Discursive History Research Articles

Writing the Body Wild: Primatological Narrative and Spaces of Animality

In this paper I argue that the autobiographical accounts of the primatologists Jane Goodall, Biruté Galdikas and Dian Fossey offer an entryway into how the process of recounting subjective experience is mediated by a discursive history of animal embodiment. Through an exploration of ‘wild men’ figures in the Euro‐Western historical imaginary, I argue that primatology autobiographies must be seen in the context of centuries of Euro‐Western tales of journeying into wild space, a space that is fecund and sensual, and space of animal‐like corporeality that exists in contrast to the ‘civilised’ world. I situate this argument in the broader theoretical field which has examined the ‘torsion’ of ontological experience and inscribed identity, arguing that recent feminist scholarship might be further enhanced by engaging with the notions of humanness and animality that have long underscored an embodied identity politics.

The trouble with tongzhi

A general address term in Communist China, tongzhi ‘comrade’ was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong to refer to members of sexual minorities. Examining its level of acceptance among non-activist gay and lesbian Hongkongers, this article argues that non-activists’ ideology about sexuality accounts for their rejection of tongzhi and their preference for strategies that leave same-sex desire unspecified. This study demonstrates how the discursive history of a label can both enable and impede its political efficacy. It also sheds light on the internal resistance that representatives of minority groups encounter when introducing new labels for those they supposedly speak for.

Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia

On the same day, at different ends of Australia, two extraordinary rescues of men from extreme hardship took place. The two miners, both white and of Anglo-Celtic origin, were fêted, appeared on television chat shows and became celebrities so sought after that they had to employ an agent. The three Torres Strait Islanders, members of a grouping identified as ‘indigenous’ in the Australian social order, who had survived 22 days at sea in an open dinghy, were, to all intents and purposes, ignored by the mainstream Australian media. They would appear to have simply gone back to their families and got on with their lives. This article tracks the discursive histories in which each event was embedded to examine how this distinction could happen and how it could be so naturalised that hardly anybody commented on the disparity of treatment. It is this taken-for-granted disparity that I am describing here as everyday racism.

On the actuation of semantic change: The case of tongzhi

This article addresses a lacuna in research on the actuation of semantic change by shedding new light on speakers’ motivation. Focusing on the semantic change of tongzhi from ‘comrade’ to ‘sexual minorities’ in Hong Kong, it argues that the semantic change of social category labels is sometimes actuated by speakers’ desire to index different stances and to project different personae. Yet the speakers’ agency involved is both enabled and constrained by the discursive history of the term and larger socio-historical processes. This study also demonstrates the importance of uncovering speakers’ motivations through the use of different data collection methods.

As If: Kant, Adorno, and the Politics of Poetry

Speaking about Adorno's reflections on modern poetry inevitably obliges us to consider the relation between ethics and literature, and more specifically, the well-known question of writing poetry after Auschwitz. In this spirit, I would like to preface my paper with a radio interview, the rhetoric of which is embedded in Adorno's thinking of this question, but an interview which forgets the complex history of this question and, as a result, inscribes unthinkingly 9/11 into the discursive history of genocide. Like Adorno, who spoke about poetry and society through the airwaves, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky offered his outlook on poetry and politics after 9/11 in an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition of September 8, 2002, where he also read his poem, 9/11.1 But unlike Adorno, who advanced a complex, agonistic, and eventually tragic understanding of poetry, the American poet showed his complicity in the prevailing a-historical rhetoric, and his preference for some rather facile programmatic answers. Here is the first question posed to Pinsky: Before we hear your poem, let me ask how much time passed after 9/11 before you were

Schadenfreude: A Case Study of Emotion as Situated Discursive Display

AbstractMost Americans are aware that joy was expressed in the Arab world over the suffering inflicted on Americans with the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Less known is that such Schadenfreude was expressed by many Chinese citizens as well. This paper analyzes a sample of texts from postings on the Beijing University bulletin board system. Following a discursive approach to the social psychological study of emotion, we consider discourse as the means whereby power relations are asserted and maintained. These power relations comprise a domain within which actions and emotional displays are occasioned and understood. Based on the texts analyzed here, Schadenfreude can be understood as a discursive display by an observer of an event. This event must be recognized in terms of a "discursive history" within which a bully (here, the United States) has repeatedly violated the "rights" of bullied parties. In accordance with this discursive history, the event is seen as a reversal-in-tradition whereby rights presumed by the bully are violated. Finally, the observer must disidentify with the bully. As a discursive display, Schadenfreude not only comprises the overt performance of the observer's taken-for-granted understanding of the bully-as-bully, but also displaces any potential alternative discourse such as expressions of sympathy other observers may have for any target of such an event. This approach complements the social constructionist perspective within the literature on the sociology of emotions, but departs fundamentally from this literature's essentialist (or psycho-physiological) perspective.

Back to the Future: Contextuality and the Construction of the Basic Writer's Identity in JBW 1999-2005

Gray-Rosendale continues a project begun with Investigating Our Discursive History: JBW and the Construction of the 'Basic Writer's' Identity (JBW 1999) in which she employed a Foucauldian archaeological perspective to trace the dominance of as well as the disruptions within the three major metaphoric allegiances of basic writing studies: developmental, academic discourse, and conflict. In this piece, Gray-Rosendale argues that three new constructions of basic writing student identity that have gained prominence in the journal from 1999-2005: the basic writer's identity constructed as in situ; the basic writer's identity constructed as a theory, academic discourse, and/or history reformer; and the basic writer's identity constructed as a set of practices in action. All are part of what she terms a model. Identifying both beneficial and detrimental aspects of this contextual model, she calls upon basic writing teachers and scholars to work to combat some of the problematic elements within this latest metaphoric allegiance.

The writer as nomad?: The art of getting lost

Critical of the European travel writer’s proclivity for self-location and self-affirmation, postmodern voyagers have attempted to lose their way while traveling. Roland Barthes, for example, describes Tokyo in Empire of Signs (1982 [1970]) as a city with ‘no addresses’: a place where he cannot read the map; where he cannot adequately direct his taxi driver; finally, where he must ask the taxi driver to pull over and phone the people he is trying to reach. But getting lost is not, for Barthes, a bad thing. It corresponds to a larger project of unsettling European travel writing’s purported psychological and political mastery: when a person wanders astray, he or she is subject to what Barthes calls ‘a certain disturbance’ that unsettles the constructs of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. Barthes’ theoretical descendants have pushed these claims even further, claiming that losing one’s way – literally and philosophically – leads to a deterritorialization of knowledge: literary wandering subverts the ‘arrogance’ of discourse and resists the systematization of the world. In light of such claims, I investigate here the discursive history of getting lost and ask: does getting lost really subvert discursivity and systematization? If yes, then why did even eighteenth-century European travelers decide – long before Barthes – to get lost on purpose? Does the late twentieth-century desire to get lost undermine this Romantic model (visible in Goethe and, later, Flaubert)? Or does the postmodern travelogue in fact replicate this earlier narrative, in which lostness presupposes its own recuperation? And does modernism – as I argue here – present an ‘unheimlich’ counter-narrative?

Text, Agency, and Organization in the Light of Structuration Theory

This article argues for three linked conceptions. First is a conception of ‘a text’ as characterized by three features: a text is symbolic; it is inscribed as symbols on a relatively permanent, ‘readable’ medium such as paper or CD; and it has a coherent enough structure to be dealt with by interpretive processes or technologies such as financial processing. The second conception is that of an organization as a stable relational system grounded in the capacity to ‘“bracket space–time”... via the reflexive monitoring of system reproduction and the articulation of discursive history’ (Giddens, 1987b: 153). I argue that this capacity depends on the specific properties of ‘a text’ mentioned above. Third, ‘agency’ is conceptualized in line with Giddens’ ‘internalist’ model of agentive powers, which are ones necessary to engage with a text as organization members do. The paper argues that other conceptions risk blinding us to the features and relationships shown to be crucial here.

Shallow Literacy, Timid Teaching, and Cultural Impotence

s a discipline, we have known at least since we started reading translations of Bakhtin in the 80s that acts of literacy depend on much more than a set of linguistic decoding and encoding skills. Instead, speakers and listeners, readers and writers are in dialogue with other individuals, with their discursive histories, and with cultural values and institutions. In 1983, Shirley Brice Heath’s seminal Ways with Words invited us to consider that literacy is always historically, socially, and culturally situated and that the dominant discourse practices in American schools can misinterpret and fail to engage the discourse practices of those who learn to speak in economically or racially marginalized communities such as Trackton and Roadville. A decade earlier, linguists such as William Labov and Geneva Smitherman helped us begin to see that low-prestige dialects of English such as Black English Vernacular had sophisticated grammars and were informed by a complex set of cultural values. Yet in 1996 Lynn Z. Bloom could still write in a leading NCTE journal: “Yes, freshman composition is an unbashedly middle class enterprise” that rewards such values as self-reliance, responsibility, respectability, decorum, moderation and temperance, thrift, efficiency, order, cleanliness, punctuality, delayed gratification, and critical thinking (655). Yet as a profession we require our students to spend millions of dollars every year on prescriptive grammar and usage handbooks that rarely bother to nod to the complexities of language use in their rush to encourage students to write as if they are all aspiring New Yorker essayists. And, yet, as a discipline, we still embrace—in practice if not in theory—the Shaughnessy partyline that the best we can do is be culturally sensitive to students’ diverse literacy backgrounds as we assimilate them to our understandings of academic and professional discourse. Despite decades of scholarship that invite us to move beyond an understanding of literacy as more than a neutral set of basic skills, the discipline of rhetoric and composition remains largely impotent to challenge the dominant view of literacy because our teaching is timid, because in our composition programs, in our rhetoric classes, and in our disciplinary practice we fail to embrace the basic understanding of literacy as situated in our lives, in our students’ lives, and in culture-at-large. Why are we so tentative? We know that privileged forms of discourse—including the academic discourse practices that give us status in our schools and our society—have contributed to the marginalization of women, people of color, working class people, people living in poverty, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people, and those physically and mentally abled in other than the

Ethically Challenged: The Impasse between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory

The study of would seem to have come upon hard times of late, having been routed by the wildly uninformed attacks of conservative politicians, cultural critics such as Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, and journalists and scholars outside the field, who have habit of not reading the things on which they make confident pronouncements. In this important book, however, Beatrice Hanssen, theorist and historian of philosophy, reassesses the wars, which she contends are far from over, by first dissecting the way key concepts and terms have been used in these wars with little, if any, awareness of their constantly shifting historical contexts. She does this both relationally--that is, within the broader context of various disciplines in the academy-and internally by examining the two theoretical approaches she believes have been the most influential: Frankfurt School critical and poststructuralist theory, in particular Foucault's discursive histories, or genealogies, and the deconstructive poststructuralism of Judith Butler's performative of resignification. Along the way, Hanssen isolates various issues that should be familiar to those working in the university. On the one hand, one hears from variety of directions that is elitist, male-identified, reifying, totalizing, totalitarian, specular, spectatorial, obscurantist, apolitical, universalizing, hegemonic, occidental, imperialistic, Eurocentric, antidemocratic, and violent-to cite just few of the most commonly heard invectives (232). And theory is often now used merely as a placeholder for structuralism or neo-Marxism (232), as term more useful for name-calling than for any reflective purpose. On the other hand, as Hanssen argues, although we now seem to be in period of post-theory, approaches associated with the Frankfurt School and poststructuralism remain widely influential in such fields as literary and political theory, postcolonial, queer, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory, geography and theories of spatial meaning, and many others. The very ubiquity of the term post is itself one sign of the problems addressed by these two schools, for the term suggests model of history that posits intellectual development as series of fads that deviate from some supposed universal form of reason. In that model, one could compare universal reason to body of

Rediscovering Literature in a World of Texts

Readings at the Edge of Literature. By Myra Jehlen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 246 pages. $19.00 (paper). MYRA JEHLEN'S READINGS AT THE EDGE OF LITERATURE TAKES UP AQUESTION THAT all who work in English departments (or who, whatever their institutional placement, treat belletristic texts in their scholarly writing) would do well to consider: Why return to literature? That is, now that the boundary between literature and history has been notably blurred, if not eroded, in academic discourse, such that all manner of texts are made to speak to one another, to inhabit the same intellectual terrain, why restore literature's exceptionalism? What can literature do—or what can we do with it—if we attend, once again, to its distinctness? This book's defense of the literary rests on the premise that, as Jehlen puts it, "form is the essence of literature" (5). Form in this account is not divorced from content (or history or politics) but is instead "an embodiment of ideas, attitudes, and emotions," the means by which an author expresses an understanding of or reorganizes a real-life problem (5). This "formal unfolding of knowledge" is, for Jehlen, especially complex in American literature, whose authors engage a troubling set of contradictions; among those she foregrounds are Twain's impulse to question racial hierarchies but then retreat into their reassurances and Franklin's attempt to balance the attractions of "infinite ambition" with the imperatives of modesty (6, 8). What interests Jehlen particularly is literature's engagement with its own limits, its artful attempts to [End Page 507] express the inexpressible. These moments, at which the unsayable is somehow said, mark the "edge of literature" invoked in Jehlen's title. The provocative claim toward which all this is tending is that literature's relevance—indeed, its very survival as a culturally and intellectually meaningful category—depends on the presence of a material history, a space outside of textuality. Jehlen asserts that history's linguistic turn—that is, the movement toward a historiography that emphasizes discourse rather than external events—threatens literary study more than it does historical inquiry, a claim that some traditional historians would no doubt dispute. The "edge of literature" takes on a second meaning here, insofar as the boundary in question depends on the presence of a material reality against which it presses and on which it comments. By recuperating a history that is not (just) textual, Jehlen argues, we can restore to the study of literature its most potent critical tool: the analysis of how ("by what means and to what ends") literary texts transform "the real" (10). Jehlen's ninth and tenth chapters usefully clarify her dispute with recent historiography—so much so that I found myself wishing they had appeared earlier in the book, prior to the literary readings that rely on the conception of history being worked out here. The first of these, "History before the Fact: The Underdetermined John Smith," meditates on the ways in which revisionist discursive history, in its emphasis on the unreliability of all colonial narratives, can collapse into a different, but no less limiting, version of certainty. When historiography's "material referents" drop from view and its skepticism with regard to written sources transforms into the conviction that all accounts by Europeans, which constitute nearly all extant accounts, are false, then the work comes to operate only within its own logic, without answering to any responsible notion of history (169). Against this narrowing of possibilities, Jehlen offers a reading of Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia—or, more precisely, of an episode in that history, the coronation of Chief Powhatan—that attends to the openness of his narrative. Borrowing from Bruno Latour's work in the history of science, Jehlen writes that Smith is "represent[ing] history before the fact," an "underdetermined" history that, like Latour's notion of "science in the making," is "uncertain, apparently redundant, and contingent" (176). 1...

The Architectural Edifice and the Phantoms of History

Starting with the literal and physical role of the “ground,” this article attempts to bring this “ground” into a discursive arena. In particular, the author is thinking about the period at the end of a war, the period in between destruction and reconstruction, exemplified in some classic postwar films in which the architecture of the city is in a state of ruin—deformed, eroded, and dark—but there is no further destruction. The article calls this period “a gap of history” and its investigation is set against a claim that architecture is a reconstructive practice, that it is enlightening and aspiring. History, on the other hand, is captured by scenes of the battlefield and dominated by a narrative of war and destruction. The article makes reference to the real and fantasy desire for destruction (war and history) and reconstruction (architecture), and how through the connecting plane of the ground architecture is entangled in war and history of destruction as it figures in reconstruction. Architecture is contingent on history as discursive—history that is not unified, fixed, or evolutionary but rather contested and rewritten within a conflictual battlefield.

The Genealogical Pedagogy of John Greyson's Zero Patience

La comédie musicale Zéro Patience (1993) de John Greyson contrefait limage du SIDA dans la culture de masse en mettant les dynamiques spectaculaires de la comédie musicale hollywoodienne au service d’une pédagogie généalogique qui présente dans son contexte historique la politique du blâme reliée au SIDA. En situant dans le cadra d'une exhibition muséologique l'histoire de l'agent de bord Canadien qui aurait apparemment « emporté te SIDA en Amérique du Nord », Greyson révèle tes discours institutionnels qui exigeaient la construction d'un « patient zéro ». Le film suggère ainsi que le musée est l'antécédent généalogique des médias contemporains, une technologie visuelle essentiellement moderne qui facilite le déploiement de certains fantasmes nationaux du corps social « sain » en étalant le corps malade de l'autre.

Process and post-process: A discursive history

While the term post-process can be useful as a heuristic for expanding the scope of the field of second language writing, the uncritical adoption of this and other keywords can have serious consequences because they often oversimplify the historical complexity of the intellectual developments they describe. In order to provide a critical understanding of the term post-process in its own historical context, this article examines the history of process and post-process in composition studies, focusing on the ways in which terms such as current-traditional rhetoric, process, and post-process have contributed to the discursive construction of reality. Based on this analysis, I argue that the use of the term post-process in the context of L2 writing needs to be guided by a critical awareness of the discursive construction process. I further argue that the notion of post-process needs to be understood not as the rejection of process but as the recognition of the multiplicity of L2 writing theories and pedagogies.

From `Political Correctness' to `Politische Korrektheit': Discourses of `PC' in the German Newspaper, Die Welt

Discourses of `political correctness' (`PC') are (Anglo-)American in origin. But one of the aims of this special issue of Discourse & Society is to explore `PC' from the perspective of languages other than English and, in this article, we look at the case of German. After providing a brief discursive history of `political correctness' in Germany, we present an empirical study of `PC'-related discourses in a corpus of texts gathered from the newspaper Die Welt. The analysis of the data begins with a quantitative survey of German `PC'-related terms from 1995 to 2000. This is followed by a qualitative analysis of the use of those terms during this period. The article reveals many similarities but also a number of interesting differences between Anglo-American and German discourses of `political correctness', especially where the themes of national identity and the so-called `normalization' of German historical consciousness are concerned.

Writing empire, underwriting nation: discursive histories of Kabyle Berber oral texts

In this article, I explore how colonial, nationalist, and media interests converge around the collection of oral texts. Moving from the French colonial project of collecting native lore to the nationalist project to recover indigenous heritage to the embedding of village songs in contemporary world music, I examine how oral texts from Algeria's Kabyle Berber region have been variously configured as signs through which social differences are imagined and hierarchically ordered. I foreground the history of intertextual penetration between North African poetic productions and Western aesthetic categories, [genre, intertextuality, oral text, colonialism, world music, Algeria]

A ‘nation of intent’ in Burma: Karen ethno-nationalism, nationalism and narrations of nation

Fully-formed nationalisms do not emerge from nothing. Nor are they inextinguishable expressions of pre-modern forms of identity and political aspirations. The argument in this paper is that if they are fully formed, they have to emerge from ethno -nationalism; that is, out of ethnic identification-writ-large, where ethnic identification becomes ‘mapped’ onto that larger thing called a ‘nation’. Ethnic identification, however, requires a transformation in modes of consciousness and atavistic ethno-histories before ethno-nationalism and then full-blooded nationalisms can come into being. The argument is made in relation to the Karen nationalist movement in Burma. Karen nationalism emerged out of ethno-nationalism that was fostered by Christian missionary interest and ethnological attempts to set out a Karen ethno-history. Missionary writings offered Christian-educated Karen, in colonial times, the basis for a ‘narration of nation’ and for viewing themselves not merely as an ethnic group but a ‘nation’. This paper sets out the ceaseless unfolding of this ‘narration of nation’ that began in the nineteenth century and now tragically occurs in refugee camps in Thailand because of drastically altered politico-military conditions in Burma since the late 1980s. These narrations can only be understood in terms of their discursive history and how this history has been shaped. These narrations are examined with a view to addressing some key theoretical issues contained in more recent studies of nationalism and nation-state-making as modern phenomena and how ethno-nationalism is transformed into nationalism.

A Different Class of Witnesses: Experts in the Courtroom

This investigation examines the discursive history and contemporary courtroom discourse of expert witnesses in Anglo-American courts, incorporating the methods of Michel Foucault into a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The history of experts is marked by a profound discontinuity in the role of experts, during the late medieval period, with experts relegated to a witness role instead of a juror role - that of the privately knowledgeable investigator - they previously held. Examination of the discourse of contemporary experts in three high-profile US trials documents a different witness status for experts along three parameters: amplification of question responses; the use of the contrastive discourse marker well to express professional disagreement with their interlocutors; and the embedding of professional practices into so clauses. These parameters stand in sharp contrast to ordinary witness discourse. The study concludes with a discussion of the stakes in legal control of expert witnesses including asymmetrical access to experts by economic status, the possible suppression of some expert testimony by recent US Supreme Court decisions, and the hierarchicalization of expert knowledge.

(review)

MLRn 96.3,200 I 823 Adorno, lioucault, Lyotard), Hayesthen elaborates a studied examination ofthe discursive history oftheterm andconcept oftysteme from theRenaissance tothe Revolution. Originally a musical term, to describe a constituted organization, tysteme wasenlisted intheattempt byphilosophical discourse toimpose orderliness upona disorderly world.The notion ofsysteme wouldseemto exemplify the problematic legacyof theEnlightenment thatis at once emancipatory and oppressive. Thetensions present inthe systematizing project aretraced through the correspondences ofElizabeth ofBohemia andDescartes, Desjardins andVilledieu andGraffigny andDevauxn through the physics ofDu Chatelet, through the reading strategies ofCondillac's 7FraiM des tystemes, andthrough selected writings ofDiderotS including theLettre surlesovseugles theLettre surlessourds etmuets entries forthe Encyclopedie andtheSupplement auvoyage deBougainville. Hayesdescribes Diderot's texts, with their insistence upon'inconsequence', as 'dissipatory structures', which she explains asa kind ofde-territorialization where categories areneither attacked nor supported, butaresimply allowed either todisintegrate ortoremain absurdly in place.ForHayes, Diderot istheleastsystematic ofthethinkers studied, onewho resists theimpulse to'fixer lalangue'. Diderot, shewrites, possesses 'anintuition of the radical contingency oftheconnections that wemaponthe world' (p. I42).This important bookisofinterest, notonly toscholars oftheFrench Enlightenment but alsotomoregeneral readers inthehistory ofEuropean thought, andwouldbe 'enlightening' forstudents ofccxntemporary culture seeking a counter-discursive scepticism towards ourability toknow andcontrol. Reading the FrenJ Enlightenment courses a topographical trajectory from twentieth-century dystopias ofEnlightenment gone wrong, through the criss-crossing textual networks ofeighteenth-century Europe, toDiderot's fictionalized Tahiti, andconcludes with a pauseinLe Notre's designforthelabyrinth in thegardens at Versailles, ofwhichtheirregular, asymmetrical layout results from simultaneous systematizing andchaotic impulses. Theprocess ofre-interpreting the apparently familiar territory ofthe Enlightenment isthrown into interesting anecdotal relief through theauthor's relation ofherown curiously asymmetrical bilingual upbringing, writing French butspeaking English. Herexperience oftwo-way linguistic otherness accords with Diderot's realization in theLettre sur lesaveugles, following theblind man'saccount ofhisunderstanding of theword'mirror', thatiFrench couldbe a foreign language within French' (PP.I58-59). Hayesachieves heraim ofdemonstrating thatthere is another Enlightenment written within theEnlightenment we know, justas disorder is immanent tosystematicity. UNIVERSITY OFBRISTOL MARTIN CALDER Refexions surlesgrands hommes quisont morts enplaisantant. Arec despoesiesodiverses. BY ANDRE-FRANSOIS DESLANDES. Ed. by FRANCK SALAUN.(LAge des Lumieres, 8)Paris: Champion. 2000. I75PP. 250F. .. . n ... . . . . . s 1nlsworx, nrst puDllstecl anonymously lnI7I2,enJoyed a conslderable successas isproved bya significant number ofeditions andtranslations that went onappearing almost totheendofthecentury. Thisvolume isthefirst newedition ofthework since then, and,as such7 istobewelcomed. Famous lastwords willalways holda certain (morbid?) fascination, andthis aspect ofthis elegantly written text will give pleasure tomodern readers as itdidtotheauthor's contemporaries, butdoesnot entirely account for itsinitial popularity. Thiswas,infact, something ofa succes de scandale, for Deslandes's great men(and,indeed, women) arepresented, whether historically accurately or not,as modelrepresentatives of thephilosophical Reviews 824 movement offree thinking. Itistheir intellectual independence from the prejudices oftheChristian religion that allows them toseedeath as a logical endtothelifecycle that canbe faced inthesamewayas theother events inlife, free from the solemnsuperstitions withwhichreligion surrounds it. This was, of course, inflammatory stuff atthetime ofitspublication, andFranck Salaun's introduction dealswell with theimportance ofthis aspect both for thecontent ofthetext andits success. Deslandes's initial inspiration, ashetells ushimself, camefrom Montaigne, butheisnottheonly influence, andanother strength oftheedition isthedetailed treatment given tosources inthefootnotes. The editor's study ofcontemporary responses tothework is supported byan appendix containing reviews from the jrournal deWrevoux andthe jroarnal litteraire, andthearticle onDeslandes inSabatier deCastres's LesErois Siecles denotre litte'rature. Thewitty writing andclarity ofstyle andexpression maketheReJifexions a joy to read;theselected poemsthatwere appended toitinlater editions aremore pedestrian, although many ofthem have interesting links with theprose work, particularly poignantly inthelast, inwhich thepoetaspires to makethesamegooddeathas hisheroes.One oddity of presentation, which aXects verse quotations intheReflexions as wellas thetoe'sies diverses, isthehabit inpoems with varying line-lengths ofaligning alllinestothe sameleft margin, rather thanfollowing thenormal practice ofindenting shorter lines, a characteristic that makes appreciation ofthe rhythmic subtleties ofthe verse difficult. Thatapart, though, this is a welcome edition ofa text which, with its controversial content, isaninteresting social document, butalsomakes pleasurable . . . . reac mglnlts ownrlg zt. UNIVERSITY OFWALES, SWANSEA DEREK F.CONNON 'DesBeaute's plushardies...': le theatre allemand dansla France de l'Ancien Re'gime (I750-I789). BYFRANSOIS GENTON. (Seriedetudes germaniques, 4) SaintDenis :EditionsSuger. I999. 3s8pp. gsF. The importance oftheinfluence of Diderot's dramatic theories on Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgie isreadily acknowledged, as areother eighteenth-century French cultural exports totheGerman-speaking countries. FranSois Genton's study gives a timely reminder that this wasnot, however...