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The epilogue turns to current surveys of the cultural landscape of slavery, concluding that even as widespread ignorance about the history of the institution continues, many readers express fatigue with the subject of trauma. Considering the scene of the classroom alongside persistent analogies to slavery in media coverage of Central American refugees seeking asylum in the United States in 2018, the epilogue urges a new comparative literacy that allows us to understand convergences with the global present alongside differences from the Atlantic past.

This essay traces striking parallels between Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara and Plato’s Republic as a way of revealing unexplored allusions and meanings in the modern play and illuminating how classical themes were modernized by Shaw.

The introduction explores the revival of slavery in contemporary culture, ranging over examples of trauma from literature, culture, and politics. It assesses the valence of analogy as an analytic for racial and comparative critique. It lays out the key features of the slave narrative (by Frederick Douglass, for example) and examines the principal concerns of the neo-slave narrative by writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Charles Johnson. It then traces the shift from Atlantic to global as the slave narrative frames experiences of human rights violations across the Global South. Then, the introduction considers the uses of genre for thinking about race, showing how race and form have always been entangled.

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a dangerous bias toward transcendence. Stevens is mistrustful of the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview becomes a theological one, and the ways in which signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or “meanings.” In the face of this danger, he develops a poetics of tautology meant to divest language of such bias. Yet later in his career, this chapter contends, he returns to analogy as a mode of transcendence-in-immanence, and establishes a concept of “description without place” in which imagined goods, which have no immanent existence, correspond to details of a particular scene. Stevens is, in other words, working out a version of Nietzsche’s famous claim that we are not rid of God until we are rid of grammar while simultaneously harnessing the religious possibilities of language.

This chapter focuses on the poetological prose texts and drafts that make up Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy, Empedocles. In line with Empedocles’ plunge into Aetna, these texts reflect attempts to translate, not a language, but a fire, which elemental force turns out to be both the precondition for speech and its preclusion. For Hölderlin, the tragic logos is the prophetic analogos that follows upon (ana) a moment of burning—be it the fire-sacrifices that a Greek mantic translates, the fires of Aetna, or the fiery “dissolution” of an entire fatherland. At the extreme, however, the language of Aetna’s flames is unspeakable. For beneath Aetna lies Zeus’ last Titanic rival, the fire-breathing Typhon, who has a hundred heads and at least as many tongues, as Hölderlin knew from Hesiod and Pindar. The pure possibility of tragic language is not an ideal totality, but a titanic one, in which all languages speak at once. And although Hölderlin would never complete his drama, its very inachievement demonstrates the perils of an experience of foreignness in language, where the limits and origins of speech are not only thought and spoken—but also silenced, dissolved, and disrupted, in their constitutive plurality.

This chapter demonstrates the significance of metaphor in Marcel's work, which is attributed to the original helplessness of his imagination. It argues that the richness and density of his analogies are aimed at rendering them unnecessary, to reduce the world entirely to the images the self already possesses. It explains how the rhythms and patterns reflected in Combray echo throughout his experiences from early childhood to the years spend writing the novel of his past.

The chapter introduces the early modern problem of sovereignty as a crisis of representation. Focusing on the dual – philosophical and theatrical – deposition staged in Shakespeare's Richard II and the Jesuit theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations, the chapter demonstrates how the concept of sovereignty relies on its representational representaitonal structures and forms, including, above all, the notion of a sacred “body.” Together with Shakespeare's foundational play on the problem of political theology, Suárez's metaphysical writings not only provide the terminological groundwork for the concept of sovereignty in the early modern period, but they also continue to speak to us about some of its modern forms and fantasies.

This chapter looks at Paretsky’s detective novels in relation to historiography and identity politics. One aspect of the regulatory power of institutions is the power to decide what is remembered, what forgotten. Thus, the recovery of lost voices and traumatic testimony is central to Paretsky’s agenda of restoring agency to those marginalised. Paretsky questions the legitimacy of the status quo at the deepest level where totalising narratives justify the privileging of vested interests. In Total Recall and in Blacklist, Paretsky exposes America’s evasions in dealing with particularly traumatic episodes in its history: the Holocaust, American slavery, McCarthyism, and 9/11. Paretsky uses historical analogies to critique the construction of master narratives that marginalise and exclude those wronged by society—and by history. At this level, Paretsky’s novels can be seen as an attack on the ideological agenda of narrative consolidation that is so often seen as the defining political convention of the genre.

This chapter discusses Servius's commentary on the Aeneid, an epic poem by Virgil. In the commentary to book one, Servius comments on the life of the poet, the title of the work, the quality or nature of the poem, the author's intention, the number of books, and the order of books. His primary focus is language and the function of the poet as a potential model for students. In deciding on whether linguistic utterance is correct, Servius relies on traditional criteria such as analogy, nature, the authority of canonical authors (auctoritas), and educated usage or convention (usus, consuetudo).