The Slavic languages are fusional. Categories include person, gender, number, tense, aspect, and mood. We concentrate on endings for non-past, compound tenses, aorist, imperfect, and imperative, starting from Proto-Slavic (PSL), with reference to Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The time lapse between PIE and PSL is vast, so details are largely unrecoverable. The situation in the modern Slavic languages is sketched, summarizing secondary and primary endings, roots, themes, and thematic and athematic formations. The PIE present, aorist, and optative are outlined. Morphological persistence, innovation, and loss are evident from the data, and analogy plays an important and expected role. Attention is drawn to uncertainties in the origins of the various endings, uncertainties which on the whole have been pointed out, though much is open to research and discussion. Overall, the general state of the art in the field is well-established, but there is scope for further investigation, as becomes even clearer once viewed alongside other chapters.

Chapter three, “A Presentist Approach to International Relations: A Toolkit for Political Analysis” outlines aspects of a theoretical architecture for theorizing IR from a presentist perspective. Theorizing politics as a collection of ongoing “presents” is a profound shift. Systems and ideas may appear to possess stickiness across time, but this is not because of the reality of some objective, “real” past inserting itself into the contemporary moment. It is the interplay of specific pasts and futures in a specific present. This chapter lays out the central attributes of a conceptual orientation and ultimately offers a presentist “toolkit” for approaching international and global politics. This toolkit includes conceptual apparatuses emphasizing change, emergence, non-fixity, amplification, and heterotemporality. These tools offer a way to cast the political present as emergent, sociality as composed of interactions and events, and positions entities as the product of relations in temporal contexts, rather than entities existing across time.

This chapter articulates the stakes involved for mainstream scholars and those interested in traditional international political concerns by using a presentist approach to critique the “theoretical programmes” that historically have dominated IR – realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Doing so provides a widely intelligible example that others can use to guide their own work, even if they have no interest in the particular theoretical architectures used here. Employing these tools makes new things visible, exposes different questions to ask and answer, and enables different ways of understanding what we believe we already know. Each of these examples illustrates how presentism’s approach is not an external critique but one that – if taken seriously – alters key assumptions and conclusions for concepts already considered central to IR’s systemic understanding of global politics. The chapter also draws out implications at the epistemological and ontological levels, defending ideas like temporally contingent epistemologies, ontological nonconsecutivity, and an ontology that fully embraces the present

Chapter 13 chapter synthesizes the reasoning developed throughout the book, discussing the important role played by human prehistory in understanding the challenges facing modern-day humans in a globalized world of rapidly developing technologies in an increasingly virtual existence.

Numenius (second century AD), the only witty Platonist after Plato himself, memorably described Plato as ‘Moses talking Attic’. He did not mean thereby to rate Eastern wisdom more highly than Platonic philosophy, as is sometimes suggested, but to recognise in the words ‘I AM THAT I AM’, spoken to Moses by the God of the Hebrews, an anticipation, unique in Eastern lore, of the conception Numenius championed of the Platonic first principle One or Good as Being itself. This paper proposes that his further exploration of that idea shows him to have construed the Timaeus account of such being as an eternal present, or in Boethius’s words ‘the complete possession all at once of an infinite life’, not as timelessness (the Timaeus interpretation advocated by Richard Sorabji). It is argued that this was both a correct interpretation of Plato’s text, and one shared in much subsequent ancient and medieval philosophy, including Plotinus, Augustine, and Aquinas. From our own human perspective, a present tense without past or future connections might be considered ‘a kind of logical torso’, a defective remnant of ordinary time. For Plato that human conception of present time is itself a mere image of eternity.

Chapter 1 identifies three lines of research that stand in the way of compositionality and sketches the Babylonian confusion of terms that are in use for dealing with tense and aspect. In this way, it prepares for a central theme: how to deal with the persistent unclarity about the opposition between perfect(-ive) vs imperfect(-ive). A strict compositional approach aims at unravelling this tangle.

This essay summarizes the renewed and expanded perspectives on Caribbean literature made possible by the three-volume critical project to which it contributes the final essay. It then addresses three of the most pertinent issues facing Caribbean literature and literary studies as it moves further into the twenty-first century: first, how the future of Caribbean literary criticism will be shaped as much by what we rediscover about its past as by what is yet to come; second, how critical models might evolve as we reach the limit point of cascading inclusions; and third, questions of accessing and preserving literary sources (past, present and future), with a cautious appraisal of the promise of digital humanities.

In this concluding chapter, I consider how the development of a particular attachment to the founding has shaped constitutional development in the United States and how an alterative grounding in the constitutional thought of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson might provide intellectual resources for a renewed democratic constitutionalism in contemporary American politics.

The dialectical relation of long-form scholarly work and short-form blogs, social media and other contemporary public writing about how the political meanings of sex in Chaucer’s time speak vividly to our own experience cannot simply be dismissed as crudely instrumentalist or naively transhistoricist. Such approaches can provide a powerful justification for why we teach Chaucer and for his cultural significance today. Flagging the Canterbury Tales as “our cultural legacy” in the context of current considerations of “rape culture” is a rhetorical move that makes a claim for the continued liveliness and urgency of past literatures by showing how the past still inheres in the present, how present discourses can suddenly make the past newly familiar, how the past is still lively.

Chaucerians seeking financial support for their research endeavors need to be cautious about using the appeal to enduring humanistic values, since they can be used both to deracinate and to trivialize what we do (even by our allies). More particular and specific arguments based on an ongoing and dynamic relation between past and present are both truer to the enterprise and, in the end, more compelling to contemporary audiences.

This chapter examines the evocation of New Amsterdam within contemporary novels of New York. You would think that, considering its humble, yet extraordinary beginnings as New Amsterdam, New York’s earliest history as a multicultural, multilingual Dutch settlement might have generated its own literature. However, this origin point is largely absent within American literary history. By assessing how New York’s Dutch origins have been featured in contemporary literature, this chapter examines Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Teju Cole’s Open City and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. These novels are examined for how New Amsterdam is set as the scene for New York’s present and its future.

Stein used film as a model to explain the avant-garde poetics of her literary portraits to her perplexed readers. The chapter examines two early portraits, “Picasso” and “Orta,” in the context of chronophotography and early film. It also considers Stein’s theoretical reflections on her insistent style, particularly “Portraits and Repetition” and “How Writing Is Written.” Stein’s early portraits are in orientation temporal and performative (like film) rather than visual and static (like photography). They advance through sequences of similar, serially varied sentences that create the impression of an ongoing present. Stein’s cinematic form of serial variation locates meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than in its mimetic capacities. Her serial sentences keep readers focused on the workings of language and the text’s temporal unfolding and thus manage to turn an awareness of representational processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. Stein’s use of self-reflexivity to create a sense of temporal and perceptual immediacy radicalizes the cinematic strategy of embedding immediacy effects in overtly self-referential texts.

Current conditions are placed in the context of past experience in order to identify present conditions that may be unprecedented.