Abstracts PMLA 131.2 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America 575 255 Yasser Elhariry, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sufi Poets, and the New Franco- phone Lyric his is the irst work of criticism to read Abdelwahab Meddeb as a poet. Self- consciously indeterminate from phi losophica l and poetic perspectives, Meddeb’s poetry is indebted to European, especially French, high poetic mod- ernism; to the French literary turn to the United States; and to the author’s desire to be read in the lineage of the major Sui poets of classical Arabic litera- ture. Turning his back on the hegemony of postcolonial literary prose with the 1987 chapbook Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi, Meddeb generates a new francophone lyric infused with the Sui traditions of al- Andalus, North Africa, and the Near and Middle Easts. His new lyric rewrites itself as a Sui consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state, and his tonguing of the new francophone lyric leads us to a long overdue analytical paradigm. (YE) 269 Anne Dwyer, Standstill as Extinction: Viktor Shklovsky’s Poetics and Poli- tics of Movement in the 1920s and 1930s In 1923 the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky returned to the USSR ater a year of exile. Like his entire cohort of “fellow travelers,” he accommo- dated himself to the new Soviet regime. He did so in the language of travel and other kinds of movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, nomadism—a prominent motif in works by Shk lovsky from A Sentimental Journey through Marco Polo—emerges as his central igure for accommodation to oicial culture. his association occurs through the submerged double meaning of his signature term ostranenie—at once defamiliarization and reterritorialization. his dual- ity of ostranenie has implications for our broader understanding of the way mobility is active in cultural production and intertwined with structures of power. In the Soviet case, ostranenie underscores that nomadic movement is essential to the operation of cultural agents, whose relative freedom becomes a mechanism of state authority and control. (AD) 289 Jonathan Scott Enderle, Common Knowledge: Epistemology and the Be- ginnings of Copyright Law Literary critics’ engagement with copyright law has oten emphasized onto- logical questions about the relation between idealized texts and their material embodiments. his essay turns toward a diferent set of questions—about the role of texts in the communication of knowledge. Developing an alternative intellectual genealogy of copyright law grounded in the eighteenth- century contest between innatism and empiricism, I argue that jurists like William Blackstone and poets like Edward Young drew on Locke’s theories of ideas to articulate a new understanding of writing as uncommunicative expression. Innatists understood texts as tools that could enable transparent communica- tion through a shared stock of innate ideas, but by denying the existence of Abstracts 1 3 1 . 2 ] innate ideas empiricists called the possibility of communication into question. And in their arguments for perpetual copyright protection, eighteenth- century jurists and pamphleteers pushed empiricism to its extreme, linking literary and economic value to the least communicative aspects of a text. (JSE) 307 Gillian Silverman, Neurodiversity and the Revision of Book History he ield of neurodiversity ofers new ways to think about the history of the book and the history of reading. Because autistic individuals—especially those marked by “classical” symptoms—oten report a strong reliance on physical objects and a pronounced tendency toward sensory engagement, their interests coincide with those of book historians and reception critics who investigate the embodied reading experience and the material aspects of the book. Indeed, the textual practices of autistic individuals can resemble those of bibliophiles, who oten enjoy touching and smelling books. But autistic textual engagement oc- casionally takes singular forms, thereby pushing historians of the book into surprising new territory. For example, many classical autists attest to an in- tense intimacy and intercorporeity with the material book. In so doing they create opportunities for relecting on the interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds. (GS) 324 Andrew Kopec, The Digital Humanities, Inc.: Literary Criticism and the Fate of a Profession he popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom’s “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading’s original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly ap- proximate postindustrial norms. hese contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conlict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conlict between litera- ture and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will de- ine critical practice in the twenty- irst century. (AK) 576 Abstracts [ P M L A