Paradoxically, one of the Dictionary's great pedagogical successes resulted from its greatest failure: the inability to be in any way comprehensive. Although, initially, the group set out to create a certain type of discourse environment and not to attempt to meet any external standard of comprehensiveness, there was almost instantly a collective impulse to try to cover the most important territory, however sketchily. This presented immediate logistical problems. Our collection and assimilation of texts depended on some basic knowledge of the field, and the impressionistic character of our interpretations seemed to require a basic comfort level with the objects of our scrutiny. Since the project came out of a course on the fiction of sensibility, our familiarity with other period genres -- poetry, drama, philosophical and scientific tracts -- was hardly automatic, and often nonexistent. In a conventional academic essay, of course, one could make a quick virtue of necessity, and use the narrowness of his or her expertise as a way of focusing his or her scrutiny. It was a welcome challenge to work on a formal project where that option was unavailable, a project which was grounded in expansiveness. The product, of course, suffers somewhat; it is bound not to recognize certain crucial features of unfamiliar texts, and to misinterpret others. But there is ample compensation in the way in which such a project encourages quixotic ambition, and takes a certain kind of futility for granted.
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