This essay challenges the view that the last part of Orlando furioso takes an "epic" turn and abandons many of the "romance" features that characterize its first half. The essay does so by considering (1) the anachronism of projecting onto the Furioso a desire on Ariosto's part to upgrade the romance with which he began to an epic poem, given that the differences between romance and epic that modern critics claim are at work in Orlando furioso did not come to the fore as issues in Italian poetics until about fifty years after the poem's first composition; and (2) the persistence of romanzo matter and structure in the poem's last nine cantos. Modern interpreters who maintain that the Furioso becomes more epic in its last segment cite as evidence the more frequent imitation of the Aeneid, but in fact Ariosto modifies the Virgilian matter he grafts into his narrative to fit the language and ethos of chivalric romance.

This article explores two sets of convergences: one between skeptical and commonsense philosophies in the eighteenth century, and the other between poststructuralist and eighteenth-century philosophies. It argues that all of these forms of reasoning share an interest in the paper on which they are printed. Although they use the case in point of paper quite differently, James Beattie, David Hume, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida all end up in terrain on which paper shows the connection of high theory to the common sense of material cultural studies. They all demonstrate, in other words, how paper and the ink it holds offer evidence of an irrefutable reality even as their example introduces an inevitable slipperiness to the field of example.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), L. Frank Baum imagines Dorothy's nostalgia for Kansas as a desire that compels her to develop a cosmopolitan ethics only as a means of returning home. But this psychic fantasy of cosmopolitan nostalgia inevitably compromises her engagement with strangers, transforming her ethics into an illiberal form of internationalist expansionism. By entwining these incompatible phenomena, Baum creates a lasting metaphor for U.S. foreign policy: Dorothy as the reluctant traveler who selflessly intervenes in the affairs of strangers with the intention of returning home instead of remaining abroad.

An exercise in rereading, "Revisiting García Márquez among the Bananas" takes up the case of bananas in One Hundred Years of Solitude to explore the representation, subversion, and prolepsis of literature of memory, literature of witness. A historical episode represented by the novel as erased, is recovered by the novel for history, and produces effects in the world beyond the novel. Yet such recovery fails to affect the world beyond the novel. In the articulation of that contradiction, intertwining fiction and history, invention and reality, the novel proposes an enduring and essential myth for our time: that recovering violence from oblivion is useful to the present.