Abstract

When Matthew Arnold's wandering scholar-gipsy encounters former colleagues in a country lane who "of his way of life enquired," he replies thatHe spends the rest of his days in this lonely pursuit, "waiting for the spark from heaven to fall." If literature is compared to the scholar gipsy, what would be the politics and dynamics of the "spark"? Both have their presences, but in trying to understand their character—via the normative, aesthetic and cultural ways of understanding how they both matter —have we forgotten the absences that circumscribe their existences? Is knowing the scholar-gipsy and literature as significant as knowing that both are also elusive? How can they be known outside their established and ..