This essay examines the role of performance practices in the making of colonial history through an analysis of the first French-language theater piece staged in the New World, Marc Lescarbot's Théâtre de Neptune (1606). The form of performance in this work offers a radically different way of crafting and engaging with history, simultaneously “restoring” the past via reenactment in the present and implying the possibility of future reiterations. Lescarbot's script presents a useful case study of performance's challenges to more traditional configurations of literary and cultural history.

Modesty and other “antiauthorial” conventions (anonymity, self-effacing prefaces, refusal to profit) tend to be viewed as retrograde concessions to the outdated norms of an antiquated cultural field, which a more modern, assertive, and critical authorial figure will learn to abandon. Yet in the context of the seventeenth century, such gestures were associated with modernity rather than the opposite. This essay reinterprets the significance of authorial modesty by analyzing this disconnect, which calls attention less to the changing strategies of writers than to the evolving expectations and desires of readers to whom the gestures were addressed. It argues that if the aristocratic airs adopted by writers situate them squarely in the Old Regime, the readerly practices to which they appealed (and which they in turn shaped)—individualized and moralized as well as commercialized—might, by contrast, allow us more easily to associate the self-consciously modern yet modest customs of seventeenth-century authorship with our own modernity.

By focusing on what Michael Silverstein calls nonreferential indexicality—those “features of speech independent of any referential speech event” that point to the “sociological relations of personae in the speech situation” and “accomplish socially constituted ends”—this essay challenges received understandings of the linguistic purchase of modernist innovation. The author examines Hebrew and Yiddish modernist literary texts by Devorah Baron and Dovid Bergelson that employ nonreferential indexicality in order to chart the ruptures in two textual communities, in two particular historical and literary moments when gender norms, alongside racial and ethnic identities, underwent abrupt and vexed change. In these stories, scenes of domestic drama are transformed into modernist narratives of social and cultural transformation. The article contends that a pragmatic linguistic approach to literary texts illuminates how minor language modernist writing contains a self-awareness that not only addresses a cosmopolitan audience but also preserves the contingent and shifting parameters of local linguistic communities.