Discursive Potential Research Articles

Actualization of Ancient Images in Works of Contemporary Playwrights

The article explores the reception of ancient imagery in contemporary playwrights’ works. The study focuses on the plays “Besieged” by E. Grishkovtsev, “Two Wives of Paris” by E. Isaeva, and “Micropolis” by E. Vodolazkin. A comprehensive analysis of these works is conducted to examine the modernization of ancient images, identifying intertextual connections and individual stylistic features in the use of precedent phenomena by different playwrights. The novelty of the research lies in tracing the discursive properties of motifs and images rooted in ancient culture and reimagined in contemporary plays. The analysis demonstrates how contemporary playwrights' engagement with familiar material enriches the semantic field of new works, offering fresh perspectives on eternal themes and exploring new and unexpected connections between the past and present, myth and reality. This study is relevant for the study and development of cultural dialogue across different epochs and communities. The authors conclude that in contemporary dramaturgy, ancient images possess significant discursive potential and serve as a means of artistic exploration of modern reality.

Potentiel argumentatif du vocabulaire juridique et orientation axiologique du discours judiciaire

This article proposes a research programme at the intersection of linguistic semantics, law, and judicial practice. Its aim is to explain and argue for a judicial and meta-judicial semantics, complementary to legal linguistics, by giving it theoretical and methodological foundations in the perspective of the semantics of argumentative possibilities. The hypothesis is that legal terms with a dual affiliation (legal and general lexicons), deploy in the contradictory arguments of judicial practice, their discursive potential (specified by conventional definitions), but also the argumentative potential of the meaning that these lexical entities have in the general lexicon. The illustration that supports this hypothesis is based on the analysis of crime, in the contradictory pleadings of judicial and post-judicial practices in French judicial system.

Коммуникативные тактики и стратегии в бракоразводных процессах: юрислингвистический аспект

The article investigates the relationship between communicative motives and the process of divorce from a jurislinguistic perspective. The article examines how communicative factors influence the decision to dissolve a marriage. 
 The aim of the article is to identify the primary communicative motives that lead to the dissolution of marriage and to understand their interaction with the legal aspects of the divorce process. Exploring these interactions can help improve communication in such situations, as well as increase the effectiveness of legal interventions related to marital dissolution.
 Methodology, methods and techniques. The article applies discursive, lexico-semantic, contextual method of analyzing communicative tactics and strategies. The legal-linguistic analysis of divorce discourse implies the use of argumentation methodology, methodology of cognitive interpretation of legal text and discourse, methodology of analyzing the formal and semantic structure of linguistic elements and text-forming categories.
 Results. In the process of jurislinguistic analysis we have identified the primary and auxiliary strategies and tactics in divorce proceedings. The primary strategy of judicial communication is persuasion as the most significant strategy in terms of motives and goals, since it is the court that decides the outcome of the dispute in divorce proceedings. Auxiliary strategies are: deconstruction strategy, strategy of interpreting reality, emotionally attuning strategy, rhetorical strategy, dialog strategy and others. 
 Communicative-psychological motives for the dissolution of marriage can be the loss of interest of spouses (communicative conflicts, misunderstanding, indifference, aggression), infidelity, beatings, lack of care for joint children and many others. We consider it necessary to develop a special jurislinguistic methodology, using the communicative-discursive potential, which would declare a strict mechanism for taking into account the motives of action of all parties and would implement an algorithm of correlating communicative tactics and strategies in order to successfully reconcile the parties.
 The scientific novelty of the study consists in addressing the jurislinguistic discourse of divorce proceedings in order to identify communicative tactics and strategies as a basis for the development of jurislinguistic methodology that uses the communicative and discursive potential.
 The practical significance of the study lies in the use of the primary findings to create a communicative toolkit that improves the results of the judicial process.

Ethical and aesthetic explorations of systemic practice. By PietroBarbetta, Maria EstherCavagnis, Inga‐BrittKrause and UmbertaTelfener. New York, NY: Routledge. 2022. pp. 162. ISBN 978‐1‐1‐138‐346215. 23,99.

Journal of Family TherapyEarly View BOOK REVIEW Ethical and aesthetic explorations of systemic practice By Pietro Barbetta, Maria Esther Cavagnis, Inga-Britt Krause and Umberta Telfener. New York, NY: Routledge. 2022. pp. 162. ISBN 978-1-1-138-346215. 23,99. Robert van Hennik, Corresponding Author Robert van Hennik [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-5620-3099 Doctor in Systemic Practices, Systemic Family Therapist, Teacher and Supervisor at the Lorentzhuis, Haarlem, the NetherlandsSearch for more papers by this author Robert van Hennik, Corresponding Author Robert van Hennik [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-5620-3099 Doctor in Systemic Practices, Systemic Family Therapist, Teacher and Supervisor at the Lorentzhuis, Haarlem, the NetherlandsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12435Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL REFERENCES Barad, K. (2003) Humanist performativity: towards an understanding of how comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801– 831. Bateson, G. (1958) Naven: the culture of the Iatmul people of New Guinea as revealed through the study of the “Naven”. Ceremonial: Wildwood House. Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and nature: a necessary unit. New York: Hampton Press. Bateson, G. & Mead, M. (1942) Balinese character. New York: N.Y. Academy of Sciences. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis MN: Minneapolis Press. McNamee, S. (2015) Ethics as discursive potential. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 36, 419– 433. Sermijn, J. & Loots, G. (2015) The co-creating of crazy patchworks; becoming rhizomatic in systemic therapy. Family Process, 54(3), 533– 544. Shotter, J. (2010) Social construction on the edge. Withness thinking & embodiment. Ohio: A Taos Institute Publication. van Hennik, R. (2021) Becoming a posthuman systemic nomad. Part II: systemic nomads. An ecosophy. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 3(2), 1– 29. Varela, F., Thomson, E. & Rosch, E. (2007) The embodied mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J.B. & Jackson, D.J. (1967) Pragmatics of human communication: a study of interactional patterns, pathologies and paradoxes. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

The Van Gogh Experience

This experimental writing both embodies and interrogates how creative work that is re-mixed and re-presented also creates multivalent “experiences.” A menagerie of quotations performs both a narrative-of-thinking and open-ended discursive potential. The work asks: Can this manuscript both analyze and perform a subversion, problematizing notions of authenticity, authorship, ownership, production, distribution, reception, and meaning? Can immersion in fragmented, derivative writing produce an affective experience in line with a contemporary post-pandemic and technologically- and social-media-immersive “structure of feeling”? The excerpts include discussions of Vincent Van Gogh’s work recently presented as popular “immersive experiences”; discourse on the commodification, reproduction, and authenticity of art; views on artistic presentation in a pandemic- and technology-infused era; and quotations concerning (and drawn from work in) deconstruction, authorship, and avant-garde fiction, further extending interpretative potential. Where does it start, where does it take you, and where do you feel it?

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Hashtags and Environmental Literacy in the EFL Classroom

Abstract Hashtags have become an omnipresent phenomenon in the digital age. As such, far from simply being indexing devices, they can be perceived as meaning-making practices in their own right, which are involved in shaping contemporary social discourses. This discursive potential of hashtags can, for instance, be seen in current debates about climate change on Instagram and Twitter, where environmentally themed hashtags play an important role in how individuals construct a meaningful relationship to the natural environment. The present paper takes an educational perspective on these environmental hashtags, by taking a closer look at how hashtags can be used in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom to foster learners’ environmental literacy. It will be argued that hashtags provide a particularly useful learning foundation in English language education, since they assist learners in developing vital foreign language competences in the form of a response-ability and a discourse-ability and, overall, reveal the cultural construction of knowledge about the environment.

Towards a social-semiotic approach to visual analysis of two-dimensional games

Nowadays, video games are one of the most influential media from an economic and sociocultural point of view. Therefore, it is important to have tools to analyze such texts and the meanings and discourses they potentially convey. Based on the social-semiotic approach, this paper proposes a set of analytical categories to study the visual construction of 2D (two-dimensional) games. Although the 2D paradigm is no longer prevalent in video games — 3D (three-dimensional) games became gradually common as early as 1995 with the introduction of the Sony PlayStation — it is still used in several current titles. Furthermore, social-semiotic studies on video games are still not numerous; therefore, a focused study that systematizes methodological categories for the analysis of video games is a relevant step towards understanding the semiotic constitution of these artifacts. The present study focuses on Marvel Super Heroes in War of the Gems for the Super Nintendo (CAPCOM, 1996). By applying the categories presented here on the Brazilian stage of the game, this article suggests ways to analyze the visual mode of video games, taking into account their multimodal nature and discursive potential.

The Caspian Sea as Intertext: from the Old Russian Literary Tradition to Modern Mass Media (Reception, Concepts, Emotions)

The article reveals cognitive and discursive potential of the Caspian Sea portrayal in the Russian literary tradition and modern Internet journalism. The research is based on individual works of Russian writers written in different genres, as well as works of domestic journalists, representing an unconventional reception of the picture of the world framed around the Caspian Sea. The paper draws conclusions about the ambivalent meaning of the image of the Caspian Sea, its mythological semantics; it shows the intertextual nature of the image of the Caspian Sea which generates ideas relevant for the author’s reality; it defines the main constitutive concepts creating the worldview characteristic of the Caspian region; and it reveals the spectrum of emotions expressing the individual author’s perception of the image of the Caspian Sea.

Thinking outside the neoliberal box? The discursive potential of national climate legislation for the local governance of climate change

ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a renewed interest in subnational levels of governance as sites of potential and renewed ambition on climate change. One recent challenge to dominant neoliberal discourses of climate governance is legislation enacted in Wales, which places sustainable development as the central organising principle of local government. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis, supplemented by stakeholder interviews, this research analyses the discursive potential of this legislation in reshaping local governance of climate change. The findings show that the introduction of new legislation can foster the emergence of collaborative structures and collective language, but is limited in its ability to broaden climate governance discourses. This research highlights how seemingly progressive legislation is hampered in its potential through its hybridisation with already-existing neoliberal climate governance discourses and structures. It also demonstrates the importance of discourse analysis in identifying subtle narratives at work in the governance of climate change.

Great Patriotic War in Modern Dramatic Discourse

The issue of understanding the theme of the Great Patriotic War (1941—1945) by modern Russian playwrights is raised in the article. The novelty of the study is due to the appeal to little-studied plays by the authors of the 21st century. The purpose of the article is to trace the specifics of the author’s individual variants of the artistic representation of the war theme on the material of the works of modern times and to give an idea of the discursive potential of this theme for modern dramaturgy. The evidence base is the analysis of three works written by different playwrights, which present the perception and living of military events and their consequences by a woman, a man and a child. These are the plays “Frontovichka” by A. Baturina, “Seven Trophies of Private Shapkin” by V. Tkachev and “Cannibal” by N. Vorobieva and K. Zhurenkov. The results of the analysis allow us to draw a parallel between eras and show that playwrights, through the prism of war, turn not so much to the past, but to the pressing problems of the present and future. It is concluded that this indicates the key nature of the military theme for modern Russian literature and its enduring significance both for each individual and for humanity as a whole.

Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes

Here the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes.” The collage is composed entirely of quotations. Here, a thesis-driven expository regime is replaced with open-ended discursive potential. The excerpts include assessments of the replication crisis in science; discussions of p values and their centrality in the crisis; reviews and analysis of recent scientific hoaxes, “sting” operations, and/or fraudulent studies (some attempting to delegitimize poststructuralist, postmodernist, and feminist critiques of science); discussions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Wittgensteinian language games; and quotations from contemporary social theory and literature. The collage, as an experiment, offers readers an opportunity for re-contextualization through their own associative sense-making. Readers determine what is important information, what might be fruitfully compared and contrasted, and how discourses come to “mean.”

Diasporic Performativity in the Practice of Karaoke

This study explores how karaoke serves as a spatializing practice for Filipino Americans in Chicago from which a new poetics of diaspora life is performed. Space, as argued by Lefebvre, is essentially empty but becomes occupied through visual cues animated by the gestures and actions of those who inhabit it. The spatializing potential of karaoke places everyday life as a site of discourse where music and childhood memories serve not only as objects of the past but also as cultural imaginaries that live and breathe in the present. Drawing from interviews of and engaging in participant observation with Filipino Americans in Chicago from various occupational backgrounds, this study argues that karaoke as a cultural practice is informed by a logic of diasporic performativity that locates active engagement with media as an expression of human agency. The spaces of interaction that it creates embody a reconstruction of home, identity, and community, the discursive potential of which can be as political as it is poetic. Through karaoke, perceived dichotomies between performer and spectator, immigrant and American-born, homeland and hostland are untangled creating social and emotional bonds that offer possibilities of social critique.

Memeticity of communicative practices in the conditions of developmentdigital information space

The aim of the workis to investigate memeticity as a defining characteristic of modern communicative practices unfolding in the digital environment of the Internet. The research methodology consists in the application of analytical, semiotic, discursive, culturological methods in the study of memetics and memes as fundamental polymodal and interdiscursive objects of digital culture, acting as means of communication capable of forming social narratives and discourses through the prism of social semiotics. her identity. The scientific novelty of the work is that for the first time modern communicative practices of the digital environment are analyzed in terms of prevalence in their structure ofmemeticity and memetic communication; Memes, in turn, are considered not only as units of cultural information and entertainment content, but also as digital polysemes that have the ability to serve as a universal means of communication, explanation of reality, commenting on current events, promoting important norms and values. Conclusions. Over the last decade, memes have become a complex phenomenon of Internet communication and modern communication practices in general, which are characterized by memetics as an integral attribute. From the point of view of the development of modern digital information space, memes are understood as cultural information that is transmitted from person to person, but, at the same time, grows into a social phenomenon that shapes the thinking, behavior and actions of communities. Memes combine forms of intertextuality with elements of popular culture, emphasizing the dynamics of the real and virtual world and becoming an online discourse tool that gives users a sense of commitment to creating and participating in it and even influencing others. Given the discursive potential, polysemy, realized in memes, it is possible to understand the ability of these artifacts of digital culture to form new meanings and values, evaluative judgments. Memetics is a part of public communication that defines memes as texts created, disseminated and collectively transformed by various participants in participatory digital culture, enhancing socio-cultural integration in society, allowing co-thinkers to co-opt into a single symbolic space built on new precedents or precedents.

Axiology of Proverbs in the Focus of the Problem of Cognitive-discursive Modeling of Semantics of Russian Proverbs

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problem of determining the value factor in the semantic structure of proverbs in relation to the problem of cognitive-pragmatic modeling of proverbial semantics. The relevance of the appeal to the value component of paremic semantics is due to the approach to solving the problems of semantics of signs of indirect-derived nomination in the system “Language - text - discourse”, which has already become traditional for anthropocentric linguistics. Paremia is considered as a syncretic sign that combines the properties of a texteme (a language sign) and a statement (a discursive unit). Many features of it’s speech implementation are due to the combination of the properties of a mini-text with a “folded” semantic structure and a discourse unit that contributes to the formation of meaning in it’s space. In the course of determining the essence of the approach to the description of the problem specified linguophilosophical cultural status values, and proposes the author's concept define cognitive-pragmatic status values as linguaitaliana units allocated in the cognitive basis of the values of folk aphorism and implemented in a pragmatic component paramedische values. The description of axiological paremic representation is carried out in line with the cognitive-pragmatic approach to the distinction between axiological and evaluative in the semantic content of proverbs. Grounded in the study of the model description of the axiological accentually pareticheski semantics is illustrated by a thematic group of proverbs and in describing the discursive potential of the proverbs included in the context. The relevance of the study is due to the consideration of paremic semantics as a field of linguosinergic interaction of value and evaluation, expressed in the semantic structure of proverbs.

Say Hello to Ambedkar: Understanding Dalit Consciousness through Ajay Navaria’s Hindi Short Fiction

Ajay Navaria is considered “the modern-day Premchand” by Mohammed Hanif, for his radical representation of the Dalit subject in Hindi literature. Navaria’s stories contain the urban Dalit individual dangling between his identity as a village “bhangi” and the privilege of a city “babu” at the center of the narrative. This paper is an attempt to understand Dalit consciousness within Hindi literary discourse and the language politics of urban India by closely analyzing Navaria’s Hindi short stories, translated into English by Laura Brueck in Unclaimed Terrain (2014). In the first part, I examine Navaria’s intertextual relationship with Premchand in “ कथा” or “Hello Premchand” in order to understand the discursive potential of Navaria’s “Dalit consciousness” as inspired by Ambedkar. In the second part, through “गोदना” or “Tattoo,” I explore the hybridized nature of his literary-language, and the attendant questions of translatability of Dalit chetna into English. I argue that Navaria’s use of language is an exercise in the construction of a modern Dalit identity that is often silenced and reserved. This paper, therefore, studies the revolutionary potential of Dalit literature as manifested in, both, its political and esthetic sensibility.

Bureaucracy and Desire: Franz Kafka’s Accident Report

In as much as accidents are a malfunction, an interruption and even a source of horror, they also offer inexhaustible discursive potential. As an inevitable negative consequence of technological and industrial progress, accidents remind us of the contingent occurrence of disorder: they become an immaterial threat and yet they also fascinate, and create possibilities for narration.1 In the attempt to grasp, register and regulate them, accidents become cases for insurance and are transformed into data in statistical analysis. The question of guilt and liability is, thereby, replaced in the insurance system by the category of risk.2 As such, the bureaucratic and legal aspects of accidents became relevant aesthetic and narrative considerations for several modernist authors, including Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.3Franz Kafka, in his dual occupation as literary author and professional writer, a so-called concipist(responsible for writing legal documents or signing documents written by his superiors) towards the end of the Habsburg Monarchy, seems to be the ideal candidate to observe all these developments in insurance and accident prevention. In the following first section of this essay, an example from Kafka’s Travel Diariesgives an idea of his own poetics of accidentin the making (Wagner: 2007): Kafka’s 1911 report of a car accident provides us with key insights in the interrelation between the factual and the fictional world. In the second section, the function of reports and files in his 1926 institution-novel The Castleshows the possibilities of literary writing and narration in a milieu, where lifeand institutionintervene in each other (Campe: 2005).4 Finally, and against this background, I explore how the fundamental psychoanalytic term of desire is shaped in a pursuit for institutional and official recognition, so that a specific kind of official desire – in German Amtsbegehren – emerges (Wolf: 2018).5

Sociology as a resource of “intelligent power” in the globalization era

The current state of the global social system assumes a compulsory external impact on the national communities of a complex of factors defined in social science as “globalization”. Together with the creation of the general economic, social, cultural space that intensifies the international interaction, globalization increases vulnerability of separate social systems. In recent decades, the strategies of J. Nye have become the most popular paradigms of the international competition: hard, soft, smart and intelligent power. The essence of the theoretical conceptualization of the “intelligent power” is that it is based mainly on internal resources and allows to focus on developing the national worldview platform consolidating basic meanings of social system and goals of its development. The possibilities of sociology as a resource of “intelligent power” are in its expert, scientific-educational, innovative and discursive potential. Unfortunately, despite its extensive and powerful network of the scientific-educational institutions financed from the budgetary funds, sociology still does not work in national interests. Sociology is the only social science with a full set of theoretical and methodological tools to gather and analyze social information, to predict social processes, and to work for the following spheres of “intelligent power”: think tanks with the participation of sociologists can provide authorities with necessary information, consult them on important decisions, stimulate interest in obtaining new data and starting new studies, serve as a platform for the interaction with professional researchers of social life; introducing educational programs competitive at the international level and based on the production of new knowledge and its effective use in the educational process; critical evaluation of foreign ideologies and conceptions with the subsequent development of one’s own ideas and new social paradigms taking into account national interests.

Beyond the neoliberal paradigm? Images of Social Europe in open method of coordination employment peer reviews

AbstractThis article seeks to understand how, within the open method of coordination peer review process, the European Union (EU) together with member states envision the processes of European integration within the employment policy field. Our theoretical framework draws light on alternatives, nuances, and tendencies of discursive potential for transcending the neoliberal image at the core of the European Social Policy literature. A content analysis of employment guidelines (1998–2015) and best practices in the peer review programs for employment policies (1999–2015) shows how the EU seeks to find credible roles for itself in employment policy and how in this process different ideas and even more practices prevail. We find clues for transcending the neoliberal picture, visions of a different Europe that is more in accord with the European values of liberal Social Europe and cosmopolitan Social Europe than is generally proposed in this context.

The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 by Susan S. Lanser

Reviewed by: The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 by Susan S. Lanser Kristina Straub Susan S. Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014). Pp. 344. $95.00 cloth, $32.50 paper. The Sexuality of History, like its title, produces that sense of theoretical, critical vertigo that comes every once in a while when a book unsettles a reader’s most comfortable methodological assumptions. The disorientation produced by the title carries into an opening methodological chapter that offers more than some new theoretical tools to add to one’s kit. Rather, it realigns one’s relationship to both “sexuality” and “history” as objects of study. To import Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenological retake on Edmund Husserl’s table, my orientation to the “table” of “sexuality studies” has been irrecoverably queered by Lanser’s book, and I do not mean by “queering” the close reading for evidence of lesbianism or “gay” that it so often means. The methodology laid out by this book is rich in its contribution to the field of sexuality studies and, to those who read it carefully, to a lot of other fields that fall within the long time period (1565–1830) and the several European languages and nations that this book encompasses. Because of the importance of Lanser’s methodological as well as historical and literary contribution, this review will be a little lopsided in its attentions to methodology, in hopes of helping readers, not to avoid the vertigo that I experienced, but to reap the rewards of having many of their assumptions about “the Sapphic” and “modernity,” about “sexuality” and “history” turned upside down. The inversion “sexuality of history” first of all places sexuality in the driver’s seat of social and historical process. Sexual representations, Lanser argues, have social agency; they work to organize larger frameworks for understanding the world and for stabilizing or changing them. As Lanser notes, the field of sexuality studies has long recognized this agency, but if “sexuality” is not the focus of historical work, it is rarely factored into the analysis of other cultural forms. Relegated to the sidelines except by those of us who “do” sexuality studies (which [End Page 479] not coincidentally is a lot of women and queers of all genders), its formative role in a wide variety of discourses is overlooked. By placing representations of sexuality into broad, discursive frameworks for how a culture, at a given time and place, understands and explains itself, Lanser dislodges “the Sapphic,” by which she means representations of same-gender eroticism between women, from its isolated and often marginalized role as an object of study separate from and irrelevant to other discursive patterns. Instead of combing the archives for “evidence” of women loving women or creatively close-reading so as to expose the discursive potential of a text as “queer,” Lanser looks to the obvious, “on the surface” representations of female-female eroticism, not as evidence of a history of women loving women, but as part of the process by which cultures came to define themselves as “modern.” The obviousness of these representations, however, depends on one of those perceptual shifts like that of Gestalt psychology’s Rubin’s vase: two faces in profile or a vase, a beautiful young woman or a hag, depending on how the eye focuses. Instead of reading the Sapphic as exception to the dominant narrative of a narrowly defined heteronormative sexuality emerging alongside the “rise” of forms such as the novel, Lanser reads the Sapphic as an ever-present and concurrent condition of possibility for heteronormativity. The figure/ground play between Sapphic and heterosexual representations in turn expresses shifting investments in and anxieties about modern social relations and institutions in all their glittering and frightening newness. Reading across broad time periods and national and linguistic boundaries, Lanser bases her claims for the Sapphic on reading practices that move between close and distant. While she does not reject the literary logic of influence, her primary method for making sense of six broad historical epistemes and several languages is the logic of confluence, the simultaneous occurrence of similar patterns across unrelated discourses...