In Hawaii six languages are spoken by sizable groups of people in addition to the official language, English, and the lingua franca, Pidgin. They are: Japanese, Hawaiian, Cantonese, Korean, Portuguese, and Ilocano. No exact figures exist for the numbers of speakers in each group. Some indication, however, can be gained by consulting the 1950 census distribution by “race” of the Islands' population: Japanese 39%, Caucasian 23%, Hawaiian 17%, Filipino 12%, Chinese 6.4%, Korean 1.4%, other 1.2%. Allowance must also be made for the facts that some Hawaiians cannot speak Hawaiian, that some of our Chinese speak Mandarin, and that about ten percent of the local Filipinos speak Visayan or Tagalog rather than Ilocano. Obviously, in a government report, the Portuguese are included as Caucasians; locally they are considered a group apart.

Discussion of the Homeric question, the Carolingian epic, the ballads, and Arthurian romance remains, and seems destined to remain for some time a conflict between two hypotheses. One may be called the traditionalist hypothesis; for it emphasizes the origins of narrative themes in oral traditions more or less remote from the first recorded versions, and attempts to trace genetic relations between the surviving versions and to explain differences between them on the assumption that originals or intermediate stages or both are lost. The second hypothesis may be called that of literary craftsmanship, for it minimizes or denies the existence of any oral tradition, finds the source of our surviving texts either in other written texts or in the creative imagination of the author, and attempts to explain the differences between one version and another by some artistic or rational motive controlling the later author. A classic of the traditionalist school is Professor Gilbert Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic; a classic of the contrary school is M. Bédier's Légendes Épiques. The traditionalist hypothesis emphasizes the genetic relationship of story-patterns to their sources; the hypothesis of literary craftsmanship emphasizes the intellectual and artistic processes which create or modify story-patterns.

How shall we face the enormous evidence of impersonation as a central cultural practice in the development of national discourses in the Americas?

It is well known that, in December 1773, a ship named Dartmouth sat idle in Boston Harbor, prevented from unloading her cargo by the governor in protest of the import tax and prevented from leaving the harbor by customs rules. As the customs period came to a close, a group of newly patriotic Bostonians came up with a plan to resolve the crisis. One historian recounts, “a chorus of Indian war whoops sounded outside the hall and a party of what looked like Indian men ran to the wharf, entered the ships, and proceeded to dump the tea in Boston Harbor” (Deloria 2). And the rest, as they say, was history: the Boston Tea Party has since functioned as favored tale of origin for American independence and national identity.

The story of the Troglodytes in “Letters 11—14” of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes is an allegory which deals with the problem of man's nature and its bearing on the origin and development of morality and society. The problem emerges from Montesquieu's treatment of the question whether society resulted from the natural benevolence, justice, and social instincts of man, or whether, on the contrary, it was the result of a compact of men devoid of a natural sense of justice. Montesquieu shows that the basis of the social instinct is natural equity; but his demonstration involves also—explicitly or implicitly—questions concerning man's state of nature, his primitive goodness, his knowledge of moral distinctions and obligations, his capability to act in a disinterested manner, the nature of virtue, and the relation of morality and religion.

The Middle English Judas seems to pose more narrative problems than it solves. The sympathetic characterization of Judas; the shift in dramatic focus from Judas to Peter's denial of Christ; the implausible bargain Judas strikes with Pilate—all are perplexing elements. They can be resolved, however, once it is understood that Judas explains a biblical scene not presented in the work itself: the moment when Christ asks the apostles to share bread and wine, his body and blood. The sympathetic portrayal of Judas and the final emphasis on Peter's denial diminish the moral range between the two disciples and imply the universality of human sinfulness. But Judas' transaction, in which Christ is sold for the money to buy food for Passover, gives an even more specific and ironic meaning to the offstage lines “This is my body” since the bread and wine will cost Christ's body and blood.

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

Studying the structure of Platero y Yo makes explicit the organization and arrangement of expressive material as a unified whole. Why does Platero begin the way it does and why does it end the way it does? What are the inner principle or principles that tie together the various lyric chapters into a poetic unity? Several key patterns of imagery and events provide clues to the structure and meaning of Platero: the butterfly imagery which presides over the beginning and the ending of the work, occurrences of gratuitous bloodletting in the season of spring, the almost imperceptible disappearance of conditioned violence in the season of winter, the death of Platero in the month of February, the juxtaposition of life and death, violence and harmony throughout the entire work. All of these patterns and events are endowed with full symbolic significance by the seasonal cycle and by the theme of death and rebirth as a process of metamorphosis.

The ecological digital humanities evoke a method of thinking that is responsive to what jane bennett terms “the ecology of things.” Neither strictly an ecocriticism nor a pursuit solely of environmental(ist) concerns, the ecological digital humanities explore the material and philosophical interconnectedness of actants in assemblages. They attempt, digitally, to think what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.”

In the English eighteenth century, as in most ages before the twentieth century, to take history seriously was to believe, almost without exception, that history coheres, that it has a shape, that it is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction toward or away from certain teleological poles. History was a decline from the “natural” condition of man for Shaftesbury and the primitivists; or it was an ascent toward the “natural” condition of man for Priestley and the progressivists. It was a decline from a general happiness for Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and it was an ascent toward a general happiness in at least that aspect of Pope's thought represented in the lines, “Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!/ Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e'er thy name.” For Swift, and to a lesser extent Clarendon and Temple, history was a monstrous progressive aberration from standards of truth and reason. For most of the doctrinaire Whigs it was a gradual realization of human freedom. History was visualized by Young and Akenside as a corollary of what A. O. Lovejoy calls “the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.”

Burckhardt has remarked that during the Renaissance culture and enlightenment were almost powerless against astrology, kept alive as it was by the ardent imagination of the people, and their passionate wish to penetrate the future. But what he calls the “delusion” of astral influence charmed even the cultured and enlightened, and for rather more complex reasons than he suggests. The modern scholar, in analyzing Renaissance trends, tends to denounce the mind that surrenders to such influences in a rationalist atmosphere. A belief in the occult powers of the stars over Man did not, however, necessarily betray intellectual backwardness, nor was disbelief a proof of great enlightenment. Astrology, though often tolerated by princes of the Church, generally incurred the censure of theologians, and such a fatalistic belief, denying free will and granting powers of revelation to stars named for pagan dieties, appeared to the clerical mind as an incitement to idolatry. In many cases, then, the opponents of the art were conformists, not rebels—nor were they immune to superstition. Even so formidable an enemy of the stars as Pico della Mirandola toyed with magic and the cabala, and often directed his attack at science in general. On the other hand, such a champion of astrology as Mellin de Saint-Gelays argued that Man should remain unhindered in his desire to fathom the mysterious forces of the universe. If man remains earthbound, never lifting eyes or mind heavenward, wrote Mellin, he will sink to a level beneath all earthly creatures instead of becoming their master. For the French poet, prediction by the stars is not the chief purpose of the true astrologer, but a mere accessory of his earthly and heavenly researches. Such a defense of astrology as this stems from a reluctance to forbid any phase of Man's activity in the search for truth, an attitude which, though uncritical, remains consistent with the rationalistic spirit.

The epigraph for this address, which sets both theme and tone, is the first tercet of a love sonnet by the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard:

Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma dame;

Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons,

Et tôt serons étendus sous la lame….

Time moves on, time moves on, madam;

Alas, not time, but we are moving on,

And soon will be stretched out beneath the stone….

Mesdames et messieurs, chers amis, chers collègues, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and colleagues, I had hoped that the various Canadian laws concerning the obligatory use of both French and English on commercial products, in official government documents, on street signs in the province of Ontario, and in some schools would carry over to the 109th convention of the Modern Language Association of America and, for the occasion, to the whole of North America. For instance, I would have welcomed the obligation to deliver my address in French and in English, not translating sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph but using both languages in individual sentences, so that my salutation this evening would have been “Mesdames and gentlemen, dear friends et chers collègues.”

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.

Recently, some literary critics have proposed that we might relate to texts in a different way than we're used to. Instead of plunging into critique, plumbing a text's depths, or coolly analyzing its symptoms, instead of “digging down and standing back,” as Rita Felski puts it, critics might adopt a less skeptical, less paranoid— less critical—stance. We might attend to a text's surfaces, in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's terms. We might get “close but not deep,” as Heather Love suggests. We might practice a new formalism, neither naive nor nostalgic but keyed to the aesthetic and the political.

Many of us say with a smug surprise: “the Law is founded on its own transgressions.” This may be a convenient aphorism that carries within it the memory—in most cases a textual memory not necessarily elaborated by the user—of Lacan's explanations of the Law of the Father, or of Derrida's meditations on perjury, or, rather, par-jure because ultimately Derrida carefully stopped short at the irreducibility of idioms, the limits of the translatability of philosophies.

This essay examines the professionalization of United States literary studies and sociology between the 1930s and 1950s under the aegis of John Crowe Ransom's New Criticism and Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism. These paradigms pulled the disciplines to opposite poles of the professional class: Ransom argued for a less sociological literary criticism, while Parsons distanced sociology from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school. However, both implemented similar professional ideologies that synthesized their disciplines' technical and moral claims, and both paradigms involved fantasies that specialized, disciplinary work within the academy can have a broader, moral significance. These ideas remained fantasies, which contradicted the actual effects of the New Criticism and structural functionalism; professionalism became reflexively oriented toward disciplinary self-perpetuation, isolating literature and sociology from the public they were supposed to reform. Ransom and Parsons thus exemplify the disintegration of publicly responsible professionalism—an event with broad implications for the “new class” of postwar knowledge workers.

While the origin, sources, and evolution of the drama of the sixteenth century have been elaborately studied, curiously enough the non-dramatic literature of the period has suffered from comparative neglect. Monographs on single authors, studies on English literature alone, in many cases have erred thru false perspective. Thus, altho the time is not yet ripe for the general history of the sonnet, desired by M. Vaganay, it may be profitable briefly to consider English literature, in one of its phases, in relation to the great movement of which it was a part.