I recall two things about my exchange with the friendly soul who rang me several years ago with the offer to stand for the second vice presidency of the MLA. First is the vivid recollection of my serious and mostly incapacitating illness at the time: as it turned out this was to disable me almost completely for the first year's Executive Council meetings. The second is my somewhat ungracious response to the (mostly undeserved) compliment contained in the suggestion that I should accept the nomination: “Do I have to do anything if I get elected?” I asked with almost ridiculous impertinence. I think the answer was no, and I think I should say in my own defense that I formulated my question very specifically to mean only “do I have to do anything very much as second vice president?,” a position I had frivolously assumed was not usually thought of as bearing a great responsibility. In any case, I was elected, and I did nothing the first year except, as I said, miss most of the meetings because of illness, unending treatment, and pain. Never having had much to do with administration during the many, too many, decades of my teaching life, I have to report to you that in my year as first vice president I had the opportunity at the outset to see how a major professional organization is run by really competent people and, second, to witness its humane and rational responses to the various demands of our time and those of our by now somewhat anxious guild, especially its younger members, for whom the job crisis has been so disabling and discouraging a symptom of this fin de siècle. Because of this genuine learning experience throughout my presidency, I am really grateful to, and happy to mention in particular, the extraordinary talents of our superb executive director, Phyllis Franklin, whose sensitive intelligence and marvelous skills not only guided us as a very large professional organization through a series of new challenges but, to speak personally, rescued your faltering president on numerous occasions when his temper and peculiar sense of humor got the better of him. May I also mention Phyllis Franklin's senior colleagues in the association, to whom I and all the other elected officers and members owe so much: Martha Evans, director of MLA book publications; Terence Ford, director of Bibliographic Information Services and editor of the MLA International Bibliography; Judy Goulding, managing editor of MLA publications; Amilde Hadden, director of financial operations; Maribeth Kraus, director of convention programs; David Laurence, director of English programs and ADE; Regina Vorbeck, associate executive director and head of the Division of MLA Operations; Elizabeth Welles, director of foreign language programs and ADFL; and Carol Zuses, coordinator of governance and assistant to the executive director?

Having made this announcement, nineteenth-century works of fiction would go on and on. magazines and newspapers gave them all the space they wished: the serialized novel was in its heyday. While the early chapters appeared in quick succession, the core of the work was being written out by hand, and its conclusion was yet to be conceived. Nor was it only trivial horror stories or tearjerkers that thus held the reader in thrall. Many of Dickens's novels came out in serial form, in installments. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was a serialized novel. Balzac's time, a tireless provider of mass-produced serializations, gave the still-anonymous writer lessons in the technique of suspense, of building to a climax at the end of a column. And nearly all Fontane's novels appeared first in newspapers and magazines as serializations. Witness the publisher of the Vossisiche Zeitung, where Trials and Tribulations first saw print, who exclaimed in a rage, “Will this sluttish story never end!”

Mit dieser Ankündigung zogen sich im neunzehnten Jahrhundert Prosawerke in die Länge. Unterm Strich boten Journale und Wochenblätter Platz. Der Fortsetzungsroman stand in Blüte. Während in rascher Folge Kapitel nach Kapitel schwarz auf weiß gedruckt wurden, war der Mittelteil der Erzählung gerade erst handschriftlich zu Papier gekommen, der Schlußteil noch nicht ausgedacht. Doch hielten nicht nur triviale Schauergeschichten und herzergreifende Passionen den Leser in Bann. Etliche Dickens-Romane sind so, in Häppchen, erschienen. Tolstois “Anna Karenina” war ein Fortsetzungsroman. Balzacs Zeit als fleißiger Zulieferer für fortgesetzte Massenware mag ihn, noch namenlos, die Technik erhöhter Spannung, knapp vor dem Abbruch der Spalte, gelehrt haben. Und auch fast alle Fontane-Romane sind zuerst in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften abgedruckt und fortgesetzt worden, zum Beispiel “Irrungen, Wirrungen”, auf daß der Besitzer der “Vossischen Zeitung” empört ausrief: “Will denn diese Hurengeschichte nicht endlich aufhören!”

Faced with the question “whom are you writing for?” I would have to say, no specific audience. But I do not want to create an audience either, a goal that for a scholar-critic would be unachievable anyway. I have neither written a textbook for students nor promulgated any partisan interest, for I have no political agenda. Furthermore, I have always painstakingly avoided playing up to fashion. Do I then write for my peers only? If not, what is the purpose of my scholarly engagement? There is no doubt that one would like to have readers. However. does an intended readership set the guidelines, or does one want to communicate something to potential readers? Audience-related writing is to a large extent conditioned by what one assumes to be adequate, beneficial, opportune, necessary, advantageous, and also enlightening for those whom one addresses. This holds true even if the appeal is critical because, more often than not, criticism is meant to make the audience aware of what they can do to improve their situation. Thus audience-related writing is basically affirmative, and affirmation presupposes an indisputable knowledge to be transmitted. I am not one of those critics who set out to provide corroborative evidence for special causes, such as nowadays often motivate politically inspired audiences.

“It is a melancholly object to those, who walk through this great [country] or travel in the [world], when they see the Streets, the Roads and Cabbin-doors crowded with [would-be authors] importuning every Passenger for Alms.” Thus Jonathan Swift, but now I want to make my modest proposal to you. I propose that modesty be our guide. Once I sought to make my way in the world by publishing articles and books and teaching and thereby winning tenure, and my heart goes out to all those who crowd the aisles of the book exhibits at the MLA annual meeting and the corridors of the hotels where interviews are taking place. Those corridors, where you cannot make eye contact with anyone, I will never forget. But does the current system for granting tenure make sense, based as it is in large part on the imperative that those who would win tenure publish one and often two books? I think not, and I think the members of the MLA should rise up and insist that these expectations be demolished and that other, more modest expectations be erected in their place.

Punch in sexuality as a search word in the MLA online bibliography, and you'll come up with well over three thousand items published since 1981. By my estimate, at least ten percent of the journal and book articles and dissertations in this list are concerned with sexuality in texts written before 1800. Add to that the scores of books on sexuality in medieval and early modern literature that have been published during the past fifteen years, and you have quite a pile of reading to do if you want to keep up-to-date. Not bad for a subject that didn't even exist when the literary texts in question were written—and still may not exist, at least in words.

Where has french theory gone? But what was “french theory”? A misnomer for the vicissitudes of a certain number of French readings of German-language texts once they arrived on North American shores? Or was it, at its most succinct, the fate of reading itself as mediated by all that attracted a half century of French thinkers to confront the limit case of Mallarmé? It was the latter proposition that attracted me in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts: Mallarmé wending his way through postwar French thought like a radioactive tracer through the tissue of an organism. If “theory”—or philosophy—in France had in some sense gone “literary,” it was, it seemed to me, in and through a relation to the writing of Mallarmé. But our interim, PMLA's question suggests, is in some ways a posttheoretical one. What that probably means is that with the passing of certain major figures from the “theoretical scene,” we are living in a period in which the most revealing genre might well be literary biography: a dogged and occasionally humbling reality check against the headier excesses of speculation. It was with that thought in mind that I turned to Jean-Luc Steinmetz's recent biography of Mallarmé and ended up spinning this fable—of literature and life—around the single greatest surprise his work afforded me. In its effort to assemble an array of peripheral data into what Roger Caillois used to call a “cohérence aventureuse,” what follows, I would suggest, bears an essential relation to what is still, in some quarters, called theory.

The october 1999 job list prepared by the society for cinema studies has just appeared: fifty-one teaching positions involving film. What does it mean that only ten of these are situated in designated film programs, while thirty-six are hosted by departments of literature, primarily English? It means, among other things, that departments of literature are redefining and deregulating themselves. They may have cautiously welcomed film for a half century but hardly at this scale: fifty-one open positions suggest hundreds of positions permanently in place and thousands of students studying this subject each year. The confidence the humanities shows in this field is shared by most of my students, who are younger than cinema studies and must sense it to be, if not august, at least well established, rather as English seemed when I majored in it and assumed it to be as old as England. However, any census of course catalogs reveals cinema's uncertain location and function from campus to campus, posing questions of general expectations and standards—indeed, putting in question the definition of cinema studies. Evidently universities want to offer film. Bravo! But in what manner and for what purpose? What “qualifies” the hundreds of applicants applying for these fifty-one positions? Where did they gain their expertise or self-confidence?