Digital Commons Network^™

In looking toward the futures of Europe, the focal point of the legal and governmental aspects of European life has recently become the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe—or just the ‘Constitution’ as it has become colloquially known. That socio-linguistic act of referring to a document as a constitution is a mammoth move. First, it ignores all of the concerns and handwringing

around the idea of producing a legal document called a constitution that might immediately be thought of as a sovereign-building document, such as the German constitution or the Irish

constitution. Second, it suggests that the people of Europe …

In his essay "Opponents, Audiences, Constitutencies, and Community," Edward W. Said throws down a gage to literary theorists and challenges them to break out of disciplinary ghettos, "to reopen the blocked social processes ceding objective representations (hence power) of the world to a small coterie of experts and their clients, to consider that the audience for literacy is not a closed circle of three thousand professional critics but the community of human beings living in society..." To the literary critic he admonishes:

Whe you discuss Keats or Shakespeare or Dickens, you may touch on political subjects, of course, but it …