Novice heroes in modern Serbocroatian oral epic tradition present the same scholarly problems as does Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. In this Balkan narrative tradition, only a small number of epics has been recorded in which the novices and their stories are the main substance. The Yugoslav singer Avdo Međedović performed one of these by dictation for Milman Parry in Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia, in 1935: The Marriage of Mehmed, Son of Smailaga. That song of 12,311 verses is one of the two longest epics recorded from Serbocroatian tradition. By thematic analysis of it and eight other Serbocroatian epics of initiation representing the full range of the initiation story's multiformity, we can establish that Avdo's epic song is an orthodox telling of the traditional story in spite of its extraordinary, Homeric size, and that both the ancient Greek legends of Theseus (in Plutarch and Apollodorus) and Homer's story of Telemachus are thematically indistinguishable from it. The content of a common Balkan mythic tradition underlying the ancient Greek and modern Serbocroatian stories can be described, and the traditional correctness of Telemachus' presence in the Odyssey can be explained from Yugoslav tellings of the Telemachia.

Brant's Humanistic friends viewed the Narrenschiff (1494) as a satire in the Roman tradition which marked the beginning of a literary Renaissance in the German vernacular. That contemporary interpretation of the work justifies a comparison of the Narrenschiff with Erasmus' Encomium Moriae, “the most important remaining problem in Brant research” (Zeydel). The two works are formally comparable since both use rhetorical forms (e.g., oralio) as a structural basis for their satiric intent. Since the two satires also coincide on many points of content, the “Erasmian duplicity” seems the only obstacle to a complete juxtaposition. This duplicity, however, is a necessary consequence of Erasmus' use of prosopopoiia and is not characteristic of his frame of mind, as can be shown in his firm reliance on divine wisdom. In this he coincides again with Brant's attitude in the Narrenschiff. Thus, the difference between the two works is not one in kind or outlook but one mainly determined by the different audiences addressed.

Last September at an International Curriculum Conference at Oxford University, John Goodlad, Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the prime movers of American education, pronounced the requiem for what he called the “discipline-centered” curriculum movement which began in 1951. Just as Progressive Education and its late-blooming progeny, Life Adjustment Education, dominated American educational thinking from the Thirties to the early Fifties, so “discipline centered” curriculum reform, beginning with establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1951 and the MLA's FL program a year later, seems now to have run its course. Thus Dean Goodlad looks for new commitments and new values to shape our teaching efforts during the generation ahead.

This 1967 MLA presidential address summarizes the development of the Association and American scholarship during the eight years of the Executive Secretaryship of George Winchester Stone, Jr.: the production of floods of scholarship, the entrance of the MLA into national politics through the Foreign Language Program and NDEA, the development of the International Bibliography, production of endless professional pamphlets and policy statements. These scholarly and professional tasks resemble the unending labors of Sisyphus. The humanistic achievements of the scholar are still the most important. Each generation of humanistic scholars must redefine for itself and try to explain to a wider audience the values of literary and linguistic study. Despite the loss of purpose, floundering, sense of apathy and protest evident in post-war creative literature, American scholarship in all languages and of all periods is now at a peak. Americans have given back to Europe its greatest literary products of the past enriched by modern principles of editing, annotation, criticism, and analysis. American scholars move into the next century hand in hand with mechanical aids of tremendous value to liberate rather than enslave them. The one stone that Sisyphus had to roll has exploded and fragmented. The task devolving upon us is now tenfold. In our pursuit of minutiae in scholarship we will demolish all humanistic values unless we keep in the forefront of our consciousness the ten huge stones which challenge us: the new ignorance, muddleheadedness, bigness, crassness, rapidity of change, salvation of the good results of years of permissiveness, repossession of broad scholarship, realignment of new knowledge, pursuit of excellence, and above all assurance of relevance.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, has not one, but four different narrative forms. The symbolic stories, “The Book of the Grotesque,” “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” “Tandy,” and “Drink,” emphasize the symbols suggested by their titles, lead readers toward crucial thematic epiphanies, and develop several of Anderson's affirmative values. In contrast, the stories of incident, “Nobody Knows,” “Adventure,” “An Awakening,” “The Untold Lie,” and “Departure,” are virtually without symbolism, but have nearly mythically simple narratives in which characters come to some momentary understanding of self, society, or life in general. The thematic stories, “Godliness,” “Respectability,” “The Strength of God,” “Loneliness,” “Death,” and “Sophistication,” subordinate character, event, and symbol to the exposition of the “truth,” quality, or state of being signaled in the titles. The emblematic stories, “Mother,” “The Philosopher,” “A Man of Ideas,” “The Thinker,” “The Teacher,” and “ 'Queer',” focus narrowly on character types, as events, actions, and attitudes, past and present, explain them and emphasize their typical behavior patterns; they usually end with these characters seeking release from their frustrations through violence or flight. The uniformity of each narrative form, focusing as it does on one dominant element, probably lies in the lyrical impressionism of Anderson's method of composition.

With Selected Poems, 1963, Ransom's canon of “authorized” poems stands at fifty-three. Comparison of this latest collection with his 1945 and 1955 collections reveals minor and major changes of the 1945 and 1955 collections, particularly in his lesser-known poems, and inclusion of revised versions of earlier poems. Most changes show Ransom simplifying diction, smoothing meter, or removing obscurities. Minor changes (word and punctuation changes) occur in eight poems. Major changes (revisions of whole lines, addition or deletion of material longer than one line, and complete revision) occur in fourteen poems (“Agitato ma non troppo,” “First Travels of Max,” “Armageddon,” “Prometheus in Straits,” “Eclogue,” “Hilda,” “What Ducks Require,” “Master's in the Garden Again,” and others). “Old Man Pondered,” reprinted without change from the Saturday Review of Literature, is considered a major change since it did not appear in the 1945 or 1955 collections.

“Rappaccini's Daughter” (1844) has conspicuous narrative and conceptual parallels to Keats's “Lamia” (1819), and the allegorical points in both tales are remarkably similar. Both tales focus on a beautiful, innocent, but unnatural girl who dwells in a brilliant, illusory world apart from the mundane; both girls are loved by callow young men who unwittingly contribute to the destruction of the girls and of themselves; and both young men have tutors, rational men of science, who intrude upon the world of illusion and wilfully destroy it. Keats and Hawthorne seem sympathetic toward their heroines and sternly antipathetic toward the men of science; their attitudes toward the young men are ambivalent and unhappy. Both writers invest the story with an ambiguity arising from the dilemma of trying to reconcile real and illusory experience because the writers themselves had not made up their minds about this dilemma. An appendix presents textual parallels from the two stories.

You have heard about the fellow standing on the gallows about to be hanged who said, “I don't know why I am here but this will teach me a lesson.” I am that fellow, and the lesson is to watch out for John Fisher's flattering invitations to address this distinguished audience. The flattery didn't wear off until I sat down a week ago to put something on paper and suddenly realized that my knowledge of junior colleges was clearly insufficient to say anything important in only twenty minutes. But here I am. My consolation is the suspicion that many of you don't know much about junior colleges either. So let's begin, as Alice said, at the beginning.

The Comte de Brienne (1595-1666), soldier, bureaucrat, secrétaire d'Etat under Marie de Médicis, Louis XIII, Anne d'Autriche, and Louis XIV, wrote, ca. 1661, memoirs in which it appears (1) that he took seriously the principles of feudal polity, (2) that he sought to incarnate the ideal feudal vassal and expected his noble contemporaries to do so, and (3) that while such contemporary fictions as the heroes of d'Urfé and of Corneille were exemplified in fact, the fact was already an anachronism in morality and in politics.

The Coventry MS, which contains writings by Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Mandeville, and others, belonged to the Grammar School at Coventry from shortly after 1602 until the early years of the present century, when it disappeared. The volume reappeared, in private hands, in the 1950's and was bought by the Coventry City Council. Virtually nothing has been known of the contents of the MS. The Chaucerian texts (transcriptions printed in the article) are A B C, Bukton, Purse, Gentilesse, Lak of Sledfastnesse, Truth. These texts generally represent a good tradition (Brusendorff's “Bradshaw group”) and exhibit an interesting relationship with the important Canterbury Tales MS, Cambridge University Library Gg. 4. 27. The Coventry MS was written in the middle or third quarter of the fifteenth century. Its Chaucerian texts mark it as the fourth largest anthology of Chaucer's Short Poems known from medieval times.

The theories of art and the mind which Poe advances systematically in his criticism and elaborates into the cosmology of Eureka are also expressed in his literary works on all levels of theme and form, including recurrent actions, symbols, settings, patterns of characterization, and narrative stances. Despite his separation of beauty from truth and duty, and of the imaginative faculty from reason and conscience, Poe's aesthetic is a self-contained metaphysics and ethics. Unity, the essential condition and supreme value of art, is the condition likewise of death, as pursued by Poe's fictional characters through destructive acts which are vicariously and finally suicidal. Often literally artists or connoisseurs, these protagonists are motivated by a “perversity” indistinguishable in its goals and techniques from those of the divinely inspired imagination. In killing others, they impose unity upon the diverse and particular, assimilating into themselves identities which were tangible reflections of their own beings, and were, so to speak, imperfect art objects. When the hero is victim rather than aggressor, his passage into unconsciousness or mystic awareness is again governed by his longing for unity and attended by aesthetic insight. The relationship in Poe's essays between artist and critic illuminates the ratiocinative tales. Here, the detective's solutions arise from imaginative identification with the criminal and internal enactment of his deed. Obedient to the same intuitive forces, the critic-detective and the creator-criminal display a kinship which conforms to the doubling of aggressive and passive figures in the tales of terror. Life, in Poe's value system, is inimical to an aesthetic bliss; and the didactic implications of his poetry and fiction are reversals of conventional humanistic judgments.