts by the partly African writer, the Russian Pushkin, including his Eugene Onegin and "Tsar Peter's Moor," as well as Mikhail Bakhtin on Pushkin's Tales of Belkin./ 23

   My own research has included work on the background of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, both from West Indian families and both part Black. I want to teach Elizabeth Barrett Browning's wonderfully readable but now suppressed, neglected, all but forgotten Aurora Leigh, a woman's epic poem in nine books, set in England, France and Florence, a poetic tapestry which intertextually echoes and mirrors the texts of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and George Sand, all of which she knew in their Greek, Italian, English and French original forms. (The Academy seems not to have wanted it known that women could be so learned and liberated. Therefore the brilliant Aurora Leigh is excluded from the Canon, while the safe, sickroom "Sonnets from the Portuguese" goes into countless editions.) We should

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end with Leslie Silko's Ceremony , a novel of a native American soldier's need to be cleansed from the bloodshed and nuclear horror of the Second World War in Japan and which is a modern-day counterpart to Aeschylus' Oresteia, where Agamemnon's family is tainted with the bloodshed and need for cleansing from the Trojan war.

   I teach that great literature and art happens in democracies and republics where there is openness and inclusion, energy and freedom. This course is in the process of being developed and approved./24 Let us know what you think we can include in its global village's tapestry. We need to make it be a truthful mirroring of the world.
 

{ There is a tale told about a small village in Japan. One fine spring morning a man fishing saw a huge tidal wave far out to sea, and approaching fast. He ran through the village with frantic haste, knocking on doors and summoning the best spinners and weavers of the town, who came streaming after him holding their wheels and shuttles. There on the sand, they quickly spun a gigantic tapestry, rich in colors and patterns, that formed the picture of a peaceful empty blue sky and a calm green sea, alive with purple seaweed floating in the still waters, and silver fish at play. Not a sound was heard in the air until a little girl, sucking her thumb and staring at the cloth, said, "It's very pretty, but it's not real, is it?" Instantly the huge wall of water tore through the canvas and roared down upon the village, sweeping it out to sea./ 25

1 Paper read at University of Colorado, "Excellence of Diversity and Diversity in Excellence" Conference, May 4, 1990.
2 This story comes from the preface to Lauryn Mayer's 1990 Honors thesis in English, University of Colorado, Boulder, on Shakespeare's King Lear , and is used with her permission.
3 Rose Cordova, storyteller, Denver, speaks of this sensation in the stomachs of Hispanic school children in Colorado encountering the negation of their own culture for that of the dominant English-speaking one
4 Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979: English Literature: Opening Up The Canon, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
5 Terence, The Comedies, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Sadly, they have now changed that cover for the worse.
6 Karl Kerenyi, "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology," and Carl G. Jung, "On the Psychoanalysis of the Trickster Figure," in Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Myths (London: Routledge and Paul, 1956).
7 My Latin textbook as a child was Latin without Tears. I cried over it each night and also with imperial Caesar's colonial wars. It was not until I met with Ovid's poetry about and as if by women, the Heroides, and Leslie Fiedler with Terence, that we began to realize that Latin could be human, compassionate and laughter-filled.
8 Leslie Marmon Silko, "Language and Literature: A Pueblo Indian Perspective," in Opening Up The Canon, pp. 54-72, esp. 61-63; also published in Leslie Marmon Silko, The Storyteller (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), pp. 3-15.
9 Homer, Odyssey XIV (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919), pp. 66-73.
10 Hans Christian Andersen, Andersen's Fairy Tales, trans. Jean Hersholt (New York: Heritage, 1942), pp. 79-82.
11 Northvale, New Jersey: Santillana Publishing Company, Inc.: Cuantame un Cuento: La Bella Durminete (Sleeping Beauty); La Cenicienta (Cinderella); Blancanieves (Snow White), Caperucita Roja (Red Riding Hood); Los tres cerditos (The Three Little Pigs), Las semillas magicas (Jack and the Beanstalk) .
12 Andersen, pp. 79-82, 167-176. See also Franz Kafka, "The Letter"
13 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). We use "otherness," in history and geography, time and space, as a "distant mirror," romanticizing and falsifying its image to be our own as we would wish it to be. See Barbara N. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth-Century (New York: Knopf, 1978).
14 Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 86-89.
15 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976).
16 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982; Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy."
17 Farhenheit 451 (New York: Ballentine Books, 1953).
18 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). When I was teaching Chaucer's Knight's Tale's wind rose of colors, west, red, east, white, north, red and white, at Princeton Victor Masayesva, who is Hopi, noted that these were like his people's sacred colors and directions. He wrote an A+ paper on Hopi analogues to Chaucerian tales.
19 Hans Robert Jauss, "The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature," New Literary History, 10 (1979), 181-227. For this reason I give my students sheets with Greek and Russian alphabets, maps upon which to plot the tales, and ask that they construct time lines. I have observed that Japanese students traveling in Europe have done this with our texts, working them out spatially, temporally, and as a switching of codes.
20 I borrow here, hopefully with his permission, from my colleague Ron Billingsley.
21 Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. Wole Soyinka (New York: Norton, 1974)
22 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972).
23 P.N. Medvedev and M.M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
24 The Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee determined that to include African and women writers in the canon would somehow lower academic standards and voted not to approve the course. I requested early retirement from my university.
25 Again, Preface to Lauryn Mayer's 1990 Honors thesis in English, University of Colorado, Boulder, on Shakespeare's King Lear. To end with one's beginning in story-telling is, in play, to cheat death, Alcmeon observing "Man dies because he cannot join his end to his beginning."
 

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