No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
For mankind in the total orphanage which is this world homeostasis is well served by the diverse learning—as knowledge and as process—with which the members of the Modern Language Association of America are professionally concerned: language as communication and rhetoric, literature as a means of heightened understanding, and the systematic study of these relevant areas of knowledge in the interest of effective instruction in them.
The Presidential address delivered at the 87th Annual Convention of the ML A, in New York, 27 Dec. 1972.
1 First printed in Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, nouvelle ed.(Paris: C. Barbin, 1666).
2 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, Zweyter Theil (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1836), “Donnerstag, den 17. Februar 1831.” It should be noted that Goethe did not say that knowledge is power.
3 Constitution, Dec. 1970. Discussing this statement, William D. Schaefer, “MLA, ADE, and the Future of the Profession,” ADE Bulletin, No. 34 (Sept. 1972), pp. 53–57, noted that “we are not the MLTA” (p. 54), and that “unless ‘furthering the common interests of teachers’ is one and the same with ‘furthering the common interests of students,‘ we are not being true to our best selves” (p. 57).
4 The appropriate definition in Webster's New International Dictionary, Springfield, Mass., 1919.
5 Thirty thousand members may well actually represent teachers whose classes could contain between two and three million students; how many more of the same 60,000,000 pupils and students in United States educational institutions they reach (directly, or through other teachers whom they have taught or informed), I will not venture to estimate.
6 That the degree of refinement of verbal art is not all important must be recognized; see Rene Wellek, “Stylistics, Poetics, and Criticism,” in Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. and (in part) trans. Seymour Chatman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 65–75: “The mere fact that great poets and writers—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky—have exercisedan enormous influence often in poor and loose translations which hardly convey even an inkling of the peculiarities of their verbal style should demonstrate the comparative independence of literature from language” (p. 69). But it must also be remembered that even a bad translation by definition conveys whatever it does successfully convey through language.
7 Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, Faculty Notes, 25, No. 35 (12 June 1972).
8 David H. Stewart, “English Versus Communication in Pennsylvania,” ADE Bulletin, No. 34 (Sept. 1972), pp. 73–77, suggests that “excessive specialization in colleges compelled prospective teachers to learn more and more about literature to the exclusion of other concerns of English. The corollary of this is that other areas associated with techniques of expression [i.e., departments of speech, drama, linguistics, journalism, etc.] filled the areas that English vacated” (p. 75). William D. Schaefer, in the address cited in n. 3, also urges teachers not to ignore “the importance of language, language in and by itself” (p. 56). And it might well be asked if it was mere coincidence that in the 1830's German universities enjoyed unquestioned preeminence (see Carlo Dionisotti, “A Year's Work in the Seventies,” MLR, 67, 1972, xix–xxviii) when, according to Eugene Lerminier, “in order of precedence their subjects of teaching and research could be listed as follows: philology, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, religion, and literature” (p. xxii).
9 “Classiker und Romantiker in Italien, sich heftig bekampfend.1818.” Sammlliche Werke (Stuttgart und Tubingen: J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1855), v, 587–88. The essay originally appeared in Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, ii (1820), 2. Heft.
10 Cf. a statement attributed to Eldridge Cleaver: “All education is in materials, information and skills that enable us to cope with our environment and solve our problems.” Goethe's position is obviously less utilitarian than Cleaver's, and his concept of doing (or action—Tun) somewhat broader than that of President Kampf when he declared: “the practical expression of the ideological support we have built for the study of literature has been to substitute thought for action,” Louis M. Kampf, “ ‘It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)‘: Literature and Language in the Academy,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 378.
11 See (Johann) Stephan Schiitze, Reisescenen und Bemerkungen (1813), cited—from Friedrich Kind, Die Harfe (Leipzig, 1815)—in Goethe in den Zeugnissen der Mitlebenden (Berlin: Ferdinand Dummler, 1823), pp. 66–67.
12 Eckermann, Gesprache, 2 Teil, “[2]. Marz 1832.”
13 James A. and Robert K. Foley, The College Scene: Students Tell It Like It Is (New York: Cowles, 1969).
14 See William Riley Parker, “The Future of the ‘Modern Humanities,‘ ” in The Future of the Modern Humanities: The papers delivered at the Jubilee Congress of the Modern Humanities Research Association in August 1968, ed. J. C. Laidlaw ([Leeds:] MHRA, 1969), p. 120: “My personal experiences of the past two decades encourage me to believe that our particular disciplines can and will do an increasingly better job of explaining themselves to the society which supports us. … I believe that … we are on the verge of an unprecedented, massive demand that we show the social relevance of our work.”
15 The one point on which I least agree with President Kampf is his view that literature can be merely “a diversion, a spectacle,” and his assertion that “either our students become voyeurs, feeding on the experience of others, or they are bored, unmoved as stone” (p. 381). Even imperfect communication is not valueless—see J. Z. Young, An Introduction to the Study of Man (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 12: “Man's particular genius is for the transfer of information between individuals and many subtle features are involved in his homeostasis. Communication by symbols is improved by all agencies that we include as art, literature, and aesthetics, and these, far from being 'impractical,' are major contributors to human homeostasis.'” Even the lecture, a means of instruction frequently condemned as encouraging a dangerous intellectual passivity (what the Germans now call a “Konsumentenhaltung”), is thus not necessarily deleterious as mode of communication.
16 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “The thinkable and the unthinkable,” Times Literary Supplement, 15 Oct. 1971, p. 1256: “The worship of culture by the ruling class is probably less disinterested than might appear, since it confers upon the privileged the supreme privilege: that of not appearing privileged to their own eyes.”
17 Although both as statesman and private citizen Goethe was much involved in practical betterment of human conditions, as poet he was the true professional: “In my literary career I have never asked what does the public want, and how do I serve society, but have only striven to make myself more discerning and better, to refine the substance of my personality, and then always to express only what I had recognized as good and true. This has to be sure . . . been effective and useful in a broad circle, but this was not purpose but quite necessary consequence such as occurs when natural forces operate” (conversation with Eckermann and Soret, 1830). Cf. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprdche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, Dritter Theil (Magdeburg: Heinrichshofen'sche Buch-handlung, 1848), “Mittwoch, den 20. Oktober 1830.”
18 Piers I. Lewis, PMLA, 87 (1972), 106.
19 See Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 1969, p. 570.