bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Theme of Salvation in the Novels of Hermann Broch
Authors: Hardin James N.
Published: February 2007

Hermann Broch's lofty conception of the artist as seer and prophet led him to sketch out new paths for the future, absolute values for a “new society.” Thus, the theme of salvation plays a key role in his works, from the first novel in 1932 to the last completed in 1950. Broch's conception of salvation connotes not only the saving of man from the spiritual consequences of sin, but also from existential anguish. Broch presents a number of solutions, often embodied in archetypal savior figures, for the plight of modern society; they range from vast mystical visions (in Der Tod des Vergil) to utopian plans in the empirical realm. A central theme in Broch's novels is that salvation can be achieved through attainment of ultimate knowledge which emerges from Dionysiac depths but which must be structured by reason. In the ethical aspect of Broch's treatment of the salvation theme, one can discern a possible trend in the later works toward a strict form of moral activism and humanitarianism.
The Other Coriolanus
Authors: Stockholder Katherine
Published: February 2007

Coriolanus is one of the several plays in which Shakespeare explores the ways in which man's presentation of himself balances precariously on the seesaw of tragic and comic modes. Coriolanus, by the very intensity with which he asserts masculine independence from circumstance, binds himself to maintain a public and self-image of an almost Godlike warrior, but his uncontrollable need to maintain this image denies its truth. From this paradox emerge the opposite views of Coriolanus presented in the play: Roman patriot and traitor, man of ultimate modesty and braggart, most manly of warriors and boy. Furthermore, the play shows us how all these straining oppositions rise from his denial of that human tenderness in himself that is barely manifested by his love of Virgilia. Having denied his inner feeling, he must model himself on external expectations, thereby rendering his actions and reactions predictable. This predictability makes it possible for others to manipulate Coriolanus. We are, therefore, forced to see him in the coloring of a Bergsonian automaton, even though the grandeur of his stance and the consequences of it make this perception tragically painful.
The Johnson-Chesterfield Relationship: A New Hypothesis
Authors: Korshin Paul J.
Published: February 2007

To understand the ironic force of Johnson's 1755 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, we must appreciate not only their personal relationship, centered in 1746-48, and Chesterfield's indirect attempt to sponsor the Dictionary in 1754, but their literary and political relationship as well. Both men played a complex role in the politics of the 1737-44 period, Chesterfield as a leading member of the opposition, Johnson as political journalist. During these years, Johnson used Chesterfield's 1737 speech against the Playhouse Bill as basis for some arguments in his Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739), and later wrote Chesterfield's part in a number of “Parliamentary Debates.” Though Johnson favored the opposition position before 1740, in his “Debates,” under the requirement of appearing impartial, he often created for opposition speakers, especially Chesterfield, ironic arguments which redound to their discredit. Johnson's ability as ironist was considerable: comparison of the speeches he wrote for Chesterfield with collateral sources for these debates reveals that he intensified Chesterfield's opposition negativeness by increasing his ironical attacks upon the ministry in power. The effect is to satirize Chesterfield, rendering him ineffectual, divisive, and ridiculous through the creation of a literary and political persona. It is unlikely that Johnson forgot this persona during his hopeful personal relationship with and later neglect by Chesterfield. When the opportunity arose in 1755 for Johnson to address Chesterfield personally again, he fortified the “civil irony” of his celebrated letter with an ironic attack which recalls, and was perhaps influenced by, the satiric criticism he had leveled against Chesterfield through similar ironic techniques a dozen years earlier in the “Parliamentary Debates.”
Satire, Sublimity, and Sentiment: Theory and Practice in Post-Augustan Satire
Authors: Carnochan W. B.
Published: February 2007

In the eighteenth century a preference for Juvenal as a satirist eventually replaced the normal Augustan preference for Horace. But the post-Augustan image of Juvenal was selective and sometimes inaccurate. Critics emphasized his sublimity, his occasional pathos, and his supposedly rational piety, while ignoring his obscenity, wit, and rhetorical control. There are near parallels in post-Augustan satiric practice. In William Gifford, satire becomes invective; in Charles Churchill, declamation. The new satire borders on Richardsonian and even Gothic melodrama. Or, at the other extreme, it is pseudo-Horatian and almost at the vanishing point (Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide). The mock-heroic dwindles into burlesque (Peter Pindar's The Lousiad). The breakdown of the Augustan equilibrium means, in satire, a progressive failure of irony and especially of ironic diminution. Churchill's Dedication to Warburton is an important exception. It uses the new image of Juvenal in the service of mock-panegyric and enforces the Augustan satirist's traditional view of evil as privation.
Pierre Reverdy, Poet of Nausea
Authors: Greene Robert W.
Published: February 2007

The image of collapse or implosion which dominates Reverdy's poetry and haunts the climactic section of La Nausée is glossed in the concluding pages of Sartre's novel and in various parts of Camus's Le Mythe de Sisyphe. All three men focus on the experience of the absurd, on the malaise that accompanies the fleeting awareness of the contingency of all things, a feeling that is often triggered by the perception of abrupt decline or dissolution. This existentialist malaise or nausea, which terrifies Sartre's hero Roquentin, is in fact the very stuff of Reverdy's poetry and as such it demoralizes his readers. At the same time, however, Reverdy's poetry is deeply satisfying. Its ultimate appeal can perhaps best be understood in the light of Roquentin's final decision to face up to his nausea and to purify it in a lasting form such as a work of literature. It is precisely this solution to the problem of the absurd that Reveredy had intuited at the beginning of his career in 1915. Indeed, his life's work as a poet amounts to a sustained effort to confront the absurd and neutralize it in poetic form.
Autograph Fragments of Two Arnold Poems
Authors: Godshalk William Leigh
Published: February 2007

On 14 August 1869, Matthew Arnold copied fragments of The Buried Life and Stanzas in Memory of the Late Edward Quillinan, Esq., on the flyleaves of a set of the two-volume edition of his Poems (London, 1869). The volumes belonged to a longtime friend of Arnold, Jemima Quillinan, daughter of Edward Quillinan and step-granddaughter of William Wordsworth. The fragments are valuable because they contain unrecorded variants, and the fragment of The Buried Life is especially interesting in that Arnold has changed the meaning of the lines. After Jemima's death, the volumes went to May Wordsworth and are now in the possession of the author.
Something is Happening But You Don't Know What It is, Do You, Mr. Jones?
Authors: Smith Henry Nash
Published: February 2007

Stirrings of protest within the MLA during the past year challenge many received ideas about the structure and functioning of the Association. For example, we need to consider constitutional revisions transferring power from the Executive Council to a more representative legislative body. There is a basic disagreement within the MLA between conservatives who believe that the study and teaching of literature should be and can be “objective,” and radicals who maintain that such a claim is fraudulent because if the scholar fails to denounce the existing social and economic order, he is in effect an apologist for it. Although the Foreign Language Program has been characterized as merely an adjunct to American imperialism, it has operated primarily to increase study of major European languages long a part of the liberal arts curriculum. The Faculty Exchange, which has been vigorously criticized, is highly useful to small departments; the question of its abolition requires careful study. These various controversies are generated by conflicting notions of how the MLA should serve society. We must resolve the basic issue if we are to maintain the integrity and effectiveness of the intellectual enterprise to which our profession commits us.
Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?
Authors: Crews Frederick
Published: February 2007

Unlike their counterparts in socialist countries, American literary scholars and critics are generally unaware of an ideological dimension to their work. This very unawareness, however, is suited to the requirements of advanced capitalism. While our literary studies rarely exhibit the patent ideological bias to be found in the social sciences, they are dominated by ideologically congenial habits of mind. The scholarly ideal of shedding prejudice would seem to be well served by a critique of those habits, which often yield implausible or trifling conclusions.
Stendhal and the Lesson of Napoleon
Authors: Porter Dennis
Published: February 2007

Given Stendhal's known liberal opinions, his admiration for Napoleon has always appeared paradoxical. Through a detailed examination of the two works most fully representing Stendhal's thoughts on Napoleon, an attempt is made to resolve the paradox. To do full justice to the complexity of the author's attitudes, what he found to blame is first contrasted with what he praised. The admiration for the man of destiny contrasts with the dislike of the statesman, extraordinary qualities of character are set against weaknesses. Beyond the description of the man, Stendhal discerns general historical laws operating in Napoleon's career. The course of events from rise to prominence through imperial power and progressive decline embodies a lesson for mankind. Despotism promotes a state of national demoralization and, therefore, prepares its own defeat. Such a judgment derives from the historiography of Enlightenment liberalism. The contrast between Stendhal's attitude toward Danton and Napoleon confirms that this is the tradition to which Stendhal belongs. As a utilitarian Stendhal nevertheless concludes that Napoleon's impact on European history was not wholly negative, since it led to a greater sum of happiness. As a liberal he affirms that lasting happiness within a state is only possible with constitutional government.
Ludwig Tieck's “Der Blonde Eckbert”: A Psychological Reading
Authors: Rippere Victoria L.
Published: February 2007

Bertha's warning to Walther that her narrative not be taken for a Mdrchen provides a clue to an “intrinsic” Freudian psychological reading of “Eckbert,” a work which, like a dream or a fairy tale, has a “latent” as well as a “manifest” level. Bertha's narration is interspersed with compulsive confessions that point to her own repressed awareness of the symbolic meaning of her acts. On its latent level, her story is that of a narcissistic child's failure to attain the norm of productive social adaptation explicitly prescribed for her in the world of the work. Only in the fantastic “Waldeinsamkeit” does she approximate, briefly, “normal” socialization. Her theft of the jewels and killing of the two animals, in the context of her psychosocial and sexual development, is her definitive rejection of what they represent–the possibility of a productive life as wife and mother. The incestuous marriage symbolizes the fruitless union of two narcissistic characters who in the other love only themselves. Approached on a level other than that of logical causality, the story appears to have an inner coherence not previously appreciated.
Milton's Heaven
Authors: Knott John R.
Published: February 2007

As the only stable element of Milton's universe in Paradise Lost and the theological if not the dramatic center of the poem, heaven deserves more attention than it usually receives. Although Milton drew heavily upon the Biblical New Jerusalem, his heaven is unusual in being far more pastoral than the heaven of Revelation. Insofar as it resembles the New Jerusalem, heaven suggests the regality and power of God. The victory of the Son in his jeweled chariot, the best illustration of omnipotence in the poem, reflects the spirit of Protestant commentators on the final victory of Christ in Revelation. In its pastoral aspect heaven embodies the bliss and repose of the angels and foreshadows the sabbatical rest of the saints. The tradition of a pastoral heaven, entwined with the tradition of the earthly paradise, was transmitted primarily by medieval hymns and vision literature and by the Renaissance pastoral elegy. Milton's heavenly paradise offers the consolation of a bliss which resembles that of Eden and also a higher, festive joy arising from the continual praise of God. Heaven may be less engaging than Eden, but it is the image of the true city and the true paradise toward which the human drama moves.
An “Unknown” Luther Translation of the Bible
Authors: Bluhm Heinz
Published: February 2007

Luther's German writings contain a large number of Biblical quotations, many of which differ from his translations of these same passages in his formal Bible. It is obvious that he generally did not take time to look up a passage in his published versions, but produced a new, ad hoc translation which was the inspiration of the moment. The variorum Weimar edition of Luther's Bible, now complete in twelve volumes, regrettably does not include these informal quotations. From among all the casual quotations occurring in Luther's German writings, a few examples from the New Testament are presented and discussed in this article, along with the corresponding texts of the Greek original, the Vulgate, and the pre-Lutheran German Bibles, as well as Luther's official renderings. Luther's ad hoc translations are often even more vivid and concrete than his official Bible itself. They might be said to constitute a new Luther Bible—one which is not complete, to be sure, but which includes many if not most of the great scriptural passages. These casual quotations are fresh evidence of Luther's impressive stature as a literary figure. They should be included in any new variorum edition of Luther's German Bible.
Vercelli and the Vercelli Book
Authors: Halsall Maureen
Published: February 2007

Most theories designed to explain how and when the Vercelli Book came into the hands of the canons of San Eusebio di Vercelli are little more than guesswork; and those which endeavour to single out a particular agent of transmission ignore local data, such as the records of the commune, abbey, hospices, proto-university, and cathedral, which provide a wealth of documentation for the frequency of Vercelli's contacts with England and Englishmen both during and after the Middle Ages. The only solid evidence for the length of time that Codex cxvii has rested in the cathedral archives must be found in the manuscript itself and in the various book catalogues drawn up by the canons down through the centuries. Of special interest among these catalogues is a recently discovered one, dated 1426, which describes what is probably the Vercelli Book in terms suggesting that it is an old possession of the Eusebian chapter, thus lending support to the contention that the inscription on 24v of the manuscript is indeed north Italian of the eleventh century.
Ruskin, Pugin, and the Contemporary Context of “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”
Authors: Greenberg Robert A.
Published: February 2007

When read in the context of the 1840's, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” is seen to be neither an explicitly anti-Catholic poem nor a simple historical construct. Much of its bent and many of its details had previously been expressed by so vigorously polemical a Catholic writer as Pugin; they appear again later in Ruskin's pages. Browning's concern rather—and this he shares with Newman, as well as Pugin and Ruskin—was to search out in the past the roots of his own age. The corruption of spirit that he discerns in the Renaissance he also recognizes as extending into his time. The ethos represented by Saint Praxed is dead; the modern world has begun; the qualities of the Bishop are the qualities of Browning's reader. The same historicizing of the past informs “My Last Duchess”, which dramatizes in the deadly embrace of the Duke and the Duchess the destruction of the old order at the hands of the new. The Duchess survives as a frozen portrait, Saint Praxed as no more than a confused and ineffectual memory. But despite the coherence of his analysis, and unlike Ruskin and Pugin, Browning refused to enter the lists with a programme of his own.
Calvinism and Cosmic Evil in Moby-Dick
Authors: Herbert T. Walter
Published: February 2007

Melville employs theological materials which complicate and deepen his portrayal of cosmic evil in the conflict of Ahab and the whale. Father Mapple's presentation of the Jonah story sets forth Calvinist teachings which throw Ahab's revolt into relief as a revolt against the ultimate. Melville elaborates Ahab's view of his symbolic quarry by drawing upon an anti-Calvinist tradition in which Calvin's God was attacked as a brutal monster. Further, Calvin's interpretation of the Old Testament King Ahab heavily influences the characterization of Captain Ahab. Calvin used King Ahab as an example of the reprobate, those predestinately damned. He stressed Ahab's victimization by Satan and his madness as marks of his reprobation. Melville uses these themes in a way which makes evident the cosmic evil implicit in the plight of one who is thus hopeless. Here also he draws upon a tradition of attack against Calvinism. But while Melville's use of theology is extensive and sophisticated, it is always subordinate to the thematic concerns of Moby-Dick.
Howells' Use of George Eliot's Romola in April Hopes
Authors: Wilson Jack H.
Published: February 2007

Howells' many references to George Eliot s Tito Melema, beginning in 1864 and continuing up into the twentieth century, indicate that the character embodied insights on the nature of moral evil and the complexity of human personality which answered to Howells' intuitions on these subjects. Alice Pasmer's mistaken charge in Chapter xliii of April Hopes that her fiancé is, like Tito, “a faithless man” has the important function of revealing that her moral sensibility is seriously flawed. But Howells' is doing more with Alice than creating merely another Puritan dutiolator. It becomes apparent as Alice's selfishness is more fully revealed in the last third of the novel that it is her character which is glossed by comparison with Tito. At the end of the novel Alice is poised at the point where Tito began, and Howells', by marrying her to Dan, has created the conditions which will encourage the hardening of her selfishness into a predominant force in her character. Thus Howells' subtly indicates what direction her moral development will inevitably take.
The Lively Art of Manhattan Transfer
Authors: Lowry E. D.
Published: February 2007

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos' first important study of urbanindustrial life, owes much to the machine-oriented aesthetic of Italian futurism and other modernistic movements in the visual arts. Utilizing techniques and modes of perception indigenous to the machine age, Dos Passos' sought to express the spirit, rhythms, and structure of modern reality in such a way as to evoke in the reader a sense of involvement and participation in the problems of contemporary society. In its visual directness and sensory immediacy, Manhattan Transfer suggests the influence of photography and the “lively arts” of film and vaudeville. In its overall pattern of compositional contrasts and oppositions, the novel resembles abstract painting and the montage structure of the motion picture. Basic to Dos Passos' outlook is a synoptic or visual concept of reality as a network of dynamically interacting parts. Only by viewing his world as a “system” in which nothing is fully comprehensible in isolation can man realize himself as a responsible individual and direct the energies of the machine toward socially desirable ends.
Structure and Dramatic Technique in Gide's Saül and Le Roi Candaule
Authors: Church D. M.
Published: February 2007

Two early Gide plays, Saül and Le Roi Candaule, represent a revolt against the realistic and naturalistic theater of the nineteenth century, yet they cannot be completely classified as symbolist because of Gide's insistence on the importance of psychologically particularized characters. Character is a major consideration that determines the dramatic quality, the structure, and the techniques of the plays. Saul, which bears many superficial resemblances to Shakespeare's plays, is completely dominated by the figure of the King. The play's structure reminds one of a fugue; it is more an intellectual artifice than a dramatic development. In Le Roi Candaule, as in Saül, the title figure is completely dominant to the point that other characters seem mere puppets. In each play the action hinges on a voluntary self-destructive decision made by the protagonist. But the dramatic effects are due largely to Gide's interesting, yet not always masterful, use of theatrical tricks. In spite of their obvious flaws, these plays deserve consideration as forerunners in the twentieth-century French trend toward using theater as theater to express meaningful ideas about the nature of man.
Hermann Hesse, the American Youth Movement, and Problems of Literary Evaluation
Authors: Schwarz Egon
Published: February 2007

When Hermann Hesse received the Nobel prize in 1946 he was virtually unknown in this country. The critics who reluctantly turned to the new celebrity found his works threadbare and derivative. Today there exists a veritable Hesse cult in the United States among the dissident and the young. The affinities between the German author and the disaffected youth in America are many. They share similar attitudes toward adolescence, sex, drugs, the Orient, the nation, the state, the church, the military, the schools, and authority in general. A glance at the rebellious students in Hesse's native country, however, reveals that he is held by them in the same low esteem they reserve for the entire Romantic tradition of inwardness of which they regard National Socialism as an ultimate version or perversion. This contradiction of values held by sociologically and ideologically comparable groups puts the lack of a viable theory of literary evaluation into sharp focus. While traditional literary scholarship is reticent on the subject, its acts of criticism and historiography are replete with unreflected value judgments. A theory of evaluation based on the careful analysis of an author's reception, such as of Hesse's posthumous fortunes, could combat prejudice in scholarship and further the understanding of the historical dimension in the literary work.
The Composition of Novalis' Die Lehrlinge Zu Sais: A Reevaluation
Authors: Molnár Géza Von
Published: February 2007

Novalis' fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais displays in its composition a degree of purpose and coherence with which it has never been credited. A close examination of the text reveals a carefully constructed schema that unites the seemingly disparate elements of speculation and poetry into a meaningful and uniform statement on the relationship between man and nature. In the first section, entitled “Der Lehrling,” Novalis defines the ego's binary direction into an outer realm and an inner realm as the dual approach to the reality of nature; he outlines these dialectically opposed paths according to a pattern of alternate juxtaposition that reflects their opposite trends while it allows, at the same time, for their fundamental unity by linking one alternative to the other. The initial object of Novalis' exposition in the second section, called “Die Natur,” is the range of man's power of knowledge; he employs its various aspects as points of perspective from which nature may be examined, a fact that becomes fully obvious only after the underlying pattern of composition has been recognized as one that follows Kant's systematization of the human intellect, in particular his system for the categories of understanding.
Patterns of Stoicism in Thought and Prose Styles, 1530–1700
Authors: Miner Earl
Published: February 2007

Numerous writings (especially by Morris W. Croll and George Williamson) have propounded the theory that a late sixteenth-century revival of Stoicism marked English thought and prose styles, replacing Cicero in popularity, that such Stoicism came to a climax in the period from about 1580 to 1630, and that Stoicism waned thereafter in the seventeenth century. The theory is disproved by the pattern of English publication of Stoic and neo-Stoic writers, and Cicero between 1530 and 1700. The important Stoic writers were more popular in the Restoration than before and little popular in the period from 1580 to 1630. Scholars of English literature have been misled by possible continental developments behind which England lagged and by insufficient exactness in understanding classical writers and thought. Seneca's style is said to be Asiatic rather than Attic, and Cicero is Stoic in such works as De Officiis. This one Ciceronian work was more popular in England than the total canon of Seneca. The evidence shows that an altogether new account is required for the history of neo-Stoicism in English thought and prose style, as well as of the development of English prose styles.
The Teaching of English in German High Schools
Authors: Koelle Willi
Published: February 2007

German schools are gradually outgrowing the stage of chaos into which they had been plunged by the war. In a great effort the worst difficulties of the post-war period have been overcome, but conditions cannot yet be called normal. Classes still comprise 40 pupils and more. Although many schools have been rebuilt or newly built since the war, the bigger towns, which were nearly all heavily bombed, are still so short of accommodation that most school buildings have to be used in double shifts, i.e., two schools share one building, one school going in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The teaching load of a high school teacher is 25 periods (of 45 minutes each) a week. But in some respects peacetime conditions are gradually returning. Thus, the production of textbooks is approaching a satisfactory stage. There are two or three dozen different English courses for schools on the market, and a very large number of English and American texts in school-editions (with annotations). A catalogue published in the summer of 1955 enumerates 532 such editions printed in the Federal Republic of Germany, and there is nothing to prevent German schools from buying reading materials from Britain or the United States. A number of the German Länder have introduced a system by which all schoolbooks are provided free of charge.
The MLA, 1883-1953
Authors: Parker William R.
Published: February 2007

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

—Cicero.

The aim of history is to assemble real facts and real speeches, to the end that lovers of knowledge may be instructed and persuaded.

—Polybius.

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it.

—Bismarck.

If history does not truly repeat itself, knowledge of it may, sometimes, give current problems a familiar, less formidable look. That is one reason for looking backward to our origins while we, as an Association, consider anew the status of modern language study in America and seek means to amend it. Another reason is that next December we celebrate our seventieth birthday.
MLA Group Projects, 1921–55
Authors: Fisher John H.
Published: February 2007

The First World War had been over for two years. In the League of Nations atmosphere following its close, world scholarship had begun to mobilize. In 1918 the Modern Humanities Research Association had been founded. In 1919 the International Research Council, the International Astronomical Union, the International Chemistry Union, and the International Union of Academies had all been organized, and similar bodies were being founded each succeeding year. In these international bodies, American scholars were ill at ease. The war had convinced Great Britain and Europe of the material achievements of the United States, but American scholars, many of them trained abroad, felt keenly that their nation did not stand so high in the fields of international scholarship. One of the first actions of the MHRA had been to send representatives across the Atlantic to meet with MLA members, out of which discussion grew the MLA annual bibliography (1921), intended to display American literary and linguistic scholarship to European scholars. The American Council of Learned Societies, founded in 1919 to make possible American participation in the International Union of Academies, had immediately addressed itself to fostering American scholarly projects that would earn respect abroad.
The Critical Years: The Modern Language Journal 1916-30
Authors: Parker William R.
Published: February 2007

The Modem Language Journal, official organ of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, will be forty years old next month. PMLA salutes a younger brother, wishing him long life and prosperity. To commemorate this birthday we offer herewith a study of the MLJ under its first four editors. These were critical years, not only for the fledgling Journal, but for the whole profession of modern foreign language teachers. The staff of the MLA's Foreign Language Program believes firmly that study of the past can often throw light on problems of the present. It is in this spirit that we invite attention to the period 1916–30.
The Maine Language Program
Authors: Starr Wilmarth H.
Published: February 2007

The story of languages at Maine since 1946 when the Departments of Romance Languages, German, and Classics were combined as the Department of Foreign Languages and Classics is very likely short on the dramatic side. There are no great experiments to report, no application of special funds or subsidies to bolster our efforts. It is, rather, a story of hard work, steady progress, gradual and continuing evolution in an institution of modest resources and primarily local influence. If the account be worth the telling it is because it has not drama and distinction to its credit but a certain significance in that it represents the type of accomplishment possible in an institution of modest and limited proportions, yet one which, for these same reasons, is typical of a large segment of American education. The numbers of students studying languages at Maine and in institutions of similar compass undoubtedly make their impact upon national life and certainly account for an appreciable portion of those students who eventually find their way into the profession of language teaching at all levels.
Foreign Language Teaching and International Conciliation
Authors: Shuster George N.
Published: February 2007

Not so long ago ours was a country of many languages and dialects. Today it is, no doubt, on the verge of becoming, at least in its ceaselessly expanding urban areas, the most linguistically monolithic part of the civilized world. A dwindling microscopic minority still study the classical tongues. Were it not for the religious seminaries, Greek studies would long since have vanished to the point of extinction. The fate of Latin is only somewhat less dire. And what shall we say about the modern languages other than English? Fortunately, scholarly concern with and proficiency in them are widespread and notable. But so far as one is able to make out, the amount which in practical life sticks to the ribs of high school and college students is about as slight as is the aroma of a cup of Ersatzkaffee. Certainly when our people get scattered about the wide world, with which they are now perforce concerned in multifarious ways, they are like nothing so much as Missouri farmers after an ice storm that has snapped all the telephone wires and coated all the roads.
The Role of Language in the Development of Swiss National Consciousness
Authors: de Torrenté Henry
Published: February 2007

The Map of the world conveys to us the fact that political boundaries are very often identical with linguistic boundaries. This is particularly the case in Europe. Each people there has its own language and this language is also the primary element of its particular culture. This is true of the larger countries like England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia and Poland, and is almost true of France, whose linguistic domain on the European continent overlaps part of only Belgium and Switzerland. This statement applies also to the smaller countries: Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Balkan States. For all these peoples, and for many others, unity of language is one of the features contributing to political unity.
The Future of the “FL Program”
Authors: Parker William R.
Published: February 2007

This is my third annual report as Director of the FL Program. It gives me great pleasure to begin by quoting a resolution passed by the M LA Council at a special meeting held last month: “The Executive Council declares the essential elements of the current Foreign Language Program to be a permanent concern of the Modern Language Association, eventually to be included in the annual budget.” This policy statement looks forward to October 1958, when present foundation support for the Program expires. As most of you know, the Rockefeller Foundation has recently made us a supplementary grant of $115,000, to be spent in the period 1955–58. Expressions of confidence totalling nearly a quarter of a million dollars inspire (to put it mildly) mixed emotions. Not for another quarter of a million would I admit that we are undeserving; but I freely concede that this profession has scarcely begun to spend its own human resources for giving language study a vital role in American education and life.
Speech Typewriters and Translating Machines
Authors: Locke W. N.
Published: February 2007

The increasing triumph of man over matter has come about through an understanding facilitated by the awakening of the scientific spirit. At the same time, the application of the scientific method to the study of man and his activities has been slower. Probably all humanists agree with Alexander Pope that “the proper study of mankind is man,” but there is less unanimity as to the proper method to be followed in such study. Still, the social sciences are gradually developing scientific methods of their own, based like nuclear science on statistics and probability.
A Brief Bibliography on Linguistics, for Foreign Language Teachers
Authors: Moulton William G.
Published: February 2007

During recent years language teachers have heard a great many claims about the importance of linguistics in language teaching. It is true that, during the last thirty years or so, many useful and rather exact techniques have been developed for the analysis and description of languages, and along with them have come many new attitudes toward language in general. Some of this must obviously have a bearing on language teaching. Yet when the hard pressed language teacher tries to learn something about this new science of linguistics, he finds it exasperatingly hard to do so. If he asks a linguistics colleague for an opinion on the recent popular books on language (some of which have been real best sellers), he is told that they will give him no idea whatever of what has really been going on in the science. If he asks whether he should read one of the classic books by a linguist, such as Leonard Bloomfield's Language (New York, 1933), he is told that in parts it is excruciatingly hard to read, and that it is out of date anyhow. Having been rebuffed on both points, all but the most heroic language teachers will give the matter up then and there. Linguists will then go on muttering about people who don't want to learn about what they are teaching, and language teachers will go on muttering about people who have a science so extraordinary that it can't be explained to outsiders.
The 1962 Summer Institutes of The Commission on English: Their Achievement and Promise
Authors: Gerber John C.
Published: February 2007

Of the many enterprises undertaken during the last few years to upgrade the teaching of English, the 1962 Summer Institute Program sponsored by the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board has been the most dramatic and, in many ways, the most promising. Already it is clear that the effects of this program are being felt in many high-school classes, and that the formula devised by the Commission on English is being copied widely and successfully. The potential usefulness of such Institutes for the advanced training of high-school English teachers, therefore, has already been demonstrated. What makes these Institutes of especial significance to MLA members, however, is that the program required twenty of the most influential Departments of English in the country to involve themselves directly in this advanced training of high-school teachers. These were not institutes conducted by professors of Education with the casual blessing of Departments of English; these were institutes administered and largely taught by professors of English. The difference is a very great one indeed. Whether we like it or not, the CEEB Institutes have, in effect, forced those of us in Departments of English to acknowledge a substantial responsibility for improving the quality of English teaching in the high schools. Because of them—and of such subsequent activities as the Allerton Conference and the Curriculum Centers—a new appraisal of our proper professional functions has been quietly taking place on one campus after another. Even now it is no exaggeration to say, I believe, that a Department of English may no longer claim to be of the top rank unless it includes among its programs one or more designed to aid the high-school English teacher, both the tenderfoot and the old-timer.
English Literature Overseas: A Report on a British Conference
Authors: Ashmead John
Published: February 2007

The British Council conference on the teaching of English Literature overseas was held at King's College, Cambridge, England, 16–18 July 1962. As K. R. Johnstone, Deputy Director-General of the British Council, pointed out, this was the first conference on teaching English Literature overseas, though such teaching has been in progress for over a century. More than seventy-five participants came from twenty-five different countries, and had taught in many more. The discussions of the conference were taped and will be published in a 60,000 word book by the firm of Methuen.
Project English: The First Year
Authors: Hook J. N.
Published: February 2007

This will be a brief, factual, uncolored, and dull account of the first year of Project English. To understand the first year, however, we should go back a little further.
College English Departments and Professional Efforts to Improve English Teaching
Authors: Squire James R.
Published: February 2007

Jerome K. Bruner, the distinguished psychologist from Harvard who may presently be influencing American education more deeply than any other individual, recently asserted that this country is embarked on a permanent revolution in education based on a broad redefinition of the nature of the educational profession. This revolution in the educational Establishment is symbolized, says Bruner, by the presence of Nobel laureates in physics devoting their talents and energies to the devising of school curricula in science. Underlying the revolution is the assumption that “those who know a subject most deeply know best the great and simple structuring ideas in terms of which instruction must proceed.”
Four Cultures (German, Hispanic, Italian, and Russian)
Authors: Fleissner Else M. , Marichal Juan , Pitkin Donald , Simmons Ernest J.
Published: February 2007

When “Six Cultures” appeared as part of the MLA Reports of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in 1961, we planned to make periodic revisions and we here publish revised and updated versions of the lists in four languages. Readers interested in French and Luso-Brazilian cultures may consult the original lists in the Appendix to the MLA Selective List of Materials (New York: MLA, 1962. $1.00) or they may obtain a reprint of the “Six Cultures” article by sending 50 cents to the MLA Materials Center. We reprint here the general introduction by Lawrence Wylie, Chairman of the original committee.
Manpower in the Neglected Languages, Fall 1962
Authors: Harmon John , Simms James , Tierney Hannelore
Published: February 2007

This report on the study of neglected languages in United States colleges and universities in 1962–63 shows that the neglect is diminishing, with enrollments of some 17,000 in foreign languages except the “big five”: French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. In 168 colleges and universities in the United States, 68 “neglected” foreign languages are being taught in 270 departments by over a thousand teachers to more than eleven thousand students, a figure we reach by estimating that each student is enrolled in about one and a half courses in the language. The five languages in which the largest enrollments were reported are Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Norwegian.
Secondary School Foreign-Language Enrollments and Offerings, 1958–62
Authors: Eshelman James N.
Published: February 2007

In 1948, approximately one student out of seven in the public high schools was studying a modern foreign language; in 1962 the ratio was one to every four—2.4 million MFL enrollments in a total high school population of 9.8 million.1 Contrary to popular belief, this gain began long before the launching of the first Sputnik startled the nation into a searching examination of its educational system, particularly in science and foreign language. There has, in fact, been an annual increase in the ratio of language enrollments to total high-school enrollment from 1948 to the present day, though the rate of increase rose sharply in 1959, after Sputnik and after the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.
The American Scholar and His Books
Authors: Hanford James Holly
Published: February 2007

A year ago last summer, when I was privately digesting the fact that I had been nominated to the presidency of the Modern Language Association of America, I happened to be sitting at the daily luncheon table with a group of teachers, some of whom were just returning from a meeting of one of the learned societies in the social sciences. The subject turned on presidential addresses and some excellent wit was broken on their demerits. For understandable reasons I kept silence while the conclusion was being arrived at that presidents were elected too late in life. There was bound to be disappointment on the part of younger men when some veteran of the profession of whom they had heard much delivered himself of commonplaces entirely unworthy of his position and of his better self. At this point one member of the group, whose own lectures are a theme of admiration, made the suggestion laughingly that every scholar who gave any promise of being ultimately chosen by his colleagues to such an office be required to write a presidential address in his younger years against the day when his talent might be required of him on an occasion like the present.
The Purpose and Legislative History of the Foreign Language Titles in the National Defense Education Act, 1958
Authors: Derthick Lawrence G.
Published: February 2007

It is a pleasure today to congratulate you upon three quarters of a century of unique and distinguished national service. During all of this time your Association has been dedicated to the precept that communication is the very essence of cooperative society. You have pioneered the effort to advance literary and linguistic studies in our schools and colleges, sometimes in the face of apathy and even antagonism.
Modern Foreign Languages in the High School Curriculum: Excerpts for the Record
Authors: Conant James Bryant
Published: February 2007

The main conclusion I draw from my study of the American high school can be summed up very quickly. Based upon personal visits to fifty-five high schools from coast to coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, this conclusion is that no radical change in the basic pattern of American secondary education is needed in order to make our high school as satisfactory as the best I have seen.
The Arts and Humanities: Their Support and Development
Authors: Keeney Barnaby C.
Published: February 2007

You have asked me, as Chairman of the Commission on the Humanities, to speak about support of the humanities and the arts and, presumably, about the views of the Commission. This I cannot do, for the Commission has not completed its work and would, in any case, present its report to the bodies that have sponsored it.
The FI Program in 1963
Authors: Walsh Donald D.
Published: February 2007

Describing a year's activity in a half-hour report is an annual challenge that grows more difficult as the pace and scope of the activity increase. The Foreign Language Program is in some ways the victim of its success. One of our early goals was to become an information center and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Requests for materials, information, opinions, and assistance threaten to overwhelm us daily. Three members of the staff do nothing but answer these requests. The ones that are unanswerable are put in my in-basket. Telephone calls and visitors multiply. All this activity we are tempted to think of as interruptions to our real job, long-range planning, deep thinking, foreign languages in the next century. But in a very real sense the magnitude of the interruptions to our job is the sign that we are succeeding, that more and more foreign-language teachers and students and more and more people in general want to know the answers to questions and the solutions to problems of which they were hardly conscious a few years ago. There has been a revolution in language learning in this country and among recent visitors to our office have been language teachers and administrators from all over the world (France, England, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Africa, Australia), who have come to find out what we are doing.
The Modern Language Association College Language Manual Project
Authors: Bowen J. Donald
Published: February 2007

This Project, a textbook for college students of beginning Spanish, long talked about, has come a great distance since its inception in May 1956. I report in this paper its present status, and describe the pedagogical philosophy basic to its design. The Working Committee of six has profited all along the way from the valuable help and guidance of the parent Advisory Committee and from numerous special consultants.
The Caricature of Foreign Aid
Authors: Cleveland H Harlan
Published: February 2007

The New Year is almost here. Once again—sooner, it seems, each time around—we face the time to make resolutions and the time to take stock and to foretell our own destiny. Having just helped nurse another United Nations General Assembly to bed, I already have my fill of resolutions. But I would like this evening to make and defend a prediction.