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...writing a book about Shakespeare, it is not at all clear that literary interests lead to progressive ideas about ethnicity and difference. Why not start, instead, with the brilliant critique of racism that threads through the texts of African America?Even if English literature has the power to rehabilitate, is the judge’s syllabus helpful? At the very least, a reading...

...write shopping lists and diary entries, repeat nursery rhymes by rote, solve logical or arithmetical problems, make promises, tell stories, sign our names, etc. Impressive though it is, this variety in the uses of language is a potential distraction from our main interest, which is in the use of language to represent. It will therefore help if we abstract away from this...

...writings of Southey and his friend Coleridge: the Aeolian wind-harp, for example, which draws its harmonies directly from Nature herself. Davy also took enthusiastically to experimenting on his own. On full moon nights in particular, he would wander down the Avon Gorge with a bulging green silk air-bag and notebook, inhaling the gas under the stars and scribbling snatches...