PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, May 2006

PMLA is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Since 1884, PMLA has published members' essays judged to be of interest to scholars and teachers of language and literature. Four issues each year (January, March, May, and October) present essays on language and literature; a Directory issue (September) contains a listing of the association's members, a directory of departmental administrators, and other professional information; and the November issue is the program for the association's annual convention. Each issue of PMLA is sent directly to the nearly 30,000 college and university teachers of English and foreign languages who belong to the association and to about 3,000 libraries throughout the world.
 

Volume 121, Number 3, May 2006

Table of Contents :

A Statement of Editorial Policy

Features in PMLA

Forthcoming in PMLA

Corrections

Editor's Column: What Can a Journal Essay Do?

Presidential Address 2005: On Rooted Cosmopolitanism
Domna C. Stanton

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"What Would Jesus Do?": Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel
Gregory S. Jackson

The Fetish in/as Text: Rétif de la Bretonne and the Development of Modern Sexual Science and French Literary Studies, 1887-1934
Amy S. Wyngaard

Tatau and Malu: Vital Signs in Contemporary Samoan Literature
Juniper Ellis

Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf
Paul Acker

Laamon's Gift
Andrew Galloway

Painting Counterfeit Canvases: American Memory Lienzos and European Imaginings of the Barbarian in Cervantes's Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Elizabeth Bearden

Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love
Waïl S. Hassan

Blakespotting
Mike Goode

The Changing Profession

Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies
Wendy S. Hesford

Interdisciplinary Opera Studies
Linda Hutcheon

Nobel Lecture 2005

Art, Truth & Politics
Harold Pinter 

Forum: Conference Debates
The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory
Robert L. Caserio, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz
Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space
Vitaly Chernetsky, Nancy Condee, Harsha Ram, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Forum
Carolyn Dinshaw, Arthur Efron, Karma Lochrie, Madhavi Menon, and Robert Scholes

Report of the Executive Director

Minutes of the MLA Delegate Assembly

Minutes of the MLA Executive Council

In Memoriam

Index of Advertisers

Index of Authors Advertised

Abstracts