ABSTRACT
Charles Perrault, in his Parallele des anciens et des modernes, makes emphatic objections concerning the excessive unreality of Homer's depiction of discord. A cognitive interest in human 'affaires' can, both as a way of writing and a way of reading, encourage the sublime experience with which Longinus is concerned. Texts that figure encounters, and readers who seek them out, can come together in a moment of sublime experience. With their belief in a linear, constantly improving, and univocal reason, the 'Moderns' cannot countenance the unpredictability of knowledge gained through encounter, nor that this unpredictability might both pleasurably and troublingly define the course of existence as human beings. Nicolas Boileau's expansion of Longinus's examples and his reflections on the sublime acknowledge the vulnerability of the unitary, the centred, or the grounded and make a case for the importance of discourse about human relations.
