Editor's Note

Editor's Note Members of ASECS are long accustomed to reflecting on and taking pleasure from the manifold forms of interdisciplinarity that characterize the work of the society, where both the confluence of methodologies and the juxtaposition of different approaches and languages offer us an ongoing apprenticeship in the richness and complexity of our common object, the eighteenth century. There is an ethic implicit in such work, an emphasis on communication : support for a dialogue which is occasionally heated, and is always stimulating . Barbara Maria Stafford appealed to this implicit ethic in her opening remarks to the 1996 Presidential Forum on "The Public Duties of our Profession " in Austin, Texas. Commenting on the ways in which technology is currently redefining the structures of disciplinary research, pedagogy, and professional contact, she called for a commensurate reflection on the ways in which we might "reduce the distance, dissonance, or gap between our intellectual selves as professional academics and our civic selves wrestling, along with the rest of the blue and white collar labor force, with the actualities of technological, epistemological, and fiscal 'restructuring' profoundly affecting every American institution." The essays in this volume bespeak an intellectual community whose members' practice in interpretative, historical, social , and aesthetic connections will stand them well as they confront technological modernity—a confrontation which has profound historical roots, as Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us in her 1996 Clifford Lecture on Enlightenment perceptions of the printing press. As a concrete instance of the ways in which disciplinary and interdisciplinary voices can happily intersect, this volume of SECC presents a cluster of essays that, while presented at different times and places, and reviewed by different readers, resonate together in ways that evoke broad contexts and future avenues for work. All take up the question of "identity ," not as a fixed, stable property whose boundaries may be confidently mapped, but rather as a complex and unpredictable process navigating different discourses and modes of social insertion. These may involve national, linguistic, and cultural affiliations (Woodfine, Plank), or call into question the relation of gender performance to literary persona (Lamb, Stephanson, Sussman). In all five, language, temporality, and the perpetual otherness of the other suggest further connections for xii / Editor's Note the reader to explore. Although they are foregrounded in the essays in the cluster, these issues do not vanish when we turn to the other pieces of the volume, as evidenced by Diane Fourny's essay on "ethics and otherness" in Diderot, Richard Morton's study of the politics of translation in Dryden, or very different studies of authorial self-presentation by James Dillon and Gregory Brown. When Beate Allert proposes, in her analysis of "visual language," to consider "lines of thought... normally considered as discrete entities or in mutually exclusive oppositional terms," she captures the elusive object of interdisciplinary desire, one which is equally present at the intersection of literature, mathematics, and science (Connor, Braun, McKenzie and McKenzie) and in a pair of essays on landscape aesthetics, politics, and literature by Julie Rak and Richard Quaintance. These essays would not have been brought together but for the generous work of many. I am grateful for the critical acumen, good humor, and perseverance of Associate Editor Timothy Erwin, as well as for the dedication of all the members of the Editorial Board. I particularly thank G. J. BarkerBenfield and Carol Houlihan Flynn, who end their years of service on the board with volume 27; I extend a welcome to new board members Patricia Crown, John H. Smith, and Patrick Coleman. The copy-editing process benefitted from the keen eyes and the good ear for prose of my graduate assistant, Kimberly Whitley. It is with a very deep satisfaction, however,that I look over the list of names of the 141 members of ASECS who participated in the review process. Each volume of SECC is a collective project; each represents months of intense correspondence, feedback, and dialogue. The volume belongs, then, to all who submitted or read essays as well as to all our future partners in conversation. Julie Candler Hayes University of Richmond ...