Alexander Gelley is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) and essays on the modern novel and literary theory, and the editor of Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford UP, 1995).  Professor Gelley's research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and Comparative Literature, Romanticism, contemporary theory, and German-Jewish literature and culture.   The subject of his plenary talk is an outgrowth of his current book project on Walter Benjamin's later writings.