Queridos Colegas, estimados amigos, bienvenidos a la conventión de la MLA. Especialmente quiero saludar a nuestros compañeros californianos y a todos los hermanos y hermanas hispánicos de estos Estados Unidos.

In the past, the association's presidents have used this occasion to inform members about issues that have arisen during the year and the ways that the officers have responded. Some of my predecessors have had years as eventful as mine and have gone to considerable length to present the MLA's actions as clearly as possible. Here the memorable address of Barbara Herrnstein Smith comes readily to mind. In times of controversy this annual rite has served the equally significant purpose of providing leadership, and in this respect few can match the example of Catharine Stimpson. I too shall give you an accounting of what the association has said and done in your name and how it has represented your manifold interests. But I also devote a major part of my remarks tonight to still another aim of this tradition: to remind ourselves why we are here and what we are about. In attempting to fulfill these goals I look at the MLA from the outside, viewing it as a participant in the social and political reality of our times, and also from the inside, inquiring into how it works.

“Las versiones homéricas” (“Some Versions of Homer”) was first published in 1932 in Discusión, a volume of essays reflecting Borges's principal preoccupations at the time: Argentine reality, Eastern philosophy, and literary and rhetorical issues. Doubtlessly belonging to the last category, “Some Versions of Homer” is the first of a series of pieces that question translation's marginal status and resituate the translator's activity at the center of literary discussion. These texts include “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939), which is one of Borges's first “ficciones” and which George Steiner, in After Babel, calls a summa of all translation theory (70). “The Translators of the 1001 Nights” (1935) and “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald” (1952) are among other noteworthy Borgesian discussions of the historical paradoxes and metaphysical mysteries of translation.

Recent comprehensive literary histories affirm their own impossibility, a gesture that once belonged to opponents of the genre. The challenge of “the impossible whole,” of course, has always influenced the design of histories of entire literary traditions, but the open avowal that the form is a project of the cultural imagination has several notable consequences. In this new understanding, for example, the histories of a given tradition answer to and provoke rather than supersede one another in sequence. Literary works cease to be pseudoevents listed to achieve the appearance of a full history; they dematerialize, and the literary historian uses their instability to maintain the discomfiting question of the relations among “history,” “literature,” and “nation.” For these reasons, the impossible genre will remain a medium of choice, and of controversy, as long as the current academic and public debate over textual, authorial, and cultural identities continues to rage.

The conceptual dominance of the “heterosexual” in modern thinking has conditioned us, when we consider the Canterbury Tales, to think about the Pardoner and his audience in essentialist terms. The Pardoner and the Host's kiss, however, stills and defers attempts by the masculine gaze of Harry and the “redeemed” pilgrims to control what the Pardoner means. By returning meaning to circulation, the kiss provides an instance in which the Pardoner's body can do more than simply deconstruct categories or gesture elsewhere for meaning. Offering an alternative view of the Pardoner's supposed “destructive otherness,” this essay suggests that his true import lies not in his alterity but in his similarity to the other pilgrims and ultimately to us as readers—in short, that the Pardoner constitutes the “open secret” of the Canterbury project.

During the last three decades the in memoriam genre has come to occupy pride of place in the work of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Through his belatedness (which is not necessarily Bloomian), his permanent exile status at the edges of two empires, and his profound poetic speculations on death as the ultimate border crossing, Brodsky now embodies the elegiac tradition in his homeland as no one has since his high‐modernist precursors, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet—and herein lies his distinct contribution to Russian verse of this century—Brodsky has constantly sought out other, nonnative precursors to mediate the dead letter of his primary Soviet culture. In “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” he adopts the “mourning tongue” of Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” while speaking of the death of Eliot in his own distinctive Russian elegy. In this way, not only does he keep “the death of the poet… from his poems,” he keeps death from the door of his own ailing tradition.

Literary critics mistrust periodization, that basic act of literary history, because they are suspicious of narrative. Where does this suspicion come from? And why has it arisen, paradoxically, together with the growing authority of the concept of narrative itself? This essay places the rise of narrative theory in the contexts of professionalism, decolonization, and the nineteenth-century novel. Gérard Genette's account of the triumph of “discourse” over “story” parallels the upward mobility of many nineteenth-century novelistic protagonists. Even denying that narrative theory can be narrativized, as Jonathan Culler does, has similarities to the vocational crisis in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Each of these narratives functions as a rhetoric of professional legitimation, leading outward from some account of “the ‘storiness’ of the story”—the role, for example, of death for Walter Benjamin and Frank Kermode—to a sense of vocation anchored in the concerns of an extraprofessional public.

Recent work on the momentous implications of mouvance and on the fluidity of genres in medieval literature has only begun to excavate the wealth of extant commentaries on the interplay during performance of rhetoric, poetry, music, dance, and drama in early cultures. Even today, Guillaume de Machaut's fourteenth-century Remède de Fortune offers compelling testimony about the generative and regenerative harmony between images and speech—themselves engendered and preserved by that most egregiously neglected rhetorical canon memoria. Long cited by poets, musicians, rhetoricians, and dramatists as crucial to their arts, mnemonics constitutes a complex epistemological framework by which to restore the lost dynamism to a literary corpus—lyric poetry—that enacted each of those arts. As the conceptual precursor to literary invention, memory collapses our current distinctions between seeing, saying, and singing, between visual, virtual, and actual performances, thus assisting us in revising our conceptions not only of performance but of genre as well.

Music is the realm where meaning is not ruined by saying. With the phrase “unheard melodies,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” evokes the unspeakable in a passage whose logic has collapsed. Literally unheard melodies, along with related phenomena, appear in music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, and Beethoven; each hidden melody resonates with the expressive structure of the piece containing it—with the felt idea that performance must actuate. Unseen pictures in paintings function similarly. Thus in unheard melodies thought acts unmediated by utterance. They—and not the Imaginary—are the Platonic ideal Mallarmé sought. They show how form is power and life.

Critical restiveness with Chaucer's “unsatisfactory” endings points to one of his most profound strategies. In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer finds at least a dozen ways to ignore, skirt, transcend, or even anticipate structural closure in favor of an engagement between the narrative and its responding audience that fundamentally works against closure. By repeatedly subverting conventional closure, he turns our attention to the dynamics of discourse as social interaction. He creates in the Canterbury Tales a copia of the human motives—social, psychological, or political—that generate communication and misunderstanding. Chaucer's sense of closure casts light on the narrative frame and on the so-called Retraction. The subversion of conventional closure, instead of undermining the text, often enriches it, deeply characterizing his whole attitude toward discourse and toward knowledge. In Chaucer's epistemology nothing is ever complete.

Translation, interpretation, adjudication, and objective knowledge are possible in a world without a foundation, a world that precludes the testing and squaring of claims against a reality external to conceptual schemes. In critical studies the prevailing relativist views assume that meanings and references are unstable, that facts, things, emphases, and values depend on various culture- or community-driven conceptual schemes, and hence that defining the inherent interests of literary and other texts is impossible. On the contrary, texts are knowable as internally justified, preregistered systems of intentionality and rationality. Each text exists as such a system prior to interpretation, and it is this system of determinate values and emphases to which interpretive analysis is accountable.