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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Our profession is brought to a crisis of self-scrutiny by the current malaise among students and within ourselves. The malaise is real and must be reckoned with however we may account for it: whether as a profound shift of sensibility resembling that which took place at the Reformation or as an equally profound unsettling of our central American myths of concern. How shall we respond? Some urge retreat–into professionalism. Others proclaim defeat–on the ground either that literature is irrelevant to a world trying to educate its minorities and its poor, or that literature is merely supportive of the status quo. None of these arguments will bear inspection. A more practical and wiser response for teachers and scholars in our discipline is a program of outreach: toward (1) the schools, (2) the disadvantaged, (3) the general community of educated men and women, (4) the mass media, (5) more inventive collaborations with each other, (6) new arrangements of literary study; and, above all, (7) the larger tasks to which our calling commits us in purifying the language of the tribe, disseminating the world's great literature, and helping to reconstruct by the power of imagination a fully human world.
* The Presidential address, a compressed version of which was delivered at the 85th Annual Meeting of the MLA in New York, 27 Dec. 1970.
1 John Amos Comenius, 1592–1670: Selections (Paris: Unesco, 1957), p. 97.
2 London: Smith, Elder, 1869, p. 49.
3 Students without Teachers: The Crisis in the University (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 14.
4 Kingman Brewster, “The Deeper Unrest,” an address delivered before the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, 6 Dec. 1970.
5 Robert A. Nisbet, “The Twilight of Authority,” The Public Interest, 4, No. 15 (1969), p. 5.
6 C. E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (New York: Random, 1970), p. 26.
7 Martin Trow, “Expansion and Transformation of Higher Education,” a revised and expanded version of a paper read before the American Sociological Association in Washington, 1 Sept. 1970. I am grateful to Professor Trow for allowing me to see a copy of this unpublished manuscript.
8 Paul Goodman, “The New Reformation,” in the New York Times Magazine, 14 Sept. 1969, p. 14.
9 Adam Parry, “The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid,” Arion, 2 (1963), 78.
10 Kenneth Cavander, Iphigeneia at Aulis. (Introd. to his new translation of the play now at press.)
11 Plato, Republic, vi, 496.
12 “Young Writers Say They Don't Read,” New York Times, 23 May 1969.
13 Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” trans. Mary McCarthy, in The Mint, ed. Geoffrey Grigson, No. 2 (1948), p. 85.
14 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), p. 29.
15 James Russell Lowell, in his presidential “Address” before this Association, PMLA, 5 (1890), 22.
16 Letter from Benjamin DeMott to Michael F. Shugrue, 29 Aug. 1970.
17 Robert Ornstein, “The East Technical High School—Case Western Reserve University Cooperative English Project, 1969–1970” (unpubl. report).
18 Crisis in the Humanities, ed. J. H. Plumb (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), p. 8.
19 “Quotation and Originality,” in Letters and Social Aims (Boston: Osgood, 1876) p. 177.
20 Works, ed. Hereford and Simpson, viii (1949), 593.
21 “The Language of Self-Deception,” in Language in America, ed. Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner, Terence Moran (New York: Pegasus, 1969), pp. 82, 95.
22 Archibald MacLeish, “Crisis and Poetry,” an address before the Yale Alumni Convocation in the Arts and Sciences, 7 Oct. 1960.