This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

The immediate presence of the medium of writing, taken as object of Dante’s vision, becomes a metaphor for the immediacy of vision in the visio Dei. Writing is a medium or a means, but it is made here to function also as an immediate revelation, of God – or at least as a symbol for such immediacy. And yet, Dante’s vision of the divine Word as writing breaks it down into signifying by virtue of difference. The positive presence of the divine is rather signified by a negative play of difference generated by the signifiers of writing. Writing, consisting of signifiers of absent signifieds, indicates how all sense in language is generated by difference without positive terms. Dante’s presentation of the written text of Wisdom from Scripture makes this generation conspicuous in its binary differentiations between noun and verb, vowel and consonant, gold and silver, etc. By highlighting the nature of writing as signifying by difference Dante reveals language as profoundly and metaphysically a way of alluding to the unrepresentable. Writing is subject to fragmentation and breaking down in every visible manifestation. This disintegration becomes itself the token of a higher meaning and being beyond its grasp. All its expressions and transmissions fall victim to radical contingency. The breakdown of mediation is the realization of Dante’s vision as the immediacy which is God. Anguished lest contingency undermine belief in divine providence, Dante turns contingency into the marker of a higher, humanly incalculable, urepresentable yet necessary Being and meaning. Such Being and meaning alone can be believed to be divine.

Native American oral traditions unsettle any notion of linear temporality, colonial and otherwise. This chapter therefore does not observe the requirements of “history” in the usual sense. Instead, it recommends appraising the evidence of orally transmitted Indigenous texts, collected and edited under conditions of colonial reeducation and cultural trauma, to force us to think critically about the implicit assumptions inherent in our use of the term “history.” The chapter shows that oral narratives have the capacity to condense various temporal events into complex, symbolically overdetermined stories that are both literary and historical; it discusses the performative aspects of oral traditions, without which written texts are only partially intelligible; it argues that oral texts are crucially observant of place and land; and it proposes to give more weight to oral traditions in studies of Native American literature, as well as in educational settings today.