Introduction of Forums at MLA Annual Meetings

Extract

The Group-Section arrangement of the MLA annual meeting grew out of the 1920 Presidential address by John Matthews Manly who envisaged “in a dozen or more rooms small groups of members actively devoting a whole session to different phases of some topic in which all of them were keenly interested,” and “discussions of a more popular and discursive character—discussions of critical theory and practice, reports of notable additions to our knowledge or on other matters of interest to us as teachers rather than as investigators” (PMLA, xxxv, Appendix, Proceedings for 1920, lv).