Unless and until the modern LANguage Association changes its (unwritten) law that the presidency is usually a consolation prize bestowed upon an elder statesman, presumably because he or she has managed to live long enough to become emeritus (not for any merit, but by automatic fiat of the Board of Trustees), the presidential address will lead to reminiscence. We who no longer teach are particularly dangerous. All our academic lives, we have had captive audiences who could not choose but hear our auditions. Now that no one longer receives credit for listening to us, younger generations rightly avoid us ancient mariners, as in my youth I tried to duck American or Canadian relatives who wished to refight the Civil or the Boer Wars.

Oursituationjars with our ideal. We are caught in a changing world. Economists tell us that we are in a period of transition from one socioeconomic system to another. And the transition is not merely socioeconomic; it is literariosocioeconomico. The period is marked by depletion of natural resources; by the population explosion; by overproduction and underconsumption, in our country at least; by crop limitation, with subsidies for underproduction; by automation; by the displacement of manpower, the rise of cooperative or gang enterprises, and the obsolescence of private or solitary labor; and by unemployment, or the dwindling of opportunities for able men and women to find market-supported jobs.

Can the giant of 1980 continue to wear the clothes, however stretched and patched, of the pygmy of 1883? Can any association thus organized and thus steadily expanding continue without taking a fresh look at the pattern of its activities? The problem is not peculiar to the Modern Language Association; it is common to other national organizations of a scholarly, professional, or scientific kind. […]