Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

This chapter applies the analysis of the preceding chapter to the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12, which I argue serves as a discursive template or blueprint for Parmenides in his ‘Route to Truth’. In addition to building on the notions of the rhetorical schema and types of dependence developed in Chapter 3, I extend my analysis of the discursive architecture governed by the hodos to include the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction which is a central feature of Od. 12.55–126. I also show how the hodos in Odyssey 12 has distinctive features – including the use of modally charged negation and unusually lengthy description sections followed by argumentatively rich units of text – which link it to Parmenides’ poem but differentiate it in crucial ways from other texts and phenomena, including general patterns of Homeric deliberation, polar expressions, the crossroads in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the so-called Orphic gold tablets.

Chapter 3 tackles the considerable exegetical difficulties posed by the antinomy of teleological judgment. Although the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment poses an antinomy between regulative maxims of reflective judgment, it also presents a conflict between would-be constitutive principles of determinative judgment. This fact has led a number of readers to conclude that the latter conflict is the antinomy of teleological judgment and the former is its resolution – Kant’s explicit claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The chapter argues that posing the conflict between would-be constitutive principles of determinative judgment is explained by the attempt to assimilate characteristic features of a dialectic, specifically the fact that it ensnares ordinary understanding. Building on the earlier discussion of the distinction between explanation and description, it further claims that the regulative maxims of reflective judgment do not contradict one another, even as they are first presented, but in fact essentially complement one another. The maxim of teleology governs the description or observation of organisms as self-organizing beings; the maxim of mechanism directs us to seek to explain their generation and the processes they undergo mechanistically, just as all other causal processes are to be explained.

The difference between literary language and flowery prose. Checking adjectives and adverbs are really doing a job. Detail implies significance: description needs a reason. Description should produce an effect rather than draw attention to itself as an effect. Why clichés endure – and why we should beware them. Metaphors and similes – keeping them real. The debate over modifiers. Muscular verbs. All description comes from a particular standpoint. Describing place. When detail is relevant and how much is too much. Chekhov’s gun. Telling details. Showing instead of telling.

‘We all know, deep in our egotistical little hearts, when we have written something that has no function in the text other than to show off what good writers we think we are. We have at this point stopped communicating with the reader and are being self-indulgent: we have stopped doing our job and are doing something else.’

Cavell’s notion of an “elaborative utterance” (explicitly introduced only in The Claim of Reason) provides a clue to the thematic unity of Must We Mean What We Say? Elaboratives are called for when the very description of what one has done is at issue, and so calls for being acknowledged (confessed, admitted to) or denied. Cavell takes up from Austin’s “Excuses” to emphasize the importance of finding, inventing, and projecting appropriate descriptions of actions as part of the very possibility of action – and indeed human passion, human response, as such. Moral arguments can always break down: this is due to the indispensability of elaboratives, the embedding of actions with words in life in ways that always allow us to “go on,” refuse to go on, or to divert our attention. The fact that there are always elaborations to be made shows the impossibility of building a “best case” of moral knowledge or action immune to dispute or recasting. But Cavell’s work does not show that there is no knowledge at all of morality: he resists a skeptical conclusion. Instead, he sharpens our sense of the importance of our ability to settle on limits of responsibility in a human world.

There is a long history of describing communities in ecology. It is now time to develop a general predictive framework for this discipline. The goal is to simultaneously provide a consistent theoretical framework to guide research and a practical framework to guide conservation of wild landscapes. We propose that this framework has four key elements: the species pool vector P, the local community vector C, a vector of environmental filters E, and a vector of functional traits T. The central challenge of community ecology is to predict the species composition of any community C, using prior knowledge of P, E and T. Common filters include flooding, fire and herbivory. Each community C is a subset of the regional species pool P and is the result of filtering that matches species’ traits to the local environmental conditions. Dispersal, competition and time are also important in community assembly.

This last chapter returns to the main point of this book: to propose a new “way of seeing” (Johns) international legal knowledge construction. It puts forward three conclusions. First, the “mundane” (Johns) only comes into view by changing the way we read or listen. This entails a willingness to attend to international law’s texts; to spend time with them and to ‘stay seated’ throughout the attempt at reading or hearing them differently. Second, considering others’ knowledge practices this closely spills over into a closer consideration of one’s own. This is in fact what follows from the book's sociological approach, and by showing what forms this (self-)reflection may take on, I argue that the knowledge practices of those involved in the cyberwar discourse are not limited to doctrinal work. Third, looking at international legal scholarship in this way also reveals the presence of its writers. In writing about international law its scholars distance themselves from it; and in so doing we come to see that there is, in fact, a writer at work (as also discussed by Pierre Schlag). What results is a view of scholars as engaged in ‘writing law’ in a very literal, textual, tangible sense.

This chapter puts forward the main point of the book: to propose a new “way of seeing” (Johns) international legal scholarship. One of its principal claims is that a focus on the ‘microlevel’ of international legal scholarship changes our understanding of what it means to make law. This has significant implications for what we scrutinize and how; for what we think matters to the way international legal knowledge comes about and what it is we do as legal scholars. What it entails is an “attentiveness” (Orford) to the particular, individually spoken and written word, as well as to the part played by the individual scholar who utters it. The introduction roughly outlines the cyberwar discourse, but mostly situates the book in scholarship about doctrine as well as scholarship about the (socio)linguistics of academic knowledge construction. It also details how it takes up Anne Orford's call for a “turn to description” and relates that turn to practice theory, linguistics and ethnographic work on and in international law.

Tacitus’ Germania is notable for its absences: lacking a preface and programmatic statements, and being the only ethnographic monograph to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity, readers have often leapt to fill in its perceived blanks. This chapter aims at redressing the effects of overdetermined readings by interpreting the text’s absences as significant in their own right.

The debates about world literature tend to focus on the way literature moves in the world, the way it interacts with a world that is already “out there” relative to the actual content of the literary work. I focus here instead on the way that literature makes worlds, and on the ways that these processes of world-making point us towards a way of thinking about “world” literature that sees the latter term as an active participant in the construction of the former—or rather, in the construction of many types of the former term. The particular test case for investigation is the Chinese poetic genre known as the fu.

Sea of Cortez is part travelogue and part marine biology textbook that Steinbeck coauthored with his friend Ed Ricketts. This chapter examines Steinbeck’s interest in science, in species, and in the possibility of a shift in human consciousness offered by his encounter with Mexico. Placing Steinbeck’s book in the context of theories of the borderland and ideas of the Global South, together with his education in biology and “non-teleological thinking” gained from Ricketts, we uncover Steinbeck’s ecological vision that rejects progressive, goal-directed thinking. Sea of Cortez imagines an ideal of humanity, in harmony with its environment, found in moments of deep observation and passive description of other species. This descriptive method enables a complete understanding of other animals, an ecological sense of species interrelationship, and the possibility for new ways of being on the planet in the face of human extinction. The chapter ends by tracing Steinbeck’s understanding of Mexico’s indigenous population, which offers the potential of a holisitc, non-teleological existence, even as Steinbeck cannot fully transcend the barriers and prejudices of race.

This final chapter addresses the concreteness of fictional experiences on which Brontë’s, Trollope’s, and Thackeray’s various uses of the novel depend. I examine nineteenth-century medical responses to Coleridge’s paracosmic play, in particular their cautions against imagined environments as precursors to hallucination, and the continuity of this discourse with more general anxieties about fictional or poetic experience; for instance, George Henry Lewes singled out Dickens as an author who shared his pseudo-hallucinations through novels. This view of novel-reading as imaginative sensory participation has since been overshadowed by the cinematic and the digital, but represents an important precedent for the everyday presence of non-material things and spaces. In a reading of Little Dorrit, where multiple characters form their unrealised hopes and plans into fantasised environments, I argue that play, hallucination, and fiction provided nineteenth-century critics with tools to conceptualise a phenomenology of the virtual, or even its reparative value.

In this chapter we evaluate not only how different paradigms approach the topic of peacebuilding but also how they compare and contrast with one another. This essay suggests that despite some clear incompatibilities, realism, liberalism, constructivism, cosmopolitanism, critical theory, public policy, and localism share some common ideas about how to pragmatically resolve conflicts, including focusing on the participants of these conflicts, developing locally grounded solutions, maintaining long-term commitments, and focusing on comprehensive approaches to peace. The main divide, we suggest, is between understandings of power in practice, with the more monist approaches positing that local actions come from structures that are not easily perceived. This critique, however, is minimized by the reality that all of the paradigms agree that peace cannot be sustained without both tempering the prerogatives of power with ideas of equality and consulting local actors. We conclude this chapter with comments about the benefits a cross-paradigmatic approach to peacebuilding has from methodological and theoretical standpoints.

The fundamental task of a general-purpose dictionary is to identify the words of a language, describe their actual use in speech and writing, and report what use shows about meanings. Supplementary—and controversial—tasks include describing social attitudes toward disputed usages and prescribing ‘correct’ usage. Dictionaries differ in the degree to which they honour the supplementary tasks. Some limit descriptions of status to labels attached to particular words or senses; others offer expansive guidance in usage notes appended to dictionary entries. Usage notes themselves differ—some implicitly prescribing as well as describing usage, others restricted to description of attitudes. This chapter explores the history of attempts to strike an acceptable balance between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to usage in select twentieth-century and twenty-first-century monolingual general-purpose English dictionaries, chiefly those of American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford University Press.

By the time we reach the first half of the 1710s, Swift had become – briefly – a key propagandist for the government. Taking gentle Horace as his model, Swift freely adopted a disparate range of prose and verse, including that of his rival, Richard Steele. In this period Swift deftly experimented with a number of classical sources, often in startling but wholly effective ways. ‘A Description of a City Shower’ and ‘A Description of the Morning’ revisit Virgil by way of Dryden and Donne, among other improbable bedfellows. Like many poets before him, Swift explicitly turned to Ovid (and his chief English imitator, Dryden) when writing ‘Baucis and Philemon’, a raucously mundane British variation on the story made famous in Metamorphoses. Description poetry, irreverent odes and epistles, fantastical fables, repurposed songs, fake prophecies and even a premature elegy: in his mid-career verse Swift covered a wide range of mixed-up genres, many of which had (to his mind) become corrupted by modern poets and commentators, as well as writers in all sorts of other lines of work, from shamming astrologers to political pamphleteers.

This chapter illuminates the role of science in colonial expansion since the time of the Enlightenment, as well as the varied forms of contestation, creative appropriation, and counter-science among the colonized.