I have recently been indulging in a favorite fall pastime of MLA presidents, reading the presidential addresses of previous years, and the reminiscences of both Germaine Brée and Northrop Frye about earlier conventions set me to thinking about my own first MLA meeting in 1950. Though I do not recollect the particular meeting, what I do remember from that period is a feeling of collegiality, the sense of belonging that characterized our whole profession thirty years ago. Of course we were a much smaller organization then, with about six thousand members, as opposed to the nearly thirty thousand we have today.

In 1763 when Edmund Burke had not yet given up his plan to make his way in the world by literary efforts, he wrote a letter to William Gerard (“Single Speech”) Hamilton who had just procured for him a pension on the Irish Establishment. His purpose was to make it clear that in accepting the pension he would not be giving up all his time, some of which he wanted to devote to writing:

Northrop Frye's recent criticism confronts the contemporary problem raised most powerfully by the Vietnam War—can we find a telos or definition of man on which we can ground our moral reactions and our visions of human development. Frye establishes this telos by an analysis of origins. Contained in a civilization's statements of “concern,” in its imaginative treatments of its own condition, one can find an underlying structure of desire which defines the ends of man. This structure and the recurrent images it produces then can serve as the middle terms people use to justify and value their actions. Frye shares his treatment of mediation with contemporary Hegelians like Sartre, Lukács, and Ricoeur, but grounds his absolute in tradition rather than in ideal absolutes or posited evolutionary patterns. Frye's idea of mediation also provides an ethical model for literary criticism: the critic tries to combine literature as product and as cultural possession by interpreting his materials as projections of imaginative desire. Furthermore, we can use Frye to criticize the relativist denial of origins in structuralist critics like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

The “Cartapacio de Francisco Morán de Estrella formado en Toro hacia 1585,” constituting part of the Poesías varias, M 531, a manuscript in the library of the Royal Palace at Madrid, contains (on folios 142–146) El llanto de San Pedro traducido por Sancho Viezma, octavas. In spite of the use of the word traducido the poem is not a translation of Tansillo's Lagrime di San Pietro and only partly is it an imitation. The term may have been employed by the scribe under an erroneous impression that it was a translation, or may have been loosely employed to stand for imitation or derivation, a procedure not uncommon at the time.

In this brief meditation i am less concerned with how tragedy as a theatrical form relates to democracy than with how democracy entails a tragic politics, in its ancient and contemporary manifestations. My broader argument follows from three presuppositions:

Philosophically speaking, democracy is a historical manifestation of self-organized politics that rests on no foundation other than self-authorization, which, being occasional and provisional, has no antecedent and is therefore abyssal.

Politically speaking, democracy requires an imaginary of rule without archē or telos—an an-archic imaginary that disengages itself from traditional parameters of the command-obedience structure. This isn't to say that democracy entails no rule. On the contrary, it engages in the paradoxical practice of anarchic rule, or rule shared by all (even those in opposition), so that the traditional division of power between rulers and ruled is destabilized.

Ethically speaking, there is nothing good or bad about democracy; all moral imperatives are foreign, perhaps even contrary, to democracy. Hence, democratic politics operates in an ethical realm without categorical imperatives, a priori principles, or transcendental guarantees and is thereby constitutively perilous and precarious. Democracy involves a tragic imaginary, enacting a politics of tragic life that includes folly without heroic salvation and demands lucidity in conditions of total uncertainty.

I. Sága, the Name of a Goddess. Jacob Grimm, in his Mythologie (ii, 759), interpreted the name Sága as a personification of the appellative saga ‘history, story.‘ This interpretation has now been rightly rejected because the long radical vowel a in the proper name Sága is attested by its occurrence in skaldic verse. I question, however, whether this difference in the quantity of the radical vowel in these two forms warrants the conclusion that they are not etymologically related.

Hans naumann gibt in seiner Deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart (1923) folgende Darstellung von Clara Viebigs Kunst:

Naturalismus wie Heimatkunst, peinlichst genaue Gegenstandsmalerei, sozialen wie psychologischen Realismus, all dies beherrscht diese verspätete, aber konsequent gebliebene und bedeutendste Naturalistin in ganz ausserordentlichem Mass.

In both his Life of Sir Henry Wotton and The Compleat Angler, Izaac Walton testifies to Wotton's love of angling. Wotton was, says Walton, “a most dear lover, and frequent practiser of the art,” and intended “to write a Discourse of the Art, and in praise of Angling.” Doubtless when Walton went down from London to visit Wotton at Eton, they would turn aside from discussions of letters and the vexatious questions of church and state to talk about fish and the best methods of catching them. It is not improbable that they cast their lines together in convenient brooks and rivers. Was their talk about angling overheard by a lad who later made both a literal and a literary application of their ideas? It is not unlikely; and it would seem that herein lies a kinship between the fourth section of Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections and the great masterpiece of mid-seventeenth century literature.

Modern criticism has given increasing recognition to the functional, as distinguished from the decorative, aspect of rhetorical figures in the poetry of the English Renaissance. The continuance of this emphasis is particularly appropriate to Spenser's pastoral, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), where the relevance of the figures to the larger considerations of style—indeed, to the total discourse—is so cardinal. The importance of the figures is enhanced by the natural use of rhetorical arts by characters, set in a kind of mise en scène, whose suasory speeches largely comprise the poem. Stress of the functional side of the rhetorical elements in the poem need not deny or denigrate the role of the figures in conferring upon the verse an aura of conspicuous beauty. The office of the figures in this respect is simply another manifestation of the same taste for elegance which reflected itself in Renaissance dress, manners, ceremonial processions, and décor. The beautifying characteristics of the numerous word orders, comprised of tropes and schemes, were recognized and frankly accepted by literati of the Tudor period. In their eyes, figures possessed value as ornament by reason of their constituting departures from everyday speech patterns. The idea is conventionally phrased by Abraham Fraunce, whom many believe to be the Corydon praised in lines 383–384 of the poem: “A figure is a certeine decking of speach, whereby the vsual and simple fashion thereof is altered and changed to that which is more elegant and conceipted.”

On 5 February 1805 John Wordsworth, the poet's brother, drowned when the ship he was commanding was wrecked off the English coast near Weymouth. No one would want to deny Ernest de Selincourt's assertion that his death was “the most terrible blow that either William or Dorothy had ever suffered”; it can easily be taken, as it often is, as the blow which signals the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power, his shift to Christianity, and his withdrawal into the isolation of Rydal Mount. There is justification for seeing in John's death such crippling force, but the story is more interesting and less conclusive, particularly as it relates to Wordsworth's poetic development, which is what will concern us here.

George Eliot's biographers and critics are generally aware of the important role George Henry Lewes played as her literary adviser. They describe how he helped her to develop her literary powers by means of his affection and sympathy. But the real extent of Lewes' influence in this connection has not been determined.

The greatest poetry, according to Hazlitt, is the “truest” poetry and therefore the most passionate; for, to communicate the essential truths of nature, a poet must feel intensely. Lesser poetry falls short by offering a limited or “abstracted” view of nature. This abstraction may be due to imitating other poets, as in the “poetry of common places”; to the poet's preoccupation with his own experience, as in the “poetry of paradox”; or to the use of “articial” materials, as in the “poetry of wit.” Each kind lacks the truth of great poetry, for each kind, in one way or another, limits the range or depth of feeling. But whereas the “poetry of common places” and the “poetry of paradox” simply have the qualities of great poetry to a lesser degree, the “poetry of wit” has a “kind and degree of excellence” of its own.

Something of a literary sensation in its day (1737), as well as a mystification, Gaudentio di Lucca has fallen into a state of progressive neglect that threatens to become oblivion. Students of utopian schemes of social organization seem to have forgotten its existence. Recent historians have either ignored it entirely or have accorded it only cursory attention. “Interesting from a certain oddity and air of ‘key’ about it rather than from much merit as literature,” is the verdict of Professor Saintsbury; while Professor Elton concedes that its author had some invention and color, and that his “ ‘news from nowhere, ‘unlike many fictions of the kind, includes adequate police intelligence.”

Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World, by the Anishinabe author Gerald Vizenor, shows how people can come to form a profound relationship to a place even in sites of (in this case, American Indian) displacement and relocation. I argue that Vizenor's text reflects a complete formation of an urban community in its reclamation of landfills and sewers as integral and religiously significant human spaces that must not be ignored. The community in this novel is not only multicultural but also interspecies, as Native ties to physical place and plant and animal species are reinforced. Moreover, I show the importance of this portrayal of urban community and belonging in a Native context, considering that over two-thirds of all Native people in the United States live in urban settings.

The fact that Pericles was Dot included in the First Folio has thrown discredit upon Heminge and Condell; for even if, as has been conjectured, difficulties of copyright prevented their publishing this very popular play, it is felt that they should not have claimed that they presented in their volume all of Shakespeare's dramas. Since the play could scarcely be ignored, as some of the earlier dramas of divided authorship might have been, the most natural conjecture seems to be that Pericles was generally regarded as substantially another man's play. I believe that in 1623 not only those friends and fellows of Shakespeare who had access to his papers (and who made no other mistake so far as we can determine), but many of those who were urged to buy, would think of the play as “Heywood's Pericles,” in a way that they would not think of “Fletcher's Henry VIII”—nor of any play in the Folio as being essentially the work of an important living dramatist. Most critics believe that Shakespeare was only the reviser of the piece, and assign to him Acts III-V without the choruses and brothel scenes. This leaves only 754 lines, including some we do not really prize and which may not be his. If these scenes were a mere revamping of scenes already in existence, we need not bother about the omission of Pericles from the Folio; if Shakespeare was the original composer of those scenes, and wrote the brothel scenes also, we are put to shifts to explain it. Of course no such consideration would prevent the play's being printed in quarto as Shakespeare's, for we know that in the case of other dramas no warrant at all was needed.

Arecent study of the manuscripts of the works of Chrétien de Troyes contains an appendix which purports to survey the published fragments of the various romances. In point of fact, so far as Erec is concerned, it omits all reference to the. three fragments we now possess. Those to which the author refers are not properly speaking manuscript fragments, but rather early publications of excerpts from complete manuscripts which have now been collated by Foerster in his large edition and by myself in a forthcoming edition of the same romance. Therefore, despite the fact that Foerster's collation was careless and incomplete, these early fragmentary publications are of slight interest. However, in an extensive work dealing with the ensemble of the manuscript tradition of Chrétien, some mention should have been made of the three real fragments which we possess, even though, as the editors of the two published ones have remarked, they are not extensive enough to be of great importance in the classification of the manuscripts.

The increased attention to the study of American Literature in our higher institutions, and the want of any good text-book to assist the teacher, seem to warrant the discussion here of the subject which I have ventured to bring before you, and which, I am well assured, holds a considerable place in the thought of many teachers of English. If there seem to be but little that is original in the following brief outline, and indeed much that is not new, it has nevertheless seemed to me worth while to emphasize the educational capabilities of our own literature and perhaps to suggest method in the study of it. It is certainly discreditable to us that we have done so little toward a faithful and affectionate study of what is purely native and national in our American writings. The text-books intended for use in our schools are, for the most part, sadly incapable. They are without critical ability, and are constructed usually upon the same pattern : —a number of names of greater or less eminence in several departments of intellectual activity are set down in chronological order, with a few lines of biography concerning each. There is rarely any sense of proportion, the same space is given to a wretched poetaster like James Gates Percival as to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Tvlor's ‘History of American Literature is a permanent honor to American scholarship, a skilful and laborious examination of all the literary remains before 1765. Professor Richardson's unfinished ‘American Literature’ contains much that is interesting, but we still need for class use, a book from which teachers can teach, and from which students cannot ‘cram.’