Fiction writer, playwright, and political activist for whom Jewish identity, if not ritual strictness, remained central, Israel Zangwill used the term ghetto in his early work as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto, the ghetto of Venice signified both.  Later, however, Zangwill looked beyond the ghetto to other sites and cities of Italy as inspiration for a wider philosophy. In Italian Fantasies (1910), Zangwill used the genre of the travel essay to develop ideas about art, religion, and society that grounded culture in the experienced life of place. At the same time, he sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a Jewish commentator who was also cosmopolitan and modern, heir to a Victorian legacy of social critique.

Cosmopolitanism need not always be a duty, an identity, or a condition; it can just as easily be a moment or a memory, an experience that can vanish in a puff of smoke. This article explores the surprisingly similar ways that Zeno’s Conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by Art Spiegelman imaginatively reframe cosmopolitanism through the figure of cigarette smoking. In particular, it expands attention to No Towers past the discourse of trauma and connects the new graphic canon to a canonical work of literary modernism. The chain-smoking figures at the center of these two texts give us an image of the cosmopolitan which is reducible neither to the Enlightenment ideal of the supranational liberal citizen, nor to its contemporary idiom, the fluid and flexible post-identitarian subject. Instead, both writers use cigarette smoking to delineate an apt cosmopolitan resident for two cities on the verge of being transformed by warlike nationalisms. Where Svevo uses nicotine addiction to connect his twitchy protagonist to prewar Trieste, Spiegelman insistently, but ironically accumulates forms of memory and identity around smoking, from his image as human and as “Maus,” to the smoke of the ovens at Auschwitz, to the burning of the Towers themselves. But this work of belonging is interrupted in No Towers by the New York City smoking ban, which displaces an apoplectic Spiegelman from his briefly “rooted” cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, this article explores an unlikely seam of detail, and a consistent image of the cosmopolitan, which persists across the borders between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, between the modern and the postmodern, and between the First World War and the War on Terror.

The paper focuses on the four “pedagogical” novels by writer and journalist Frida Vigdorova, mostly known for her records of the Joseph Brodsky’s trial of 1964. These novels written in 1949–1958, as well as some of her journalistic publications of the 1950s, made her one of the most influential publicists who wrote on the problems of school and schoolchildren. The article traces Vigdorova’s key ideas and literary techniques back to the second half of 1940s, when she wrote her first novels, first and foremost My Class (1949). Although Vigdorova was regarded as a follower of Anton Makarenko, the famous pedagogue of the 1920s and 1930s, one may find a significant shift in her interpretation of his theory. The main difference consists in her emphasis on the idea of the “individual approach” to each child, by contrast to the earlier attention to the issues of the collective. This idea is represented as a strong moral demand on every teacher or educator. The author shows that this idea was “re-invented” in the late 1940s by the officials of the ministry of education and pedagogical publicists in order to respond to a strong pressure of the pedagogical corps that had to face severe problems that emerged as direct social effects of WWII and were exacerbated by the banning of all psychological approaches to children after 1936. The “individual approach” becomes not only an ideological, but also a literary basis of all Vigdorova’s novels, a structural principle of her narratives.

In seventeenth-century literature on the Grand Tour, the ghetto of Venice appears as a place of cross-cultural exchange and misunderstanding, a contact zone that stimulates interrogation and translation, comparison and projection, prejudice and discovery. The ghetto goes into eclipse in the English letters of the Enlightenment, to re-emerge in a number of Victorian texts. The essays of this forum show how the renewed interest in the Italian Ghettoes served two late Victorian writers, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, to reflect on their own modern British and Jewish identity.

This paper argues that the term “comics” can and should be used to refer to prints from early modern England. We have ample reason to shift the starting date for comics to at least the seventeenth century, if not earlier, within the English-speaking world. The invention of print stimulated the creation, adoption, and codification of elements of the comics form. Print also changed the quantity and quality of social encounters with the comics form. Readings from “A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter” and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther demonstrate that scholars of the comics canon must turn their attention to the early modern English print.

An attempt to elucidate Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “The Translator’s Task,” followed by an analysis of two approaches to its meaning: the philological-historical, represented by Peter Szondi, and the deconstructionist, used by Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson. In spite of the radical difference between the two, they are surprisingly shown to meet in their final assessment of Benjamin’s intended meaning.

In “Nutting,” which is comprised of a tissue of allusions to Paradise Lost, William Wordsworth carries on a sustained though enigmatic conversation with his great predecessor John Milton.  The speaker in the poem describes a recollected boyhood episode of raiding a bower of hazel trees in terms borrowed from Milton’s descriptions of the tempter Satan and the tempted Eve and Adam. Wordsworth rewrites and internalizes in a compressed lyric space the drama played out in Paradise Lost, choosing a narrative in which the individual falls without external provocation, as both ravager and ravaged.  Attention to the Miltonic elements in “Nutting” suggests, pace Harold Bloom, that, far from experiencing an “anxiety of influence” as he contemplates Milton, Wordsworth finds the example of Milton uniquely enabling, to the extent that assimilation of Milton’s poetry becomes for Wordsworth a condition of writing poetry. What Wordsworth inherits from Milton is, the essay argues, a deep balance of delight and sadness, of joy and sorrow, a balance arising from the sense that the world in which we live is at once a place of exile from paradise and a paradisal home.