In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens uses physiognomy as an indirect way of portraying characters that observe their fellow-characters rather than as a direct means of portraying the characters observed. This reading of faces often constitutes misinterpretation: Dickens links Our Mutual Friend to the issue of reading itself, providing models of reader response. Misreadings thus become morally and aesthetically relevant to the overall structure and effect of the novel.

Flannery O'Connor did not see herself as a political writer, and many critics perpetuate her self-image in their assessment of her work. She was, however, a keen observer of the politics of everyday conversation. By exploring the ritualized exchange of clichés between employer and hired help, particularly in "Revelation" (1964) and "The Displaced Person" (1954), this essay examines the ways in which O'Connor draws attention to the peculiar collective power of the cliché. The two stories demonstrate the politics of the cliché in her fiction, a phenomenon some critics overlook because they assume, as many of O'Connor's characters do, that clichés are empty platitudes. "Revelation" dramatizes the politics of the cliché in a democratic setting, whereas "The Displaced Person" calls attention to the way in which clichés confirm and contest hierarchies of power in the master-servant relationship. In "Revelation," the seemingly benign (and often hilarious) exchange of clichés between two key female characters serves to exclude a third party. The ritualization of their exchange, however, and the assumption that clichés are banal, mask this act of exclusion. "The Displaced Person" also stars two female characters who exchange clichés to exclude an outsider, and because clichés have the ability to echo unexpectedly across conversations, they function both inside and outside the women's relationship. A variety of other speakers draw on a communal stock and recycle the same clichés. The regularities with which clichés and silences circulate in the conversations between the two key characters can thus be extrapolated to a network of other relationships within the story. Over time, a single act of exclusion on the part of two characters develops the potential to trigger escalating acts of aggression, verbal and physical. "The Displaced Person" suggests that clichés carry unexpected and potentially ever graver consequences in a collective context. "Revelation" and "The Displaced Person" enable O'Connor to explore issues of democracy in a new way; read in the context of each other, they highlight the political and ethical significance of clichés, in particular their relation to violence.

You can locate A. R. Ammons in a line of great walkers from Wordsworth to Frank O'Hara, but what makes him different from all the rest is that despite being so peripatetic, he could not keep his feet on the ground. In poem after poem he, or a stand-in protagonist, not only turns, spins, and whirls, but rises, ascends, levitates. Thereafter comes in due course a descent, sometimes an arduous or scarifying one, but which typically finds him the better off after his return to terra firma. Levity in the transferred sense - Ammons was a whimsical, voluble, unbuttoned humorist - proves useful in contending with the perilous consequences of his levitations. In addition to his drollery, Ammons sporadically employs a prophetic voice, meditates on philosophical issues, and delves expertly into phenomena privy to the natural scientist. The composite result is a style of levity entirely his own. The extent to which he may, as a consequence of his levity, or in spite of it, be enrolled in a transcendentalist tradition of the visionary sublime stretching back to Emerson, as Harold Bloom would have it, is debatable. Five poems examined very closely give a slant on the issues involved, "Moment," "Transcendence," "He Held Radical Light," "Levitation," and "Hymn." Other Ammons poems are discussed briefly, and incidental comparisons are made to poems by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery.

Carlyle's view of modern life as a palimpsest serves as a postulate for his Victorian contemporaries and successors, who make it into the defining idea of the modern city. Following Carlyle's lead, they explore the urban palimpsest, yet nor for them is his prophetic voice of guilt and punishment. Rather, in exploring the uneasy pleasures in the juxtaposition of the urban layers of modern experience, in The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend and other novels Dickens strikes the modern note of the attraction of repulsion as well as shifting, alternating, alternative realities. The boundaries of class and species are honeycombed by pathways which hum with traffic and constant crossings of the layers of the palimpsest of modern urban life, and the reader navigates among unstable places together with the narrators who are often split and divided along the fault lines of urban life.

The essay takes up Garrett Stewart's recent discussion (Partial Answers 8.1) of the ethical tempo of a rhetorical figure, syllepsis, in order to think through some temporal consequences of the ethical turn.

The article focuses on Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924), a collection of ghost stories composed by Dorothy Macardle, a prolific Irish author, historian, and political journalist. The article demonstrates how Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the reader's hesitation, as central to the fantastic (and by extension the gothic genre), helps one understand Macardle's engagement with the sacrificial ideology of Irish nationalism. Macardle's collection of stories of supernatural apparitions during the troubled 1920s makes Irish history the sphere of the fantastic. It makes the reader hesitate - not between the different approaches to the supernatural - but between the conflicting ideological positions presented in the text.

This essay examines the implications of Dickens's statement in the preface to the one-volume edition of Bleak House (September 1853) that in the novel he "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things." This claim, I argue, goes to the core of Dickens's art as a writer, an art that combines the presentation of disturbing news about the contemporary state of society with a skilful attempt to provide narrative pleasure, pleasure designed to ensure that the narrator retains his hold over readers for 67 chapters. Dickens's achievement, I conclude, constitutes literary art of the highest order, one that instructs readers in social and ethical truths while also delighting them and holding their attention in the course of telling a compelling story.

The paper demonstrates that Dickens's Our Mutual Friend complicates any attempt to differentiate between aesthetic enjoyment and social awareness in reader response. It isolates three models of reading in which the interconnection between aesthetic effect and consciousness-raising effect is associated with the entanglements between person and thing, animate and inanimate, living and dead, subject and object of perception. These entanglements destabilize the grounds on which we would usually differentiate between aesthetic pleasure and social critique.

The article focuses on the aggressor-victim paradigms upon which Dickens builds three of his female characters in Great Expectations: Mrs. Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, and Molly. Usually described as monstrous, the three characters are here discussed in terms of the hidden motives of their strange behavior, one of the sources of uneasy pleasures in the reading process. Viewed from the feminist standpoint, the representation of the three characters is associated with Victorian views concerning the treatment of women, sexuality, crime, and marriage; viewed in psychological terms, all the three display symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, wit the roles of victim and aggressor shifting over time.