Crises of the Sentence

There are few forms in which so much authority has been invested with so little reflection as the sentence. Though a fundamental unit of discourse, it has rarely been an explicit object of inquiry, often taking a back seat to concepts such as the word, trope, line, or stanza.             To understand what is at stake in thinking—or not thinking—about the sentence, Jan Mieszkowski looks at the difficulties confronting nineteenth- and twentie