Report of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

Extract

The thirty-sixth annual RMMLA convention will be held at the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City on 21–23 October 1982. The University of Utah, which invited RMMLA to hold the convention in Salt Lake City, has provided support for such events as a Foreign Language Film Festival and a panel discussion by the outstanding literary critics Stanley Louis Cavell, Stanley Eugene Fish, and Hayden V. White. Local program directors are former RMMLA executive director Joel Hancock and former delegate Wolff von Schmidt, assisted by former president Richard J. Cummings, Karen Lawrence, Milton Voigt, Barry Weller, and, as book-exhibit coordinator, Philip J. Spartano. The over fifty sessions will cover English and foreign literatures, linguistics, teaching, comparative literature, literary criticism, ethnic studies, science fiction, French black literature, literature and other arts, and children's literature. RMMLA's geographical interests will be represented by sessions on western Americana and folklore and on recent Mexican literature, and the Rocky Mountain American Dialect Society will hold a conjoint meeting. Other organizations that will meet include the Popular Culture Association, the American Association of University Professors of Italian, the Association of Mormon Letters, and Letras Femeninas. A conference sponsored by the Western States Women's Studies Association, a Women's Caucus breakfast, and meetings on feminist pedagogy, women and literature, and the mother in twentieth-century American fiction will acknowledge the role of women, even though the states that provide a home for RMMLA and a site for the convention have not ratified the ERA. Seminars will mark the 150th anniversary of Goethe's death and the James Joyce centennial, while special sessions will treat the classical tradition and the modern world, creative writing, and Asiatic languages. An interdisciplinary event will focus on the contributions of Italian culture and civilization to the Western world, and the Western Association of German Studies has planned a panel on literature as perceived by a historian, a philosopher, and a literary critic. The French-Canadian section will feature a French-Canadian poet-singer.