Through the figure of a castaway, in other words, Webster evokes an
optative understanding of social problems through which different social arrangements, with fewer social evils, might be glimpsed.
As Whitman writes in the Emersonian
optative mood (15) in the early editions of Leaves of Grass, he employs the apostrophic O to convey this subjunctive hopefulness however much that mood is challenged in the years after the Civil War.
(126) As modernity's distant echoes of ancient rallying calls in battle, the slogan is embedded with the "residual magic" (127) of
optatives (speech acts that express wishes or desires), and of performatives.
Their textbook is divided into thirty extensive and ambitious chapters which cover everything from the alphabet to the
optative mood.
The full set of speaker-oriented modality consists of imperative, prohibitive,
optative, hortative, admonitive, and permissive.
"If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating." The sentence is technically a subjunctive conditional, with the additional complication that its main clause is either wishful or hortatory, bordering on what in some languages would be called the
optative, yet also taking the form of what grammarians categorize as an imperative.
Moreover, as is characteristic of Emerson's texts in their most hopeful moments, he is only able to make the gesture in the
optative mood--"I would write," as Stanley Cavell has stressed.
In "The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens," Phillips shows how Stevens overcame the conflict between "the malady of the quotidian" ("The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad") and a longing for transcendence by learning (in the wake of "The Comedian as the Letter C") to value the commonplace in and for itself In particular, she focuses on the
optative aspect of Stevens's poetry.
We have argued that the extra-legal nature of the early Internet, actual or
optative, has yielded to comprehensive normativity, including rules imposed by website managers and jurisdictional claims by sovereign states.
There are three independent moods, roughly comparable in function to the mood categories of many other languages: Indicative, Interrogative, and
Optative. The Indicative mood is used for statements and yes/no questions.
The issue is further exacerbated by the
Optative, defined as the l-participle used without the auxiliary, expressing a wish (as in Dobro nam dosli 'Welcome') or a conditional action in subordinate clauses with some su-bordinators (Silic and Pranjkovic 2005:196, 351), such as makar 'even if' or bez obzira 'regardless', as seen in (9).
In the end, although reparation for Klein constitutes "a fundamental element in love and in all human relationships," it must be rethought as an
optative gesture, a leap of faith beyond reason's moral and political calculations, a scramble to preserve and sustain life itself in the face of continued violence.
He does touch on this issue in the conclusion, where he calls the three books examples of '
optative sociology' (123).
