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Presidential Address 1985. A Rhetoric of Ritual: Or, Crisis and Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Theodore Ziolkowski
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Extract

THE BALLROOM of the Chicago Marriott may strike some people as a strange place to observe cultic rituals. Yet the cultic aspect of the occasion we are celebrating this evening—the annual address of the outgoing president of the MLA—has often been noted by past speakers. Germaine Brée (1975) referred specifically to this “tribal ritual” of ours while Northrop Frye (1976) alluded more obliquely to the fate of divine kings in The Golden Bough, who vanish into limbo as axes grind ominously in the background.1 Even if our mode is merely ironic, the ritual proceeds, as Helen Vendler (1980) pointed out, according to “invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 3 , May 1986 , pp. 314 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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References

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