Queridos Colegas, estimados amigos, bienvenidos a la conventión de la MLA. Especialmente quiero saludar a nuestros compañeros californianos y a todos los hermanos y hermanas hispánicos de estos Estados Unidos.

In the past, the association's presidents have used this occasion to inform members about issues that have arisen during the year and the ways that the officers have responded. Some of my predecessors have had years as eventful as mine and have gone to considerable length to present the MLA's actions as clearly as possible. Here the memorable address of Barbara Herrnstein Smith comes readily to mind. In times of controversy this annual rite has served the equally significant purpose of providing leadership, and in this respect few can match the example of Catharine Stimpson. I too shall give you an accounting of what the association has said and done in your name and how it has represented your manifold interests. But I also devote a major part of my remarks tonight to still another aim of this tradition: to remind ourselves why we are here and what we are about. In attempting to fulfill these goals I look at the MLA from the outside, viewing it as a participant in the social and political reality of our times, and also from the inside, inquiring into how it works.

Recent work on the momentous implications of mouvance and on the fluidity of genres in medieval literature has only begun to excavate the wealth of extant commentaries on the interplay during performance of rhetoric, poetry, music, dance, and drama in early cultures. Even today, Guillaume de Machaut's fourteenth-century Remède de Fortune offers compelling testimony about the generative and regenerative harmony between images and speech—themselves engendered and preserved by that most egregiously neglected rhetorical canon memoria. Long cited by poets, musicians, rhetoricians, and dramatists as crucial to their arts, mnemonics constitutes a complex epistemological framework by which to restore the lost dynamism to a literary corpus—lyric poetry—that enacted each of those arts. As the conceptual precursor to literary invention, memory collapses our current distinctions between seeing, saying, and singing, between visual, virtual, and actual performances, thus assisting us in revising our conceptions not only of performance but of genre as well.

Music is the realm where meaning is not ruined by saying. With the phrase “unheard melodies,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” evokes the unspeakable in a passage whose logic has collapsed. Literally unheard melodies, along with related phenomena, appear in music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, and Beethoven; each hidden melody resonates with the expressive structure of the piece containing it—with the felt idea that performance must actuate. Unseen pictures in paintings function similarly. Thus in unheard melodies thought acts unmediated by utterance. They—and not the Imaginary—are the Platonic ideal Mallarmé sought. They show how form is power and life.

More than just an innovative early-twentieth-century play or the product of an avantgarde movement, Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars assails conventional notions of art without rationalizing its attack through an appeal to an explicit aesthetic or social program. Lewis is not so much establishing an aesthetic position as playing with the idea of aesthetic positioning. An examination of the shifting stances taken in the play highlights some of the most important sources of formal and thematic turbulence exploited by the nonprogrammatic avant-garde and exposes the means by which this turbulence is contained. The mimetic world of the drama is at first undercut by the visual enticements of the page and by references to the social institution of art; then the drama is hybridized with narrative representational techniques and overlaid with shifting allegorical implications. Ultimately, these aesthetic contortions turn the text into a performance staged on the pages of the magazine Blast.

The twentieth century has witnessed a crumbling not just of diverse types of authority but of the social and intellectual foundations on which the very idea of authority is built. This “crisis of authority” needs to be viewed in historical perspective. Ever since the Protestant Reformation, attempts have been made to internalize authority, “to shift the basis of its verification from external and public modes to internal and private ones” (Harris 1). This controversial shifting of credentials is connected to a comparable change in the representational forms and functions of authorizing discourse. The increasingly uncertain premises of representation, especially its ambivalence as a mode of linguistic and cultural organization, appear to have much to do with the “present confusion” of authority (Arendt 95). Since many voices have been raised against representation, there is little need to document the intellectual disaffection it has produced, except to recall what, in our context, is the most characteristic charge of all: namely, that the much deplored power of representation to order and to command language and to impose on it “the imperious unity of Discourse” (Foucault 386) forces on us an incompatible link between language and humankind.

In 1600, Will Kemp danced a morris from London to Norwich and published an account of his feat, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. His propensity for histrionics had won him widespread fame in England (as the Clown for the Chamberlain's Men, the acting company he had left in 1599). Attempting to capitalize on that propensity with his morris, he sought immediate monetary gain and also a lasting personal recognition; consequently, his pamphlet emphasizes the affinities between his project and a mercantile venture. In doing so, moreover, it presents Kemp's dance as a reworking of the medieval morris traditions, a version distanced from their carnivalesque associations and communal origins and offered for sale, so to speak, in the marketplace of theatrical representation.

Early English stage melodrama was one version of a melodramatic mode that pervaded the nineteenth century in response to the effects of a growing market culture, especially the classificatory procedures of government bureaucracies and the concomitant formation of a class society. By examining the relation between this genre and the rioters who initiated the “Old Price Wars” in Covent Garden Theatre in 1809, I show how melodrama resisted a class society by supporting more traditional status hierarchies. Melodrama represented the contemporary confrontation between these two distinctive forms of social organization as a family conflict that included the audience. By means of climactic moments of audience participation in its plot, melodrama elicited the spectators' recognition of their own familial ties and therefore facilitated a symbolic reunion that both reflected and encouraged the behaviors of the Old Price rioters, who materially resisted the introduction of market relations into the theater.

Offering a layered reading of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, this essay investigates the gender politics of the play's Elizabethan performance conditions together with those of twentieth-century film and video reproductions. Instead of attempting to recuperate Shrew for feminism, this reading confronts the sadomasochistic fantasies lurking behind the facades of farce and romantic comedy; considers how Shrew's representations accumulate cultural capital that can be deployed to make and remake new patriarchies and new myths about “woman,” as well as about women; and explores the play's continuing cultural renewal as a popular pleasure that weaves together voyeurism, fantasy, and consumerism.

Like the “tragic ways of killing a woman” that Nicole Loraux explores in Attic tragedy, Renaissance ways of killing a woman (including Shakespeare's in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra, Marston's in Sophonisba, and Heywood's in The Rape of Lucrece) draw on ancient narratives of sacrificed virgins and suicidal wives. The theatrical practices that shape these narratives on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage challenge a critical discourse that has located the counterhegemonic impulses of Renaissance drama exclusively in popular theatricality. The moments that most enfranchise the boys who play Lavinia and Cleopatra and enable them to intervene in the meanings of their characters' deaths are those moments during which the Shakespearean stage most reveals its debt to the elite traditions of Senecan tragedy and the private playhouses of the children's companies.

Lope de Vega's El primer Fajardo (c. 1610–12) chronicles the rise of a hero of the Christian Reconquest who triumphs over a Moorish opponent, Abenalfajar, and thereby earns the Moor's Castilianized name and a place in history. A gambler, he “plays [or ”wagers“] a Moor” and, in the process, subdues the images of Spanish orientalism. His parodies “transcontextualize” Moorish motifs and challenge the Reconquest's codes. During a key re-creation of a traditional ballad, “Jugando estaba el rey moro” ‘The Moorish king was playing,‘ Fajardo attacks the metaphorical depiction of Muslim-Christian tolerance. His transgressive moves colonize the domain of balladry, while his Morisco servant's malapropisms mock conventions that are elsewhere an enabling legacy. Lope's official writing as secretary to the duque de Sessa parallels some of these motifs: the aptness of a name is borne out in performance, and playing the Moor involves impersonating cultural differences, even when the aim is to eliminate the communities of represented “others.”

Recent cultural criticism and literary theory draw extensively on vernacular languages, performances, and rituals as paradigms for reading African American prose texts. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “An Ante-bellum Sermon” draws on the African American vernacular sermon and the performance of the black preacher to create a “preacherly text” that reconstructs the African American author's strategy for achieving authority with a racially divided audience. The conventions of dialect fashion a mask that evokes stereotypical minstrel images, so that Dunbar's preacher can subversively inscribe a political and racial discourse within the confines of the dominant nineteenth-century American popular culture. Dunbar's preacherly text is always double-voiced and disguised, taking full advantage of linguistic indeterminacy and using indirect verbal strategies to speak the unspeakable. In this way, “An Ante-bellum Sermon” provides us with a model for theorizing about the persisting rhetorical strategies of African American poetry.

While some recent gay scholarship attempts to appropriate a naturalized position within the patriarchal tradition that apparently excludes it, this essay aims to situate the gay within an expanded concept of maleness. The critical response to homophobia does not overcome the binary-opposition codes that form the basis of conventional sexual difference. Jean Cocteau's 1926 essay on transvestism, “Une leçon de théâtre: Le numéro Barbette,” shows those binary codes in operation as the female impersonator Barbette moves across gender boundaries only in a death-defying high-wire act. The Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's 1988 performance piece Suiren ‘Water Lilies’ offers an alternative to the traditional sexual polarities asserted by Barbette's cross-dressing. Embodying “through-dressing” in a model of mutual inclusion, Ohno suggests the unconventional sexuality of a middle voice that preserves the ability of sensation or inner experience to fashion appearance.