The proceedings somehow opened. The talking and laughing and shuffling suddenly subsided … a figure rose; she took her way from among us; she mounted a platform; she spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended. Directly she sat down another rose; mounted the platform; spoke for precisely five minutes and descended; then a third rose; then a fourth—and so it went on, speaker following speaker, one from the right, one from the left, one from the middle, one from the background—each took her way to the stand, said what she had to say, and gave place to her successor. … They were like marksmen, I thought, standing up in turn with rifle raised to aim at a target. Sometimes they missed, and there was a roar of laughter; sometimes they hit, and there was a roar of applause. (Woolf 229)

The Prologue to the twelfth-century collection of French narrative poems called the Lais presents a woman poet, now known as Marie de France, who appears to be preoccupied with the significance of origins and who takes a bold initiative while remaining elusive about the exact nature of her enterprise. A close reading of two of these tales—Lastic and Chievrefoil-helps clarify the problematics of Marie's portrayal by showing that it rests on a deliberate poetics of silence. The poet-narrator stresses not what is heroic, public, and patriarchal; rather, she creates an alternative type of lineage rooted in silence, secrecy, and, above all, in a private exchange between two who love. The gradual revelation of the sign and its meaning, achieved by successive attempts to gloser 10 lettre, are intimately connected both to Marie's text and to her poetic persona: to gloss the one is to name the other.

As turning points occur, they are always moments of confusion, not moments of clarification. There is no “great temptation” in Eliot's Mill on the Floss, no “balance” in Zola's Une Page d'amour. “Revolution” means aporia, or disoriented turning, and it is intrinsic to Plato's dialectic, as to Kant's and Nietzsche's. Dancing in Renaissance texts such as Davies' Orchestra implies vertigo, not cosmic harmony. Spenser's Mutability Cantos and poems of Keats, Yeats, and Stevens attempt responses to this universal turning; they suggest that we aim not at discovering the truth of outcomes but at comprehending historical processes in movement.

We're short on charter members, this year, who can speak of the debates waged and principles established when the original forty men gathered in Hamilton Hall at Columbia College to set this learned and professional society afoot. But twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of our diamond jubilee, I wrote up a history of the MLA for the special anniversary issue of PMLA, relying heavily on a work by my predecessor, William Riley Parker. No need to repeat here the contents of that sixteen-page, double-column essay. No need to remind a present reader (as Chaucer used to say in almost any of his delightful exercises in occupatio) of the long record the MLA has in stimulating and helping other humanistic societies along the way or of its long-standing umbrellalike policy of providing hospitality at annual meetings for any number of special groups and interests, from the Milton and Melville societies to the National Council of Teachers of English, the College English Association, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. Now, I believe, it provides local habitation to some eighty-four such. To witness at any annual meeting these days six thousand humanistic scholars and teachers busying themselves for three days with their scholarly concerns is to sense the pulse beats (a little frantic to be sure) of a healthy and civilized activity in a troublesome world.

The wounded neck of the hero in the Middle English Gawain and the Green Knight constitutes a subtle yet significant link in the chain of signs that shapes the poem's meaning. As illumined by the long tradition of commentary on the wound as moral emblem, the site of Gawain's nick draws on the Christian doctrine of the Fall, ancient philosophy's idea of the soul's anatomy, and the implications of the literary motif of beheading in order to suggest the nature of the hero's culpability. Gawain's fault, as signified by his wound, involves the disruption of reason's reign in the soul and is associated with the scriptural theme of stiff-necked pride. Paired and contrasted with Gawain's wound are the sacred wounds of Christ, signs of the remedy for the hero's fault and the basis of a parallel between the moral concerns of Gawain and its companion poem Pearl.

The space of women's writing is too often described in negative terms. In Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, as well as in other works by seventeenth-century French women novelists, what have been read as signs of effacement can be viewed as attempts to assume control of the fiction-making process. Thus Lafayette devised a dual authorial signature for her masterpiece; an external signature-the anonymity she used to protect her person and increase her authority-and an internal signature-her heroine's gradual determination to supervise the plot of her life and the publication of her story. Both Lafayette's choice of anonymity and the princess' renunciation of marriage and life in the world can be seen not as acts of avoidance but as affirmations of the woman writer's authority.

Inexpressibility is an ancient and still lively topos that proclaims language inadequate to reality. Whatever the definition of reality, inexpressibility proclaims “no tongue can tell,” “no words can say.” In considering Pearl‘s four inexpressibilities, its reiterated loss, and the way the poem ends, the essay alludes to historically relevant works and to other English poems of inexpressible human loss that help to distinguish the quiet, sad way Pearl ends. Whatever Pearl‘s inexpressibilities owe to historical tradition, they participate also in the larger literary and experiential domain of worded poem for unutterable grief and in the more precise domain of poems whose speakers endure the grief of losing what they most desire and of losing too their visions of comfort, fed by that desire.

Following the institutionalization of the public masquerade in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the masquerade set piece becomes a standard, though problematic, topos in English fiction, figuring prominently in novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Inchbald, and others. Though characteristically considered an allegory for the corrupt “Town,” the masquerade “diversion” also serves crucial narrative and thematic functions. As a place of unexpected meetings and surprising assignations, it precipitates imbroglio and intrigue, the elaboration of plot itself; and its transgressive social and sexual reversals and exchanges intimate the collapse of ideological and didactic lucidity. Leaving in its wake a world upside down, it coincides with an incursion of mutability and ambiguity into the static world of eighteenth-century representation. Just as the real masquerade represented a carnivalesque disruption of the eighteenth-century symbolic order, the masquerade episode disturbs the prevailing decorum of eighteenthcentury English fiction.

I was appalled by the invitation to write this essay. Although I have always urged students to become aware of the way they read, of why they read in that silly fashion, and of how they might read more rewardingly, I have never bothered much with the history of my profession. I have written principally on Romantic poetry and nineteenth-century fiction. So the MLA seemed to have adopted the position of Senator Roman Hruska, who, defending one of President Nixon's feebler choices for the Supreme Court, argued that even if what was charged against the nominee was true, nonetheless mediocre minds had as much right as any other group to be represented on the Court. My hesitation at serving as token incompetent was increased by the unanimous advice of qualified modernists, distinguished critical theorists, and kindly strangers on upper Broadway that the task was impossible within the space allotted.

Latin American fiction has historically been characterized by its testimony on sociopolitical issues, and the contemporary novel offers important examples of the documentary narrative. Indeed, Latin American authors appear to have made richer—and earlier—use of documentary narrative than have more commonly cited American writers. Through an examination of five representative narratives, by Rodolfo Walsh (Argentina), Elena Poniatowska (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Hernán Valdés (Chile), and Miguel Barnet (Cuba), this study examines such major features of Latin American documentary narrative as complementary and contrapuntal juxtaposition, irony, authorial editing and commentary, foreshadowing and echoing of events, and disjunctive interplay between various levels of the text.

Pantagruel is composed according to an overarching typological design that lends to the work both coherence and a profound meaning. Pantagruel's genealogy and other biblical elements in the first chapter establish Rabelais's hero as a type of Christ whose specific messianic mission is to reverse the effects of Cain's murder of Abel. The telos toward which the entire work moves is the climactic duel in which Pantagruel fulfills his promise by killing Loup Garou, a type of Cain, and bringing peace to the besieged Amaurotes. Pantagruel is thus a Christian humanist epic of redemption in which the original crime of brother against brother (Cain's fratricide) is obliterated, and the evangelical reign of brotherly love (Christ's caritas) is restored.

The self in Jonson's comedies, like the self described by modern sociologists, is a reflection of other reflections, created by the society it creates. As Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority seems to show, the social self is radically contingent. Therefore the anagnorisis in Jonson's comedies is a catastrophe in more than the technical sense; it is the discovery of a self that cannot bear its own exposure. By contrast, the heroes and heroines of Shakespeare's romantic comedies discover themselves in relation to a nurturing family and a mature sexual family. Theirs is a psychological self. In the “comical satires,” Jonson encounters the problem of finding appropriate endings for plays whose characters can achieve no satisfying self-discovery. In Volpone the protagonist acts like an experimental social psychologist, exposing the pliability of the social self. The catastrophe shows that Volpone's own “substance” is only a reflection of his world's insubstantiality.

In surveying the contributions of the Modern Language Association of America to the teaching and study of foreign languages in our country, especially during the last three decades, I hope to recapture the mood and spirit of past events and to pay tribute to those colleagues who took leading parts in them. This is not an easy task, but it is a welcome and a challenging one. Many of these colleagues are deceased, others are retired, and few if any of us during those intensely active years, I suspect, gave much thought to the task of gathering materials and memories for a chronicle of the MLA's role in the development of foreign language study. But it was an inspired and inspiring time—one happier than the present for education in our country—and I am grateful for the opportunity to set down a brief, personal, and inevitably incomplete memoir.