Unstable Text Research Articles

Artists’ publishing: Sites of affective experimentation

The past few decades have seen conversations around code and language exponentially intensify, with the advent of social media – X/Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook – and artificial intelligence, ChatGPT and so on. In this article, Ami Clarke makes the case for artists’ publishing as a site of affective experimentation that emerges from very specific human and technological assemblages throughout history. A posthuman reading reveals the unreliable narrator, the unstable text, fluidity and multiplicity and other emergent properties, indicative of a subjectivity that emerges in synthesis with its environment, revealing artists’ publishing as a radical site of change. This article focuses specifically on publishing as process – the idea of processual works that critique through their production and distribution, and that come out of the frameworks inherent to publishing and early networked culture, and hence the dissemination of ideas central to this.

Justicia divina: juicio y desacralización en el texto minificcional. Una lectura a la obra Guillermo Bustamante Zamudio

Regarding the mini-text Divine Justice belonging to the book Oficios de Noe by the Colombian writer Guillermo Bustamante Zamudio, an attempt is made to parody the legal discourse in order to question the comprehensive processes involved in the mini-fiction reading and thereby reveal themes, strategies and meanings. The purpose is to understand the entire hermeneutical circuit that allows the reader to arrive at possible judgments about the coordinates of the universe sustained in the desacralization, the subversive character and the production of narrative tensions that are debated between the absurd, the uncertainty and the playful as symptoms of an always borderline and unstable text. For the treatment of these aspects, a hermeneutical understanding and a phenomenological approach are used based on the proposals of Piglia and Guillen. As results we have a text judged around the fall of all certainties, which becomes the exercise of a detective reading full of riddles, suspicions and persecutions.

Why Children, Parrots, and Actors Cannot Speak: The Stoics on Genuine and Superficial Speech

AbstractAt Varro LL VI.56 and SE M 8.275-276, we find reports of the Stoic view that children and articulate non-rational animals such as parrots cannot genuinely speak. Absent from these testimonia is the peculiar case of the superficiality of the actor’s speech, which appears in one edition of the unstable text of PHerc 307.9 containing fragments of Chrysippus’ Logical Investigations. Commentators who include this edition of the text in their discussions of the Stoic theory of speech do not offer a univocal account of the superficiality of the parrot’s, the child’s, and the actor’s speech. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of the Stoic account of genuine and superficial speech and show that not only is there an account of superficial speech that univocally explains the superficiality of the speech of parrots, children, and actors, but that this account challenges traditional assumptions about the entities at the heart of the Stoic theory of language—lekta. It will turn out that genuine speech is the expression of alektonby way of performing a speech act, and that this account of superficial speech can be used to explain other linguistic phenomena that are of interest to the Stoics, such as sentences in insoluble sophisms and sentences containing demonstratives that do not refer to anything in the subject term. Importantly, my reconstruction shows, against the near consensus view oflekta, thatlektado not primarily explain what makes an utterance meaningful. Rather, they primarily explain what makes an utterance an instance of genuine speech.

Source Text Revisited: Nature and Role

Source text is a term inevitably involved so long as translation is concerned. The form of source text and its relationship with the target text is very much subject to the way translation is conducted. Based on an analysis of stable versus unstable text, the source- target relationships as well as the ways source text offer information, source text has been herein revisited and destablized as dynamic rather than static, a combination of texts instead of a single one. It is argued that what source text can offer is a broad spectrum of relatable information.

Niestabilny tekst Pana Tadeusza

The Unstable Text of Pan Tadeusz The article discusses the changes introduced by the successive editors of Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem to the text version published by the poet himself. The most important one is undoubtedly the addition of the poem considered the “epilogue” to Pan Tadeusz, allegedly lost by Mickiewicz. No less radical are the interventions consisting in supplementing the text with fragments from the autograph or with the poet’s later additions made to the already printed text, as well as in corrective conjectures in instances regarded by the publisher as slips of the pen. The article compares the surviving authorial versions of the text, demonstrating that Mickiewicz himself treated his work as a continual process and tested new solutions on various occasions; however, there is no evidence that he intended to introduce them into the printed text.

Beppe Fenoglio’s <i>Partigiano</i> Archive: Translation, Resistenza, Testimony

Beppe Fenoglio’s most famous novel, Partigiano Johnny, is not actually a novel at all, but a posthumous philological reconstruction of a series of typescripts that inspired one of the fiercest Italian literary debates of the postwar period. This debate reached a fever pitch in the 1990s as Italy was coming to terms with the impact of the Resistenza on national identity. As a partisan-writer with no connections to fascism, Fenoglio long occupied a stabilizing role in the Italian literary canon, intensifying the stakes for academics who wished to “heal” the wounds of his fragmented text and use them to produce a coherent, redemptive Resistance narrative, with Johnny- Fenoglio serving as a contemporary Dante. However, the incomplete, incompatible typescripts structurally refute the dominant postwar rhetoric that depicts the armistice as a “radical rupture” in Italian history, a “year zero” that catalyzed Italy’s rebirth. With no clear beginning or end, the texts enact a structural resistance that is echoed thematically in the partisan-protagonist’s metatextual reflections on the difficulty of narrating the Resistenza after the war has ended, which he theorizes in Dantean terms. Reading these thematic and structural resistances, this essay argues that they suggest that the “incomplete” archive is not treatable. Rather than opposing the philological debate or taking sides, I consider how this unstable text and the surrounding efforts to reconstruct it, collectively testify to the trauma of writing and remembering the Resistenza.

Althusser, Machiavelli and the “Theoretical Utopia”

ABSTRACTThis article examines Althusser’s rich analysis of the work of Machiavelli, looking particularly at his deployment of the term “utopia” and “utopianism” in his reading of the Florentine’s work. More particularly the focus is on Althusser’s use of the concept of the “theoretical utopia” which in his text Machiavelli and Us he asserts is the definitive form of utopianism in Machiavelli’s theoretical project. The issue is complicated by the fact that Althusser also says in Machiavelli and Us that there is nothing utopian in Machiavelli’s work, and also because Machiavelli and Us is an unstable text published posthumously out of various drafts. A contrast is drawn between Althusser’s negative use of the term utopian (drawn from a significant strand in the Marxist tradition) and his genuine admiration for the forward glance in the work of Machiavelli. A case is also made that the concept of the “theoretical utopia” has genuine utility regardless of Althusser’s actual intentions, and that Machiavelli’s thoughts about the good society speak to important features of the modern world.

A novel clustering algorithm for large-scale text collection and its incremental version

Nowadays, the fast advance of internet technology has brought two challenges. The first one is explosion of information. The second one is new information appears rapidly. Obviously, clustering is a good solution to help users analyze information automatically, whereas traditional clustering algorithms are only suitable for small-scale and stable text collection. In order to solve this problem, a novel clustering algorithm based on vector compression particularly for large-scale text collection (LDVC) and its incremental version (I-LDVC) are proposed in this paper. LDVC selects related features to compress feature sets. Iterative training idea of self- organizing-mapping (SOM) is also imported in it to optimize selection approach. Besides, when novel texts appear, its incremental version (I-LDVC) can select small samples from original texts to alter neuron model to perform incremental clustering. In order to prevent it from over fitting to new added texts, I-LDVC adjusts the weights of samples along with training process. Experimental results demonstrate that LDVC has better performance and lower time complexity on large-scale text collection, and I-LDVC can cluster unstable text collection very well. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.45.2.8666

"Lose Yourself": Narrative Instability and Unstable Identities in Black Swan

This article discusses narrative instability as a significant dynamic in recent American cinema and focuses on an investigation of the film Black Swan as such a narratively unstable text. After an introduction to narrative instability and its connection to a (post-)postmodern cultural instability in general, I analyze Black Swan as a narratively unstable text that dramatizes previous unstable films’ concerns about identity and reality.

Virtuoso Variations: Welty's Unstable Texts and Her Outtakes

Virtuoso Variations:Welty's Unstable Texts and Her Outtakes Jan Nordby Gretlund "[W]hen communication does happen, the style is in effect beyond praise." —Eudora Welty, "Words into Fiction" 143 Eudora Welty was the master of many styles in her life and in her writing. Her style changed in accordance with the occasion and there are, of course, marked differences between her public, personal, and private styles. It is obvious to any reader that her literary style is deliberately varied, from short story to short story and novel to novel, and also that she changed her style much over the years. It is perhaps less known that there are wonderfully fascinating elements in Welty's impressive style and mental make-up that are most clearly expressed in her correspondence, interviews, and outtakes. Her most endearing feature was perhaps the temper and humor with which she defended her friends among fellow authors, attacked literary critics' "silly notions" about her fiction, and rejected interviewers' too easily acquired assumptions about her life and work. And she did this in a style that was anything but literary. I will illustrate this with examples from her deleted passages, her matter-of-fact correspondence with me, and the two long interviews she graciously granted me and later proofread—without mercy. During our interview sessions in February 1978, Welty spoke slowly and deliberately, and in a voice that held my full attention. It soon became clear to me that she was carefully guarding her privacy and refused to answer all personal questions. The first session lasted almost three hours—Welty gave the transcribed interviews her full attention, revised certain passages heavily, and cut a good number of other exchanges. Some were simply superfluous, as she saw immediately, others were too privately biographical, she insisted. There were among them passages that I hated to leave out. Our second meeting in Jackson was in June 1978, and it lasted for about two hours. First we went over some of the revisions of the first interview, that is, I pleaded to be allowed to keep certain passages, without much [End Page 117] luck. Next I asked new questions, which were then reviewed by Welty and returned to me by mail, and much good material was reduced or deleted for various, sometimes mysterious reasons. The 1993 interview was also carefully weeded by Welty and returned to me. So the interviews, as they now stand, were edited, revised, accepted, and authorized by Welty, for which I am grateful. But the interviews as published are without some highlights and fine passages that were removed by the author and not necessarily for literary reasons. It is this experience that makes me ask: what else did we lose at the editing stage? What artistic literary highlights, which might at one time have been removed for valid immediate personal reasons, can we now recover in good conscience? When she collected her most famous essay "Place in Fiction," in The Eye of the Story, Welty cut three paragraphs or twenty-four lines. On proof page 129 for the collection, she asked Albert Erskine in a marginal note: "Albert—don't you think the essay could do without any of this? (I'd already cut part of the discussion of this point.) I feel it is dated & weakening probably. E." (Galley 70, qtd. in Marrs 22). I suggest that Welty was not always a good editor of her own material; and that her motivations for cutting were mostly non-literary. The distinction she claimed persistently between private and personal is not a good tool, because the distinction is not always clear. In our correspondence she chastised me for being too inquisitive about her "private," or was it, "personal" life. The other distinction, the one between political and literary, was easier to apply and Welty did. The version of "Place in Fiction" that we use as Welty scholars is perhaps not the best. We should note that many of her texts exist in multiple versions so that it makes sense to talk of the unstable text. At times it is more important to know the dates of Welty's revisions than it is to know the original date of...

Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, by Michael AlexanderWilliam Morris's Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, by Marcus Waithe

Reviewed by: Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, and: William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality Ruth Livesey (bio) Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, by Michael Alexander; pp. xxviii + 306. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $45.00, €25.00. William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, by Marcus Waithe; pp. xvi + 218. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2006, €50.00, $95.00. The book beautiful and a revived interest in the quality of printing were later offshoots of the Victorian interest in things medieval. It was clearly a sign that I had been spending too much time with such aesthetes when I decided to read first Michael Alexanders expansive work, beautifully produced by Yale, with copious colour illustrations and handsome bindings. Marcus Waithes book, on the other hand, is the result of a new initiative by the UKs English Association, working with the independent academic press Boydell & Brewer, to support specialist monographs: such earnest intentions dont extend to dust jackets; the cover itself seemed to be the emblem of plain living and high thinking, with the author and title pasted on a label, and so it came second. [End Page 740] In addition to its very material advantage of colour reproductions, Alexander's study offers three refreshing differences to a standard monograph on modern medievalism. First, the chronological range of the work, from the 1760s up to the work of Geoffrey Hill and W. H. Auden in the mid-twentieth century, extends beyond anything else written on the subject. Second, the author is not a specialist scholar of Victorian literature or cultural history but has published a number of translations of Old and Middle English texts and hence possesses an increasingly unusual authority on the matter of medievalism in modernity. Third, Alexander himself is robust in dismissing the "evil" directive that "rewards research, not teaching" in British universities: his work is aimed at liberating "the common inheritance of English literature" from the enclosures of "fields of academic research" (xiii). This is a work written to give a piece of native earth to the endangered common reader, dispossessed by the lairds of academe. The greater part of the book reads—unsurprisingly—as a set of engaging public lectures (with colour slides) by a well-respected emeritus professor. Alexander claims that the study was an offshoot of his work on literary history for A History of English Literature (2000), and despite some assertion that this work is a cultural history, its chief mode is rather to move from author to author, assessing his or her significance in a traditional canon. Walter Scott, whose role in reviving medieval romance is very usefully mapped throughout the book, is relegated to a subordinate position: he is, apparently, "today regarded as a second-division British Romantic" (48). The poetic "tact" (147) and "moral seriousness" (142) of Christina Rossetti puts her a point or two ahead of her brother, Dante Gabriel, for his stubborn immaturity in confusing, rather than combining, the "sensuous with the spiritual" (120) in "The Blessed Damozel" (1847, 1881); Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842) pips John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820) to the top spot on similar grounds. That these Leavisite pronouncements are not worked through with detailed textual analysis would make me hesitate before recommending the book to undergraduates, despite helpful accounts of the sources of nineteenth-century medievalism, such as Thomas Malory's Le morte d'Arthur. There is a cheerful sense of liberation at first in Alexander's assertion that the work is the result of "reading primary sources" (xv) and that he has read very little in the way of critical studies on his subject (he notes that what he has examined "was not very encouraging" [xiv]). On reflection, however, a book hostile to current scholarship in toto but redolent of donnish authority makes for a strangely unstable text. The first seven chapters of Alexander's book cover familiar territory: Scott, Keats, Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Benjamin Disraeli, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Augustus Welby Pugin, and the Oxford Movement are all identified...

The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's "Antagonia" Tetralogy: A Study in Narrative Communication

The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's Antagonia Tetralogy: A Study in Narrative Communication. By Kevin E. Teegarden. Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, n.d. 211 pages. Good novels have always required astute readers. This is so no less for Don Quijote from the seventeenth century than for Ulysses from the twentieth, each demanding that readers exercise care and creativity to draw out the intricate and sometimes ambiguous elements of their composition. Some good novels-and Luis Goytisolo's Antagonia stands as one of them-not only require acts of creativity implicitly but also devise the process of writing and reading as the cynosure of their narrative, thus challenging the reader to engage the text from a variety of perspectives. In The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's 'Antagonia' Tetralogy, Kevin Teegarden accepts such a challenge and offers a fine overview of how Luis Goytisolo compels readers to enter and disentangle his novel. Teegarden divides his study into four main parts, which in turn he devotes to the four parts of Antagonia (Recuento, 1973; Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar, 1976; La colera de Aquiles, 1979; Teoria del conocimiento, 1981). His analysis is shaped by reader-response criticism, defined in the introduction with an eclectic mix of ideas from Iser, Kristeva, structuralism, and semiotics. On the one hand, this approach allows Teegarden to scrutinize the rich diversity of Antagonia drawing upon the general interactions of text and reader; on the other, it also enables him to focus on specific components of the individual works in each of his chapters. In Recuento, Teegarden draws out the emergence of Raul as writer and principal focalizer who orients the reader; in Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar he unravels the complicated self-referring genesis of the novel and shows how the narrative theorizes against itself through the contingencies of reading in an unstable text. La c6lera de Aquiles presents a different challenge for the reader. While Teegarden rightly underscores the relative stability of the reader's place in the novel, he also explores the larger project of the tetralogy: the relationship between reading narrative and reading one's own life, both of which are fraught with pitfalls even when everything seems in order. In La Teoria del conocimiento, the final part of the Antagonia, Teegarden ably covers the narrow focus of the novel on epistemological matters as well as Goytisolo's broader attempt to summarize the whole of his literary theory on the relationship among author, text, and text-reader. …

Signs of Borges (review)

Reviewed by: Signs of Borges Debra A. Castillo Sylvia Molloy . Signs of Borges. Trans. Oscar Montero. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 142 pp. $32.50 cloth, $15.95 paper. With this superb new translation of Molloy's 1979 book, English-speaking fans of poet, essayist, and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges finally have access to this important study of the Argentine master. This is a book to read cover-to-cover, in order to delight in the fluid interplay of Borges' texts and Molloy's interpretations, to enjoy the flashes of humor, to learn from [End Page 391] the carefully wrought analyses. One of things I like best about Molloy's book is its clarity of exposition. While a sophisticated understanding of current theoretical trends underlies and informs her analysis, Molloy has the confidence not to overburden her text with unnecessary quotes, and the result is a tightly focused monograph. This is not to say that the book is an easy read. Molloy notes in her 1993 preface that "Borges taught me to think about literature, even to write it": a useful warning for students who find Borges' stories difficult, uncanny, or inhospitable upon first reading. Certainly, one of the ways that both Borges and Molloy think about literature is abstractly, and one of the delights of this book for me is to see how Molloy utilizes Borges' scattered, unsystematic, and frequently contradictory statements about literary form as the basis for a coherent and systematic theory for reading Borges. Molloy's chapters are, as the title of the book indicates, arranged around semiotic—rather than more user-friendly thematic—structures, but they are structures that echo and expand upon familiar Borgesian tropes. Among her topics are "a surface of images", "mask and displacement," "deflected signs," "lack of symmetry," "the waste of the circumstantial," "the pleasure of interpolation," and "heterogeneous enumeration and overcrowded series." Molloy begins the book with a statement that seems to me even more compelling now, given the vast Borges industry, than it was in the late 1970s: "To read Borges, to consume a predictable Borges who no longer surprises us, has become a habit. By common accord, it would seem, readers of Borges, with the collaboration perhaps of the author himself, have turned an unstable text into a solid monument." In essence, Borges has taught all of us how to read literature—his literature—but something has been lost in the reading and in the canonization of this eccentric and brilliant figure. Molloy's intent in this book is to restore to her reading of Borges' narrative a recognition of its potentially disquieting and provocative effects, and to do so without falling into the trap of an overfacile categorization of rhetorical modes that both she and Borges would decry. The tactic requires an elegant balancing act, in which Molloy, like the author she studies, established a "surface of images," which, in her words "sets up a multiplicity of dialogues and of possible, variously interchangeable complicities." If Molloy's study does not shift quite as paradoxically and unpredicatably as the author she studies, she is continually aware of the Borgesian dialogue and its possibilities, and she opens herself up critically to the game of masking. In other words, we would do well to remember that her critical "I" is as much a ritual imposture as the narrative "I" of the author she studies. It is, I think, this feature more than any other that helps Molloy cut through the paralyzing seriousness that often attends Borges studies and to remind us of that other Borges: the masked reveler in a literary carnival. The overriding metaphor in the entire book is one familiar to us from Borges' short stories and essays: the metaphor of the face, and of the shadow play of a mirrored identity which is both accepted and decried in [End Page 392] the same tragi- comic gesture. Molloy's preface, with its evocation of "el otro, el mismo" reminds us of Borges' famous discussions of artistic identity: of authors and characters including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Funes, Pierre Menard, Herbert Quain, Hamlet, and Borges himself, all of whom meet and exchange ideas in the atemporal world of the library...

The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Persuasion and Credibility (review)

152Philosophy and Literature reception of Diderot's dialogue brings out a significance that could not have been intended by Diderot, Jauss treats this not as an error, but as an unfolding ofthe latent meaning ofthe work through history. Noting that Hegel's reading nevertheless seems to reduce Diderot's philosopher to a moment in a dialectic that transcends and subsumes him, Jauss closes his essay with a question: does the dialectic necessarily close off a continuing dialogue, or could it "allow new truth to arise from a polyphony of voices without garnering for the voice of the other the unhappy fate that awaits Diderot's philosopher in Hegel's interpretation " (p. 147)? Like Bakhtin's, Jauss's commitment to dialogue is based on respect for the voice of the Other. His book is full of references to fellow scholars, in whose work he almost invariably finds something valuable; it is refreshingly free of polemics. For all its imposing erudition,Jauss's discourse remains open, weaving together a chorus of voices, and always questioning. University of OregonSteven Rendall The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Persuasion and Credibility, edited by Martin Warner; ? Sc 236 pp. London: Roudedge, 1990, $55.00. For the general topic of this eighth volume of the Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature, Warner has proposed "the ways in which persuasive (and related literary) procedures of the biblical writers cut across or reinforce their concern with truth" (p. 5). British and American scholars of religious studies, literature, and philosophy have responded in eleven essays that consider subjects asvaried as biblicallanguage, symbolism, structure, and the classification of biblical texts as historical or imaginative writings. Moreover, to elucidate the rhetoricaltechniques ofthe Bible, these essays adoptdiverse critical perspectives: structuralist, deconstructive, feminist, intertextual, and reader response. The initial and final essays suggest strategies that allow us to experience the Bible as both sacred truth and literary text. Lynn Poland's excellent "The Bible and the Rhetorical Sublime" argues that the post-Romantic preference for symbolism over allegory has robbed the Bible ofits affective power, while Cyril Barrett's "The Language of Ecstasy and the Ecstasy of Language" proposes the reading of mystical or prophetic texts as poetic metaphor, a language embodying truth, but not truth that is empirically verifiable. Three unrelated Reviews153 articles challenge traditional interpretations of the Old Testament and Apocrypha . For John Barton, the enduring power of the prophets results not from their analyses of the moral decline of their nation, but rather from their skill in assimilating "the shortcomings of Israel and Judah to models which were generally held, in the ancient world, to cause divine displeasure" (p. 63). David Clines demonstrates that the Book ofJob gives no answers to the problems of suffering and moral retribution. In fact, the prologue and epilogue, as well as the protagonist's singularity, contradict the text's purported meaning. Margarita Stocker considers the Book of Judith another unstable text which anxiously portrays its heroine as both masculine and feminine, self and other. Part Two gains coherence by concentrating on the Gospels, Epistles, and the issues of their claims to truth. Both Stewart Sutherland and Roger Trigg reaffirm the importance of historical truth to any reading of the New Testament, with Trigg suggesting that we apply the criteria of law rather than those of science to our assessment of the evangelists' presentation of history. Warner aligns himself with them in his study of persuasion in the Fourth Gospel by claiming that "the whole persuasive strategy of the Gospel depends on its being subjected to rational controls at the levels of narrative judgment and sign" (p. 177). DavidJasper and George Kennedy present the opposing view. ForJasper, the authoritative proclamations of Mark are a response to the early Christians' desire to "entextualize" themselves, that is to assert their identity and communal interdependence by means of a written text. Kennedy convincingly argues that Paul's proofs of Christ's divinity rely on interpretation and emotion rather than fact. They are "rhetoric," not "history." Finally, Michael Edward's insightful, almost lyrical, treatment of the Gospel of John tries to close the gap in this debate by considering the fourth evangelist as both historian and literary genius who...

Some Metrical and Prosodical Features of Catullus' Poetry

THE TEXT OF CATULLUS, as transmitted to us, presents certain anomalies of metre and prosody, which some scholars are in the habit of retaining, others of normalizing to a greater or lesser degree. The result is an unstable text, which apparatus critici and commentaries fail to justify adequately. Take, for example, the pentameters at 66.48, 67.44, 68.158, 76.10, 97.2, 99.8, and 114.6 as these are read in the latest editions: we observe that Schuster always retains the manuscript reading, and at 66.48, where the text is conjectural, admits hiatus; whereas Cazzaniga avoids hiatus at 66.48, and Mynors never admits it except at 68.158, which is the one place from which Helm removes it; G. B. Pighi, again, retains it only at 114.6; and finally G. P. Goold, in what today is still the most substantial review of the Oxford text of Catullus,' proposes to remove from this poet all except prosodic hiatuses, concluding that is no certain instance of hiatus in Catullus. I am grateful to Phoenix for giving me an opportunity to set forth in this journal the considerations that prompt me to adhere to the opposite opinion. In my view the fact that the hiatuses in question can be removed easily, even if not always with happy results, does not constitute, as has been alleged, an argument against the soundness of the manuscript tradition, but derives from the very nature of the phenomenon transmitted. Nor do I believe that apart from the hiatus there are really cogent reasons to suspect the received reading. Thus, in Poem 67, audiui ... loquentem of v. 41 does not oblige us to read speraret in v. 44, since the explanation of the present tense given by Kroll among others may be considered satisfactory; in 99.8, abstersti is no more surprising than subrepsti at 77.3, and is to be classed with the numerous other syncopated forms of the second person of the perfect tense that we find in Catullus; and in 114.6, even if it were true that dummodo ipse, as Goold opines, though not devoid of sense . .. , is devoid of point, this would not, simply by itself, constitute a sufficient motive for believing the manuscript reading to be corrupt. On the other hand I do not propose to consider here a question which in any event ought not to be raised when we study any poet in isolation from others, namely the question how natural or unnatural the hiatus must have sounded in Latin. I would only observe that even in languages 'A new text of Catullus, Phoenix (1958) 106-111.