The four studies brought together in this volume (three of which were given at the University of Pennsylvania as the 1994 Rosenbach Lectures) have very different topics, scopes, and approaches. They pose a common question, however. How are we to understand the ways in which the form that transmits a text to its readers or hearers constrains the production of meaning? The appropriation of discourse is not something that happens without rules or limits. Writing deploys strategies that are meant to produce effects, dictate a posture, and oblige the reader. It lays traps, which the reader falls into without even...

I would like to open this essay by considering three eighteenth-century texts — Vico’s Scienza nuova (1725), Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1793), and Malesherbes’s Remontrances (1775) — each in its own manner questioning the relations between symbolic activities and the structures or modes of transmission of the oral and written. All three aim to identify the crucial moments that determine either the course of nations, the progress of the human mind, or the history of the monarchy. The method is similar in each: ages and epochs are distinguished by their characteristic forms of writing or modes...

In The Tempest, which was performed at court on 1 November 1611 before James I, Shakespeare presented a prince who, to his misfortune, preferred the company of books to the art of government. Prospero, the duke of Milan, had given up the exercise of power in order to devote all his time to the study of the liberal arts and secret knowledge. “Being transported and rapt in secret studies,” his only aspiration had been to flee the world and find refuge in his library: “Me, poor man, my library was dukedom large enough” (1.2.109–10).¹ Prospero had given over the...

“George Dandin, first time — Tuesday, 10th. . . . The troupe left for Versailles. We played Le mari confondu. Returned Thursday, 19th.”¹ This is how La Grange, one of Molière’s actors, noted the premiere of George Dandin at Versailles in July 1668 in the pages of his Extraits des Recettes et des Affaires de la Comédie depuis Pâques de l’année 1659.

Under the date of 21 July, the Gazette tells us both more and less:

On the 19th of this month, Their Majesties, and with them Monseigneur the Dauphin, Monsieur, and Madame, and all the Lords and Ladies of the...

Popular culture is a category of the learned. Why should I begin with such an abrupt proposition? Simply to remind us that the debates surrounding even the definition of popular culture engage a concept that attempts to define, characterize and name practices never designated by their actors as part of “popular culture.” An intellectual category aiming to encompass and describe artifacts and behaviors situated outside learned culture, the concept of popular culture, in its multiple and contradictory meanings, has expressed the relationships maintained by western intellectuals (among them “scholars”) with those whose cultural otherness is even more difficult to understand...