Henry James’s late novels suggest a world of talk which is morally ambiguous because epistemologically unstable. James’s early and late dialogues are radically different: in the late fiction, talk becomes a process of imaginative collaboration, and language virtually creates the conditions under which perception is possible. In The Ambassadors, Parisian talk educates Strether even as it seems to dissemble. And in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, conversation shapes the terms in which certain actions will be possible; talking together, characters create a world that fits the shape of their desires. Jamesian talk is at once hypocrisy and art: lying becomes a mode of vision. But if James’s liars are artists, his artists are also liars. We prefer Maggie Verver to Charlotte Stant not because she is more honest, but because her language makes for the most harmonious and inclusive order.

About thirty-five years ago, my professor in a course on seventeenth-century english social history began with the following. “You may have heard,” he said, “that the reading list for this course has not changed since I took it here in 1924.” Here he paused. “But I can assure you that it has changed”—he paused again, and added, sotto voce—“however imperceptibly.” These words have long seemed emblematic for me of the pride felt by much of the historical profession in the continuity of its essential practices. I do not mean, of course, that historians have not embraced new groups of people, adopted a much wider array of ideological stances, and above all invented a researchable historicity for many things that had never before seemed to have a history. All this innovation is splendid, and the finest products of academic history constitute a rich and admirable body of work. But in the essential practices, especially the practice of reading—the basic relation of reader with language and imagination—change is, shall we say, hardly perceptible. It seems that the charge that historians are professionally taught not to read is almost as true now as it was two decades ago when Dominick LaCapra made it (339). But if we are to learn about the historical imagination, histories need to be read and academic historians need to be reminded from time to time that what they do is as subject to the formative pressures of discourse as any other precinct of the world of words.

What time is it when we read? There are many answers to this question. Time might refer to a particular day of the week, as in Sunday reading, a practice that Christina Lupton finds has spanned both religious and secular contexts. Or time might imply a sense of pace, that reading is something we do quickly or slowly, which Rolf Engelsing suggests when he distinguishes between intensive and extensive reading. Or perhaps time is more periodic, an argument one finds in Deidre Lynch's work on nineteenth-century habitual reading or Christopher Cannon's work on medieval practices of rereading. Or time could be closer to an idea or topos, as in Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope like idyllic time. Finally, for someone like Gerard Genette the time of reading is fundamentally about anachronism, the nonlinear nature of narrative time.

In this brief meditation i am less concerned with how tragedy as a theatrical form relates to democracy than with how democracy entails a tragic politics, in its ancient and contemporary manifestations. My broader argument follows from three presuppositions:

Philosophically speaking, democracy is a historical manifestation of self-organized politics that rests on no foundation other than self-authorization, which, being occasional and provisional, has no antecedent and is therefore abyssal.

Politically speaking, democracy requires an imaginary of rule without archē or telos—an an-archic imaginary that disengages itself from traditional parameters of the command-obedience structure. This isn't to say that democracy entails no rule. On the contrary, it engages in the paradoxical practice of anarchic rule, or rule shared by all (even those in opposition), so that the traditional division of power between rulers and ruled is destabilized.

Ethically speaking, there is nothing good or bad about democracy; all moral imperatives are foreign, perhaps even contrary, to democracy. Hence, democratic politics operates in an ethical realm without categorical imperatives, a priori principles, or transcendental guarantees and is thereby constitutively perilous and precarious. Democracy involves a tragic imaginary, enacting a politics of tragic life that includes folly without heroic salvation and demands lucidity in conditions of total uncertainty.

In the academic study of cinema, as in other kinds of academic discourses, one of the most commonly encountered questions these days tends to be some version of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be represented in this manner? What does it mean for me and my group to have been made invisible? These questions pertain, of course, to the urgency and prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. This is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nation, class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics thus to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality” (Andrew 348).' Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, currently faces its own “impending dissolution […] in […] transnational theorization” (Introduction 1). How did this state of affairs arise?

Since Dryden lived in a period when the authority of Aristotle in matters of poetry was gaining rather than losing strength, and since he was both a critic and a writer of serious plays, it was inevitable that he should come to grips with the principle of a tragic catharsis and with the broader problem of the function of tragedy. The passages in which he gave his answer to these problems are well known, but the significance of his remarks in relation to the ideas of his time has not always been understood. Especially, the assumption in recent years that all Neo-Classical renditions of the Aristotelian catharsis are irrelevant because of the strong moral bias of the period has led to the ignoring of quite important differences between the theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Although Wordsworth professed contempt for Macpherson's “translation” as a worthless forgery, it can be shown that he was familiar with the subject-matter, the spirit, and, in places, with the exact phraseology of Ossian; that he borrowed an Ossianic word or two when he needed it; that many of his poems deal with themes relating to the Ossianic poems, or present images or lines to which parallels may be found in Ossian; and that in his passionate love of the mountain wilderness he came very near the spirit of the blind bard of Selma.

The theory that in Book II of the Fairie Queene Spenser represents Mary Stuart allegorically in the character of Acrasia has never been presented with sufficient evidence to raise it above a level of general probability, and although the further cumulation of proof that I have gathered together here hardly seems enough to establish it as a fact of literary history, it may help to recapture some of the mental associations of his original readers and the figurative medium in which they were expressed. It is my purpose here to show that when the Faerie Queene was published Elizabethan courtiers had for a considerable time looked upon Mary Stuart as the epitome of intemperance and had characterized her as a Circean enchantress, a rather striking parallel to Book II with its political study of temperance and its major evil character—the Circean witch Acrasia.

Among mediaeval compendiums of devotion one of the most widely known—in England at least—was the Speculum Ecclesie, written about 1240 by Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury. The extent of its popularity is indicated by the fact that it occurs in Latin, French and English versions and that nearly sixty MSS. are still preserved which contain this treatise either as a whole or in part—twenty-nine in Latin, seventeen in French, and the others in English.

When we remember the subtle irregularity of Milton's rhymes in Lycidas, and the frequency with which he introduces rhyme into the blank verse of Comus and Samson Agonistes, it is less surprising that there should be rhymes in Paradise Lost than that they should not have been noticed. That they are deliberate rhymes needs little proof, for it is obvious that an ear as fine as Milton's must have heard any rhyme which can be heard by the ordinary reader, and this examination grew out of the vague impression of rhyme given by certain passages in Paradise Lost, and the presence of a few obvious rhymes, such as:

Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round (i. 711–713)
This horror will grow milde, this darkness light,
Besides what hope the never-ending flight (ii. 220–221)
Allegeance to th'acknowledg'd Power supream?
And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seam, (iv. 956–957)
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Some times towards Eden which now in his view (iv. 24–27)

To anyone who has followed the development of the theory of ballad origins, it is well known that there are two main theories in the field for our suffrages at the present time: the communal; and the individualistic, literary, or anti-communal theory. The last name of the second theory is indicative of the attitude of its upholders, for they have in truth been largely occupied with a criticism of the communalists, always demanding of them more and ever more light, and ever, like doubting Thomas, refusing to believe until an actual ballad dating from at least the time of Hereward the Wake is produced for their fingers to touch. The communalists, by an appeal to the well-established facts of folk-lore and ethnology, maintain that the ballads are the product of the communal stage of society in Europe, in which the populace held festive dances, and in which there was actual improvisation of certain traditional lyric narratives. These narratives had their verse-form determined by the dance; and the whole poem from beginning to end was the product of the people, and was not in any way composed by literary persons. Moreover, these ballads have been handed down by oral tradition, and live in the mouths of the people. Of course, there is no claim that one expects to find in the ballads of the collections anything which springs directly from the ancient source; all that is claimed is that the poetic form is handed down, and, so to say, the general ballad tradition. This claim of long descent is substantiated by the very features of the ballads as they exist to-day; by their impersonality, their refrain, their depicting of but a single situation, their use of incremental repetition. Thus, it is maintained, the ballad is not derived from any pre-existing literary material, but is the result of a primary impulse which is as old as man, and out of which the various forms of communal poetry spring. Finally, the ballad is not connected with the popular tale; “it follows an entirely different line and springs from an entirely different impulse.”

In this article I consider the possibility of using vocabulary to determine the original dialect of Old English poems later than Cynewulf and choose two poems on the same theme, Judgment Day I, reputedly Anglian, in the Exeter Book, and Judgment Day II, reputedly West Saxon, in order to illustrate the application of this method and test its validity.

The reception of Aby Warburg's first published work, his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli, has overlooked layers of meaning implicit in Warburg's word choice. His study of the afterlife of antiquity relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as Inspirator (“inspirer”), Stimmung (“mood,” “atmosphere”), and Milieu (“milieu”). Warburg brings out the reference to air in these words, invoking their philological nuances and physiological contexts. The air designated is not only the physical medium in which Botticelli's windblown accessories move but also the quattrocento's cultural atmosphere in which Botticelli's creativity thrives. In addition, air implicitly functions as a disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend traditional art history.

In a recently published article, Mr. J. R. MacGillivray has announced the necessity for redating Wordsworth's play. By closely checking allusions in Wordworth's letters, he is able to show that it could not have been begun before March 7, 1796, and that the letter in which the poet tells Wrangham that the first draft of it is nearly finished must have been written “some time between the beginning of December 1796 and the end of February 1797.” The play, MacGillivray feels, would have been begun not long before October 24, when Dorothy reported her brother “now ardent in the composition of a tragedy.”

The reading habits of the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity, and Patience remain a fascinating and fruitful field of study. Much has been written about the books the poet read, or may have read, but it is unlikely that the catalogue of books owned or read by him has by any means been completely reconstructed. Of the books he certainly knew, the Vulgate is of first importance for its influence upon the poet's thought and style. Certain, but less important, are the Romance of the Rose and the French text of Mandeville. Of the books very probably read by him the Divine Comedy stands first, followed by the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, Boccaccio's Olympia, and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. Less probable is his reading of Tertullian's De Patentia and De Jona et Ninive, the Travels of Marco Polo, Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica, the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, the French lapidaries, and a few others still less certain.