After Kennedy's essay, the
critical locus for this issue's nexus of subject, belief, and global capitalism shifts away from Shanghai, China, and Lahore, Pakistan, to New York, USA.
The topics include the Fatou-Julia decomposition of transversally holomorphic foliations of complex codimension one, a plane sextic with finite fundamental group, the topology of abelian pencils on curves, the middle Betti number of certain singularities with
critical locus a hyperplane, standard bases and algebraic local cohomology for zero dimensional ideals, and a universal bivariant theory and cobordism groups.
While her lack of specificity (she relies too often on references to 'a number of these critics' or 'the middlebrow reviewers') weakens her argument, Acocella advances a convincing claim that politics characterized Cather Studies from the start: 'The more senselessly she was dismissed by the Left, the more she was senselessly exalted by the Right and used as a stick to beat the Left.' Ideology, rather than aesthetics, established the
critical locus, a phenomenon resulting all too frequently in shallow analysis.
She discusses the major concerns and themes of Hemingway criticism through the decades, tracking the ebb and flow of interests as well as the rise and fall of attention to specific texts (The Old Man and the Sea as
critical locus of the 1950s, The Sun Also Rises of the 1970s, The Garden of Eden of the 1990s).