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.

Absalom, Absalom! achieves mythic significance and universality through Faulkner's deliberate use of parallels between Thomas Sutpen's attempt to found a dynasty in the Old South and the attempts of ancient Hebrew rulers to establish their kingdoms. The choice of title for the novel, as well as numerous analogies between Faulkner's plot and incidents in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, particularly n Samuel, indicate that Faulkner intended the biblical accounts of dynastic failures to illuminate and strengthen his theme. In attempting to find reasons for the failure of Sutpen to establish his Southern dynasty, critics have advanced four tenable theories. One theory finds Sutpen's innocence the principal reason for his failure; another sees hubris as the cause of failure; still a third contends that the socioeconomic injustices of the pre-Civil War South, magnified in the character of Sutpen, account for the failure. The fourth and most tenable theory, considered too briefly by critics, indicates that the very concept of dynasty is so basically flawed that failure is inherent in the design itself; or, more broadly still, that men erroneously persist in the mythic hope that they can establish permanent dynasties, though historically none has succeeded.

I. Sága, the Name of a Goddess. Jacob Grimm, in his Mythologie (ii, 759), interpreted the name Sága as a personification of the appellative saga ‘history, story.‘ This interpretation has now been rightly rejected because the long radical vowel a in the proper name Sága is attested by its occurrence in skaldic verse. I question, however, whether this difference in the quantity of the radical vowel in these two forms warrants the conclusion that they are not etymologically related.

In Milton's attempt to justify the ways of God to men, perhaps no passage in Paradise Lost is more important than Book III, 173–202, for in these lines Milton expounds his doctrine of predestination and its concordance with the mercy, grace, and wisdom of God. To the average reader, however, the passage offers considerable difficulty; and it is indeed surprising, in view of the importance and the obscurity of this portion of the epic, that editors and scholars have done so little to clarify the doctrine of these thirty lines. Newton contented himself with asserting that the views there expounded were Calvinistic, and Todd followed Newton. Sumner, without comment, showed a parallelism between portions of the passage and Milton's De doctrina, a document which is uncompromisingly Arminian. Brydges, however, repeated Newton's observation; and Barber argued at some length for a Calvinistic interpretation. Verity, on the other hand, seemed to agree with Sumner, but dismissed the matter with a single sentence: “The doctrine of predestination here alluded to is discussed at some length in the Christian Doctrine, I, 4.” Masson, Browne, and Moody, in turn, ignored the matter. Such disagreement, therefore, would seem to justify an attempt to throw more light on the passage by determining the precise doctrine that Milton there advances and the relation of that doctrine to the view on predestination advanced in the De doctrina.

The Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis has come down to us in complete form only in the quarto edition printed by Robert Charteris at Edinburgh in 1602. There is no manuscript of the complete play. Several of the “interludes” were copied by George Bannatyne and are to be found in the Bannatyne Manuscript (1568), preceded by a proclamation of the play which does not appear in the early printed edition.

A prose text of the Twelve Profits of Tribulation (MS. Royal 17 B xvii) based on the Latin treatise, De Duodecim Utilitatibus Tribulationis ascribed to Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath (†ca. 1200), was included by Horstmann in his edition of the works of Richard Rolle. Miss Hope Allen in her study of Rolle's writings has since demonstrated that this treatise is wrongly assigned to him. Horstmann also printed the text of the Twelve Profits from MS. Rawlinson C.894, and listed several other manuscripts containing prose versions of this treatise, in both English and French.

In 1814 Mme de Staël published a curious second preface to her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (1788), her first important published work. In this new preface she shuns all discussion of Rousseau and simply restates her own ideas concerning woman. In her youthful work, despite occasional differences with Rousseau on other matters, Mme de Staël had espoused his idea of woman, abandoning all claims to feminine achievement for a Rousseauist enchantment with love. Her conception of woman, basically conservative, derived from a deep need not to diverge from the prejudices of her beloved father, whose notions paralleled Rousseau's. Mme de Staël's life departed radically from the conservative mold, however, and she experienced great difficulty in evolving a personal stand that could reconcile her confidence in her own gifts, emphasized in a passage from De la littérature, and her ideal of marital love, most explicitly stated in a chapter of De l'Allemagne. The second preface recapitulates these conflicts, but as an oblique reply to Rousseau's strictures on the woman of letters it is both an apologia for having lived the literary life and an understated espousal of the principle that the use of one's faculties is a positive good for all women.

In Speculum, xvi (1941), pp. 149–166, A.C. Krey devoted to William, archbishop of Tyre, an article most welcome to students of French medieval romance. Rousing our interest in the work of this great chronicler of the crusades, he makes us read it, and reading it we find what we least expected: a historical background for Chrétien's Conte del Graal.

In October 2006, the Harvard University task force on general education issued a preliminary report describing and justifying a new program of general education for Harvard College. Contending that “[g]eneral education is the public face of liberal education,” the task force enumerated what a person liberally educated in the twenty-first-century United States should know—or, perhaps better, know how to think about in reasoned and nuanced ways (Preliminary Report 3). The report called for seven semester-long courses in “five broad areas of inquiry and experience”: Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change, The Ethical Life, The United States and the World, Reason and Faith, and Science and Technology. In addition, the task force suggested that students be required to take three semester-long courses that “develop critical skills”: writing and oral communication, foreign language, and analytic reasoning (6). Not surprisingly, “Reason and Faith” generated some of the most heated discussion—and it was the first suggested requirement dropped by the task force, replaced in December 2006 by a new category, “What It Means to Be a Human Being.” By the time of the final report, this too was gone, replaced by “Culture and Belief,” an area of inquiry that may include the study of religion but is broader in scope than what was initially proposed (Report of the Task Force 11–12).

In 1940 Djuna Barnes, author of the notorious but weak-selling Nightwood (1936), received a commission from Harry A. Bull, editor of the New York-based society magazine Town & Country, to write a short reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. The Nazi occupation of the erstwhile world capital of the avant-garde gave Town & Country's well-heeled readership reason to be nostalgic for Paris's glamorous recent past. As for Barnes, despite her dwindling book sales, she still had some celebrity—especially among those American readers who remembered her risqué onetime best seller Ryder (1928)—as an artist, journalist, and character of the Paris scene. Struggling with alcoholism and illness, and fiercely private, but desperate for money, she accepted the commission (Herring 242-50). Drawing on material in a notebook she had carried while working as a journalist in the 1920s (Caselli 116), as well as an unpublished 1939 essay, “Farewell Paris,” Barnes took her miniature memoir through several drafts over the course of 1940 and 1941.

Friedrich Rochlitz, who as editor of the Leipsic Musikalische Zeitung first introduced E. T. A. Hoffmann to the German reading public, relates an interesting interview with the author soon after the appearance of the first volume of the Fantasiestücke in Callot's Manier. In reviewing the work for his paper, Rochlitz had declared, “was,” to quote his words, “kein Mensch verkennen konnte—er (Hoffmann) ahme im Stile und einigermaszen in der Form überhaupt, dem Jean Paul nach.” Hoffman was enraged, and poured out his feelings in the vigorous and excited fashion, so well known to those who had in any way excited his ill will.