This chapter argues that the concept of singularity is particularly helpful in examining what is distinctive about the reader's or listener's experience of a poem of literary quality. The chapter compares singularity to comparable concepts, such as difference, uniqueness, and originality, and it argues that singularity has two especially important features: a relation to generality and a relation to the event. This means that singularity is something that happens, something that the reader or listener experiences, rather than an unchanging object independent of readers and listeners. As something that happens, the singularity of a poem may work with, as well as against, conventions shared by other poems. Treating examples by Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, and others, the chapter concludes that a singular poem is singular precisely through its arrangement of poetic conventions, shared social discourses, and general linguistic codes.

This chapter addresses problems in the philosophy of interpretation with regard to Latin authors. Its central question is what we mean by the ‘author’. The history of ‘persona’, the notion that the speaker in first-person literature and by extension the image of the author presented in any text is a ‘mask’, is explored for its theoretical and interpretive value, but also critiqued for the potential ethical and political issues it raises. The author should be considered not a window onto the life of the flesh-and-blood Roman, but rather as a construct arising in part, but only in part, from an initial human consciousness living in a specific historical place and time, then developed through a dynamic process of reception. The battle for the life and soul of the author is the story of interpretation, in which the question of the extent to which ‘original intention’ can or should be the goal of exegesis was one of the great controversies of the 20th century and remains a creatively unsolvable problem. I argue that there are certain kinds of readings which are rightly and explicitly situated outside the scope of ‘original intention’, of which I take feminist readings as exemplary.

Chapter 16 opens by asking readers to identify the elements in their developing demonstrations that are in good shape and those that still need work. The chapter organizes such elements by analogy to a three-legged stool: One leg is a demonstration’s materials; another is a comprehensive plan; the third is the person doing the demonstration. Discussion of materials emphasizes practical considerations such as visual or manipulable items that are exciting, portability, backups, links to core points, and even duct tape. Discussion of plans emphasizes clarity on the demonstration’s goals, knowing how to use the materials, and having a stock of juicy questions; detailed plans make it easier to be flexible in the face of surprises. Discussion of the person emphasizes how people are crucial to cooperative conversations, how they make the materials more interesting and more entertaining, how their questions guide other people’s learning, and how they represent their fields. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write demonstration guidelines modeled in the Worked Example about a demonstration using dinosaurs to compare human language to other forms of communication.

Chapter 2 opens by asking readers to reflect on strengths and weaknesses of experts of their choice and then to consider overlap between their own strengths and weaknesses and those of these experts. Variation in personalities and styles is useful in public engagement because we meet many different kinds of people in informal learning venues. The chapter thus encourages readers to be themselves as they talk about their science. Genuine passion combines well with any level of expertise. Further, saying "I don’t know" when you reach the edge of your expertise shows your conversational partners that you are honest. A demonstration of counting in different sign languages exemplifies these concepts. This chapter also encourages a growth mindset so that both success and failure during public engagement contribute to improved skills. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to choose the topic area that they’ll develop into a demonstration through activities later in the book.

This introductory chapter aims at giving an overview of the pervasiveness of the second-person pronoun across genres, from advertising and political slogans to Twitter via ‘you narratives’ as literature too has taken its ‘you’-turn. Starting from a linguistic template based on face-to-face interactions and adapting it to make it fit written narratives, the chapter offers a theoretical modelling of the possible references of ‘you’, given the degree of congruence between form and function, that could apply to both fictional and non-fictional texts. The pragma-rhetorical approach adopted here foregrounding the author–reader channel allows to transcend the divide between ‘you narratives’ and other genres using the pronoun that the literature has tended to keep separate. It highlights the ethicality of the second-person pronoun as readers are brought to negotiate their relation to the pragmatic effects of ‘you’ in the wide variety of texts investigated in the following chapters. The model that is designed in this chapter gives pride of place to the flesh and blood reader and her potential self-ascription as addressee even in cases where there is only an ‘effect of address’.

This chapter focuses on a basic model of professional communication and two basic goals of journal article publication. It has five major sections, Intuitive Thoughts, Frank and Neil, Professional Communication, Scientific Research, and Practical Suggestions. It starts with a discussion of intuitive thoughts of graduate students and then a discussion of two real-life cases (Frank and Nell) so that we can see how new authors think and act related to the central question of the chapter. After that, two core concepts, professional communication and scientific research, are discussed in detail, followed by several practical suggestions. In brief, there are two major reasons why we publish journal articles, that is, to develop skills of professional communication and ultimately to advance scientific knowledge and to improve human life.

Building on earlier accounts of print culture that consider its cultural work in puritan America, this essay considers where, how, and for whom print culture does and does not work. Informed by the “bummer theory” of print culture developed by Trish Loughran, Lara Cohen, and Jordan Stein, this account attempts to read slippages and silences alongside the familiar print performances of the era. Puritan print culture is inherently transatlantic, and understanding the affordances and obstacles presented by having this big, wet, and cold barrier between authors, presses, and audiences is crucial to understanding the vagaries of print for writers and readers in this era. Beyond physical barriers, there are also considerable social and cultural barriers, barriers that serve as a filter which produces the overwhelmingly orthodox, male, and white corpus of print that constitutes a major portion of the archive of puritan settlement. Finally, this essay considers the affordances and obstacles in place today that shape which puritan texts are available where and to whom.

Chapter 2 is a meditation on the general conditions of our intercourse with the past, especially as engaged by its material forms, whether in buildings, artworks, literary works or musical works. Distinctions between the forms are of course necessary but, it is argued, continuities remain: the mute testimony of the material object concerning the agents of its creation; the role of the viewer or reader in realising the work; the hand of the editor-conservator; and the role of time in its successive forms of existence.

Lydia Goehr’s history of the work-concept in music is pushed further and the dilemma of conservation, witnessed by the restored Teatro La Fenice (Phoenix Theatre) in Venice, is explored. The work-concept emerges as a regulative idea rather than a transcendent ideal form.

From the 1980s a pincer movement on editorial prerogatives came into play. The post-structuralist movement gradually undermined the assumption that works required a single reading text based on final authorial intention. Texts were also revealed to have a social dimension, as the meanings of their versional, redesigned and reprinted forms are ‘realised’ by successive readerships. The inherited but rarely inspected work-concept was thrown into doubt.

Conscientious editors who nevertheless felt the need to intervene on behalf of a new readership seemed to be left with no ground to stand on.

This chapter argues that a failure to theorise the work-concept is at the root of the problem. It shows that we need a broader concept of textual agency and an emphasis on the role of the reader in the functioning of what may now be cast as the embodied or living work. The role of the reader applies also for the scholarly edition, which emerges as a form of argument, aimed at the reader, about the archival materials it deploys.

Other possible work-models are considered, especially those implied in the writings of Franco Moretti and Rita Felski, based on the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.