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.

Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) has been ignored by criticism largely on the ground that it fails structurally. But the poem has an architectonic pattern that provides insight into Melville's lifelong philosophical problems. The work is developed tropologically, drawing its basic pattern from the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The poem is, however, an anti-gospel in which the questor-hero, Clarel, acts out his own “passion” in and around Jerusalem. Employing the motif of the three Magi with Christological and Zoroastrian star imagery, Melville carries his hero into a search for an existentially authentic faith. But Melville fails to find this faith, discovering instead through Clarel the ontological ground of existence itself. This discovery is brought about by a genuine awareness of the condition of death, a condition which destroys belief in absolutes. Death is the central theme of the poem and shapes the narrative and the characters' actions. The Epilogue presents, therefore, a forced and unconvincing affirmation of immortality, an affirmation belied by the poem s overwhelming thrust of existential despair.

Joel Thorpe of The Market-Place is Harold Frederic's most complex character. Thorpe is portrayed as the psychological product of two worlds, the type of the financial buccaneer, and a moral double. In a full-length portrait, subjective as well as objective, Frederic renders Thorpe's character in dramatic terms and integrates his behavior in public and private life. Most important, he offers a moral probing of Thorpe's type. Frederic judges him morally both through the remarks of reliable characters and through his own ironic implications. Yet both plots, the terms in which the economic battle is defined, and certain sympathetic aspects of characterization all work against the assumption that Frederic wholly condemns Thorpe. If Thorpe is shown to sin according to traditional moralities by fulfilling his impulses, he is likewise shown to sin according to his own understanding when he ceases to exercise his own peculiar impulse to power. The ambiguity of Thorpe's portrait deepens his characterization but obscures the moral statement of the novel. This ambiguity may be explained in part by autobiographical factors and in part by an ambivalence toward the tycoon that Frederic shared with other nineteenth- century American writers. Specifically, Frederic's preoccupation with the type, his questioning whether self-interest and the public weal may both be served by such a figure, and his failure either to damn Thorpe wholly or to show how coexistence between the buccaneer and society might actually occur may all point to an imaginative source for The Market-Place in Emerson's essay on Napoleon.

The meaning that attaches to the title Correspondances suggests a likely but overlooked source of Baudelaire's sonnet, the occult science of animal magnetism. Baudelaire's interest in the subject goes back to June 1838 when he discusses it in a letter to his mother. His first Poe translation, in 1848, was Révélation magnétique. In addition, allusions to animal magnetism are found in such poems as La Voix, Bénédiction, and La Mort des pauvres. Baudelaire was probably aware of, and may have attended, a series of lectures on animal magnetism given in 1844 or 1845 by a certain Alphonse Teste. In the printed text of these lectures the word correspondance is used in a sense closer to Baudelaire's than one finds in any other known source of the sonnet. Evidence of the influence of animal magnetism on Baudelaire's works tends to confirm Jean Pommier's belief that Correspondances was composed during the period 1845-46. (In French)

Like Hegel, Pater often uses images of death and rebirth to describe the historical process. This imagery reflects Hegel's principle that later stages of artistic and spiritual development annul earlier phases and yet also conserve them. The series of rebirth images by which Pater describes the process of historical development is the firmest proof that Hegelés thought was a sustained and creative influence on his work. In the strongly Hegelian Winckelmann essay, Pater represents the Renaissance as a cultural affirmation achieved through negation, while others of the Studies in the Renaissance define the idea of cultural rebirth through the images of metempsychosis and the afterlife of the pagan gods. The original version of the Winckelmann essay also mentions Hegel in connection with the myth of Demeter, which, in his essays on Demeter and Persephone, Pater treats as still another image of cultural continuity. The principal source for these studies was Ludwig Preller's Demeter und Persephone. Pater also borrowed Preller's theory of a primitive religion of the earth, connected it with the Christian imagery of death and rebirth, and employed it again in Marius the Epicurean, his most ambitious treatment of the historical dialectic.

Despite the well-established critical opinion that the Defence is a polite, straightforward manifesto of a literary theory with little apparent value as literature, Sidney's treatise is a complexly imaginative work, informed with the same dramatic conflicts between author, persona, and subject matter that characterize Astrophil and Stella. The persona exonerates poetry and energizes his oration by creating two “dramas” : he persuades his listeners to live up to certain expectations by playing the carefully defined role of his confidantes, and, at the same time, speaker-as-energetic-defender distances himself from the process of persuasion through irony and self-mockery. Thus, the speaker “beguiles” his listeners through audience psychology, rich imagery, and rhythmic prose while simultaneously warning sensitive auditors to beware of his fervor and seeming guilelessness.

John Hall-Stevenson (1718-85), friend and college mate of Laurence Sterne and the “Eugenius” of Tristram Shandy, was galvanized into writing and publication by the meteoric success of Sterne. His second impetus was his friendship for John Wilkes and his admiration for Wilkes s most important satellite, Charles Churchill. From 1760 to 1783 he attempted to keep in the public eye with fables and fabliaux, verse epistles and satires, translations and imitations. Best known for Crazy Tales (1762), fabliaux ostensibly told by members of the “Demoniac” brotherhood at his own Skelton Castle, he developed a reputation for eccentricity and bawdry. Nevertheless, he was a man not only of a curious but also of a sound reading background, he was a classicist of some competence, and he could on occasion be an effective satirist. Though most often misdirected, his persistent efforts to interpret Sterne offer important comment on the milieu in which Tristram Shandy developed; and as a Wilkesite he was frequently able to make pungent comment on the personalities and issues of his era. (Includes as an appendix a bibliography of the works of Hall-Stevenson.)

William Morris once said to a friend, “if there is a God, He never meant us to know much about Himself, or indeed to concern ourselves about Him at all.” The remark indicates a relationship that several of Morris' early stories and poems have to each other. In “Lindenborg Pool,” the protagonist seeks, but does not receive, a sign from God; in “The Hollow Land,” two medieval knights who thought they did have signs from God finally realize that they have only taken their own judgments for His; and even “The Judgment of God,” in spite of its title, argues that men should not attempt to ascertain God's judgment. Morris' Guenevere, in her “Defence,” does not defend herself against the charge of adultery but against Gauwaine's claim that his judgment is the same as God's. On the other hand, when Guenevere (in the poem “King Arthur's Tomb”) follows Morris' advice, when she does not concern herself about God or His judgment, she discovers the truth about her guilt, that while she may not have sinned against God (as Gauwaine said she had), she has certainly sinned against a man, against Arthur, her husband.

The once bleak situation of non-native English speakers in the U.S., who suffered in a monolingual English curriculum and faced discrimination because of their language, has somewhat improved. Passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1967 and its implementation through fifty-eight projects funded for eight million dollars by the U.S. Office of Education in 1970-71 have given bilingual opportunities to some of the five million American children who speak Spanish or some language other than English as their first language. However, major problems persist. There is need for international cooperation in bilingual activities. Funds are inadequate. Existing American programs cannot yet be reliably evaluated, and they are not reaching enough children. There is some formlessness in their general direction and national shaping. Higher education needs to (1) adjust teaching methodologies, evaluation procedures, and admissions policies until the present culture-biased tests can be replaced by linguistically valid, dispassionate instruments; (2) increase financial aid to non-native speakers of English; and (3) establish special bilingual teacher-training programs and materials-development centers. Development of comprehensive bilingual programs at the precollege and college levels is imperative, despite their enormous cost.

In the spring and summer of 1970 the Commission on the Status of Women of the Modern Language Association conducted a comprehensive, nationwide survey on the position of women in English and modern foreign language departments. We collected information on types of appointments, ranks, teaching patterns, and salary levels of men and women faculty members and the proportion of women among graduate enrollments and recent degrees awarded. In addition, the Commission asked for information about nepotism regulations and practices of departments in the Association. This report presents some results of the survey.