JSHOULD explain at the outset that it is extremely difficult to speak for a large department. I have tried, with only limited success, to restrain my own prejudices and to present as fair an account as I can of the range and precarious unity of our enterprise. If there is any one common conviction, it is that literary history must arise from a close study of individual texts. This implies a resistance to forms of reductive history that delimit the meaning of texts by imposing preconceived ideas of what an age could think or write. Clearly, this resistance does not rule out concern with the history of a changing language, nor does it ignore the historical occasion of literary works. But it tends to make the interpretation of literary works, in their fullness, the end of literary study; and it tends to make literary history a means to that end. As a scholar inclines more toward cultural or social history, he will see the boundaries of literature as permeable and the work of art as a special case of imaginative patterns to be found in all institutions and artifacts. (Such an approach may stress either material factors or psychic and use economic and political history on the one hand, or the history of ideas and phenomenological methods on the other.) I should say that the Yale English Department has not yet moved very far in this direction. We tend instead to stress the distinctive com-