The Political Uses of History by Joan W. Scott

“…This, in turn, lets us think the relationship of past, present, and future as a problem to explore, and not as a fixed set of factual truths, moving in a singular, ever improving, continuous line of development. I want to use my definition of history – as the study of contested relations of power – to examine the ways in which, in our current moment, “history” functions rhetorically for political ends. …”
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The use of the optative in Iliad 2,1-493 by Filip De Decker

“…I start by briefly discussing earlier scholarship on the issue, then I outline how I catalogue the forms, paying particular attention to the (metrical and palaeographical) overlap between subjunctive and future forms and finally I proceed to the actual analysis, addressing also textual and philological issues. My research hypothesis is that the subjunctive is used to describe events that the speakers and/or narrators considered to be more likely to happen, while the optative refers to what is (remotely) possible or wished for, but thought to be less probable. …”
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