Dennis Porter argues in Rousseau's Legacy that this cultural idea of the writer - as distinct from the more traditional "man of letters" - first emerged in France in the decades preceding the French revolution, and has continued to exercise a nominative power over intellectual life well into our own day. In Porter's paradigm, Jean-Jacques Rousseau serves as a seminal figure who combined radical critique of existing institutions with a new form of confessional writing and a suspicion of the art (...) of literature. (shrink)

If the morphology of baseball is similar to that of the fairy tale, it is obviously not because baseball is a form of narrative art. As my title suggests, insofar as baseball resembles literature at all in the way it manifests itself, it is clearly much closer to drama. Baseball takes place within a fixed, carefully delimited space that may be improvised but is reserved specifically for the purpose wherever the game is institutionalized. It is an ensemble performance carried out (...) by specially trained "players" in front of an audience for whom the occasion is a festive event that occurs as a suspension of ordinary life. It possesses a plot that develops in a limited period of time from initial situation through complication to denouement and has a relatively large number of dramatis personae who are sent into the playing area at a given moment in order to perform specific roles. Dennis Porter, associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English novels. He is currently an NEH fellow and is working on two books: one on plot and ideology in the novel, the other, The Alibi of Crime, on detective fiction. (shrink)