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Presidential Address 1979: E Pluribus Unum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jean A. Perkins*
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

Extract

I have recently been indulging in a favorite fall pastime of MLA presidents, reading the presidential addresses of previous years, and the reminiscences of both Germaine Brée and Northrop Frye about earlier conventions set me to thinking about my own first MLA meeting in 1950. Though I do not recollect the particular meeting, what I do remember from that period is a feeling of collegiality, the sense of belonging that characterized our whole profession thirty years ago. Of course we were a much smaller organization then, with about six thousand members, as opposed to the nearly thirty thousand we have today.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 Poirion, Le Moyen Age II (1300–1480) (Paris: Arthaud, 1971), p. 206.

2 Jean de Montreuil, Opera, ed. Ezio Ornato (Turin: Giappichelli, 1963), i, 220.

3 See Jean d'Alembert, Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751–80), for a discussion of this division.