bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Diderot Et Roger De Piles
Authors: May Par Gîta
Published: February 2007

While it has recently been established (thanks to the records of the Bibliothèque du Roi, now the Bibliotheque Nationale) that Diderot read a major treatise by Roger de Piles, the influential seventeenth-century art critic and theorist, as early as 1748, the nature and extent of Diderot's indebtedness to his predecessor have not yet been fully explored. Internal evidence, as well as direct and indirect references, reveal the impact of Roger de Piles on Diderot's ideas concerning composition, design, and color. Roger de Piles was the first French art critic to take an uninhibited delight in light and color and to attempt to render, through a bold use of concrete and technical terms, the freshness and vividness of his impressions. In this respect, too, he is an important precursor of Diderot, for the latter frequently borrowed especially apt expressions and images from the writings of Roger de Piles. Articles in the Encyclopedia devoted to the fine arts also confirm the high esteem in which de Piles was held by eighteenth-century artists and connoisseurs. Diderot and his contemporaries recognized above all de Piles's expertise in practical matters concerning the artist's craft. Even though Diderot departs from de Piles in his preoccupation with the moral message of a work of art, he shares with his predecessor a spontaneous appreciation of the exuberant forms, the animated scenes, the down-to-earth realism that characterize the Dutch and Flemish schools of painting. The sketch, as an art form more revelatory of a painter's inner spirit and genius than the more finished product, was the subject of several key remarks by de Piles which Diderot, in turn, amplified and developed in his critical essays. And it was in the writings of de Piles that Diderot found some of his most telling arguments against artificiality and mannerism in art and against an unquestioning adherence to doctrine and dogma. (In French)
“Paradice's Only Map”: The Topos of the Locus Amoenus and the Structure of Marvell's Upon Appleton House
Authors: Evett David
Published: February 2007

Upon Appleton House is a poem in which superficial sprightliness and subterranean portentousness, a variety of rhetorical stances, and a loose, episodic structure apparently conspire to create disunity. But a unifying principle is supplied by the formulaic topos of the locus amoenus. As this convention developed from Homer through the Elizabethans, it took on potentially ambiguous connotations of refection, generation, and eroticism. Marvell systematically exploits these connotations, making of the Fairfax estate a double microcosm which reflects a disorderly world and his own uncertain relation to it. The confusion is further mirrored in Marvell's deployment of the topos. As rhetorical device, its impact should normally be synchronous, so that its elements strike the reader as a unit, not as a sequence of terms successively qualifying one another. But Marvell breaks the unit down, anatomizes it, taking its topographical elements (garden, grass, shade, water) serially and discontinuously. Gradually, however, the locus reasserts its mythic totality. As it does, Marvell also traces a historical movement back through the development of civilization to the first locus amoenus, Eden, and a rhetorical movement from critical objectivity to devotional subjectivity. These movements come to a focus in the figure of Maria Fairfax, whom Marvell, as poet-priest, adores as summarizing the virtues of Appleton House, now become the emblem of a reordered cosmos, a refuge from the corrupting processes of time and change. The vision cannot last, as Marvell implies by sustaining the mocking extravagance of his language right through to the last, ambiguous lines. The unity is only poetic, conceptual, rhetorical. But a unity it is, sung out of confusions, with the locus amoenus as its major chord.
The Mill on the Floss and Antigone
Authors: Moldstad David
Published: February 2007

The Mill on the Floss, like Sophocles' Antigone, illustrates George Eliot's belief in the recurring conflict between the individual moral vision and social convention. The central problem in Antigone, she wrote, lay between “reverence for the gods” and “the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each.” Whenever man's moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed. Her words seem applicable to the dominant conflict in The Mill. An honorable but unimaginative person, Tom Tulliver clashes with his sister Maggie when she refuses to abide by conventions which seem inhumane or hurtful to those she loves. As Antigone espouses a higher law by burying Polynices in defiance of Creon, so Maggie espouses a higher law in opposing the vengeance against Wakem. Although Tom and Maggie are both partly right in their quarrel over Maggie's secretly seeing Philip Wakem, Tom, like Creon, is foolishly overconfident in crediting his conventional honor, which is simply no measure of the case. The conflict between Maggie and her brother is further aggravated by the tendency of the practical-minded Tom to domineer over his imaginative and (to him) inconsistent sister.
Aretino and the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel
Authors: McPherson David C.
Published: February 2007

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe disagreed violently about Pietro Aretino, the Italian polemicist and pornographer (1492-1556), and their differences about him help to explain why Nashe was able to make a laughingstock of Harvey in their literary quarrel. During Harvey's youth (in the 1570's), he held the then prevailing view that Aretino was a gifted polemicist and politician (only in the 1590's did English writers begin to think of the Italian almost exclusively as a pornographer). In 1592 Harvey attacked Aretino just as violently as he had earlier praised him. His change of opinion must have occurred because he had had his fingers burned writing satire in 1580 and because Nashe, now his opponent, was praising Aretino extravagantly as the Scourge of Princes. Harvey, because of his distaste for Aretino and indeed for all satirists, was now writing as a man of reason above scurrility. Nashe, with Aretino as one of his models, cultivated an opposite pose, that of the lashing modern prose satirist, long on hyperbole and short on sober seriousness. Harvey, with his ponderous irony, was no match for Nashe, the “true English Aretine.“ (DCMcP)
Imitation and Metamorphosis: The Golden-Age Eclogue in Spenser, Milton, and Marvell
Authors: Cullen Patrick
Published: February 2007

If the neo-classical aesthetic of imitation could lead to poetic photocopies, it could also stimulate a remarkable variety of invention, as Spenser's “April“, Milton s Nativity Ode, and Marvell's “The Picture of Little T. C.“ demonstrate. All are imitations of the golden-age or messianic eclogue, and cannot really be understood outside of their genre; but at the same time they completely metamorphose the conventional generic pattern. Spenser's “April” employs the golden-age conventions not only to celebrate Elizabeth I but also, and more importantly, to portray symbolically, in the identification of Elisa with Song, the Orphic ordering power of art, the interrelation of the order of art and the order of the body politic, and the new golden age of poetry heralded by his work. Milton's Nativity Ode uses the same formulas (but remolded by Christian truth and the procedures of divine meditation) to praise the true messiah, Christ, and to celebrate the new golden age, the new Eden, which His birth begins. And Marvell's “Little T. C.” uses the golden-age formulas to assert wittily the Renaissance longing for a new golden age of free love, when Honor ceases to restrict the natural flowering of the human bud.
“La marquise sortit à cinq heures”
Authors: Chesneau Albert
Published: February 2007

Simple structural analysis applied to passages cited from the works of André Breton elucidates the reasons for his condemnation of the statement La marquise sortit à cinq heures (see his Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924) as non-poetic. This study demonstrates the opposition existing between the above-mentioned realist sentence, essentially non-subjective (third-person subject), non-actual (past tense predicate), contextual (context can be supposed), and prosaic (lack of imagery), and on the other hand a theoretic surrealist sentence, essentially subjective (first-person subject), actual (present tense predicate), and non-contextual, producing a shock-image. In reality, Breton's surrealistic phrase does not always contain all of these qualities at once. However, in contrast to the condemned phrase which contains none at all, it does always manifest at least one of these characteristics, the most important having reference to the evocative power of the shock-image. A final comparison with a sentence quoted from Robbe-Grillet, the theoretician of the “nouveau roman”, proves that even though it may appear objective, the surrealist phrase is really not so. In conclusion, the four characteristics of the ideal surrealist sentence—subjectivity, actuality, non-contextuality, and ability to produce shock-images—create a poetics of discontinuity opposed to the classical art of narration as found traditionally in the novel. (In French)
Doña Bárbara: Un Cuento De Hadas
Authors: Michalski André S.
Published: February 2007

Despite the often praised realism of Rómulo Gallegos' major novel, some of its episodes are not very plausible, due not so much to an overriding allegorical symbolism as to still another narrative plane that has generally been neglected by criticism, that of folk mythology. Doña Bárbara is a legendary character introduced in a ritual style reminiscent of fairy tales. The entire novel is a retelling of a fairy tale, with Doña Bárbara as the evil sorceress, Marisela as the Sleeping Beauty, and Luzardo as Prince Charming. Doña Bárbara is called the “devourer of men,” an epithet that equates her with the flat grassland over which she reigns and identifies her as a type of nymph or siren who entices and destroys men. Inspired by both the European and American Indian legends, Gallegos endowed her with traits of European witches, as well as those typical of Indian shamans, especially nagualism. Thus, events hard to believe on the psychological plane of the narrative, such as the swift change in the character of the protagonist, appear logical on the mythical level, which is as important to the understanding of the novel as those of psychological realism and allegory. (In Spanish)
The Painter as Critic: Hazlitt's Theory of Abstraction
Authors: Park Roy
Published: February 2007

Hazlitt's early interest in painting and philosophy profoundly influenced his subsequent work as a literary critic. His view of abstraction as a process of individuation rather than generalization, developed between 1805 and 1812, was an improvement on the nominalist and conceptualist theories of the eighteenth century and anticipated the findings of modern philosophy. In its development, Hazlitt was clearly influenced by his training as a painter and his general conclusions find support in the writings of contemporary and nearcontemporary painters and art critics. His theory has important esthetic implications and provides a philosophical and psychological rationale for the new critical movement toward particularity in the evolution of which painting was a major influence. Since it was within this tradition that Hazlitt worked, it also determined the nature of his response to literature and the manner of its expression in his criticism. The influence of painting on his critical terminology suggests caution in accepting the view that music replaced painting as the dominant analogy in the literary criticism of the early nineteenth century.
Tortilla Flat: the Shape of John Steinbeck's Career
Authors: Levant Howard
Published: February 2007

Tortilla Flat (1935) was John Steinbeck's first artistic and commercial success. The novel's promise was dimmed by Steinbeck's evident inability to understand his real success. His continued insistence that a parallel to Malory's Morte d'Arthur does control the novel, and his reliance in later work on predetermined, external, and arbitrary ordering devices, make it sadly apparent that he did not learn much about structural harmony from Tortilla Flat. For, in fact, the novel is loose and episodic, and a sophisticated comic irony is used to locate socioeconomic and Catholic values in a colorful paisano community. In short, there is very little of Morte d'Arthur in Tortilla Flat. Moreover, the somewhat ugly commercial success of Tortilla Flat turned Steinbeck against the novel as it really is. Apparently he felt that he had structured the novel rigidly; that this was a good way to achieve structure; that only the stupidity of a mass audience obscured the issue. All of this appears to have had grave consequences in a good deal of Steinbeck's later work. The entire matter illuminates the failure of a greatly talented writer to develop into a major novelist—a failure that has puzzled many Steinbeck readers.
Vauvenargues and the Whole Truth
Authors: Undank Jack
Published: February 2007

Vauvenargues describes both the social and philosophical world as a battleground of conflicting interests, thereby extending the premises of Classical ego psychology into the Enlightenment. His heroes, political and philosophical, may be seen as seeking a new kind of peace in their triumph over men and systems metaphorically portrayed as rigid, blind, and imprisoned within their own egocentricity. His ideal philosopher reconciles all conflicting views in an overarching system of truth. Ultimately this system rests not so much on principles of logic as on the personal qualities of the thinker, his “pénétration,” “profondeur,” and “étendue d'esprit,” his ability to transcend the self. In the partially Spinozistic, partially rococo, and eminently conciliatory vision vouchsafed the true philosopher, variety submits to organic order, concepts and people maintain their autonomy, yet grow interrelated. Apparent contradictions vanish in the fullness of truth. Vauvenargues's early works suffer from his inability to articulate this vision within conventional, discursive forms. In the posthumous Caractères, he invents a new technique, the “définition,” which strikingly parallels the idiom of contemporary fictional realism. By capturing visible phenomena and exposing their paradoxically contrasting inner mechanisms, Vauvenargues reveals both the method and the nature of the truth he repeatedly struggled to express.
Form and matter in the publication of research
Authors: McKerrow R. B.
Published: February 2007

May I as one who has had occasion both as a publisher and an editor to read a very considerable number of books and articles embodying the results of research into English literary history plead for more attention to form in the presentation of such work?
English Language Teaching in Japanese Schools
Authors: Bryant William Cullen
Published: February 2007

As their schools reopen this year after the summer vacation, about 7,000,000 Japanese children from 12 to 18 years old are spending five hours a week studying English. They are taught by some 85,000 teachers, few of whom have ever heard the language spoken by a native—except, perhaps, over the radio. In the universities hundreds of thousands more are busy with their seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth year of English. In large cities tens of thousands of clerks and secretaries, waitresses and salesgirls, bankers and government employees of all ages go several evenings a week to commercial schools to learn English conversation and business correspondence. Many of these are among several hundred thousand listeners to radio English courses. At newsstands and bookstores, on streetcars and buses, electric trains and subways, thousands more are poring over magazines with English articles, movie scenarios and jokes; over grammar books whose chapter headings, such as “Elliptical Negation” and “Concessive Clause,” suggest their contents; over cram books, word lists and sample examinations. For high schools follow the lead of universities in making English grammar and translation a part of the rigorous ordeal called shiken jigoku, or “examination hell,” a stiffly competitive process of admission. And ever more business firms are requiring job applicants to take English tests.
Serial Bibliographies in the Modern Languages and Literatures
Authors: Fisher John H.
Published: February 2007

IN ITS 1948 report the Committee on Research Activities (Albert H. Marckwardt, Chairman) observed that, “without question, the present bibliographical aids to scholarship in our field are in need of improvement and coordination. It would be equally advantageous to have more systematically presented data on those facilities for research in various fields and topics, particularly with respect to primary materials, which are now available in different sections of the country.” The present study is offered as a preliminary step toward meeting the need for coordination of bibliographies, and the Secretary of the Association has been authorized by the Executive Council to look into the feasibility of a survey of the facilities for research in American libraries.
Foreign Language Entrance and Degree Requirements for the M.A., M.S., and Ph.D. Degrees
Authors: Viens Claude P. , Wadsworth Philip
Published: February 2007

This is the first attempt on the part of the FL Program to investigate the foreign language requirements in graduate schools throughout the United States. To keep the problem within manageable limits it was restricted to three advanced degrees, the M.A., the M.S., and the Ph.D., and to requirements in fields of study other than foreign languages. No effort was made to gain information from graduate schools which are clearly and strictly professional, such as schools of law, music, theology, medicine, and education. We used as the basis of our mailing list the USOE Circular No. 418, Earned Degrees Conferred by Higher Educational Institutions, 1953–1954, and sent a lengthy questionnaire to two kinds of institutions: (1) all graduate schools which granted any Ph.D. degrees, and (2) all schools listed in the Circular which granted 30 or more master's degrees. This arbitrary figure was chosen because it seemed necessary to eliminate from consideration several hundred small colleges which each year award a handful of master's degrees; most of these, presumably, have no language requirement.
Why a Foreign Language Requirement?
Authors: Parker William R.
Published: February 2007

This essay concerns a situation in more than 800 liberal arts colleges, though some of its points apply elsewhere in American education. The question posed—why a foreign language requirement?—has fresh relevance because the 1930–1950 trend of dropping this requirement for the Bachelor of Arts degree has very recently been reversed.
The Origins and Development of Bahasa Indonesia
Authors: Nugroho R.
Published: February 2007

First of all I should like to express my deepest appreciation for your invitation to participate in the discussions at this Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association. It is indeed a great honor you have extended to my country in inviting me to speak to such a distinguished gathering. It is, however, an honor which I have accepted with some hesitancy. As a layman in the field of linguistics I know that I am not the right person to address an association of scholars. Moreover, my desire to make a somewhat valuable contribution to these discussions has been greatly handicapped by the lack of source material and reference books which I wished to consult but which are not presently available in Washington.
The Role of Languages in the Development of National Consciousness: The Canadian Experience
Authors: Couillard Louis E.
Published: February 2007

We Felt honoured and pleased at the Canadian Embassy to have been asked to participate in this annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. We welcomed this opportunity to register our interest in your important and useful field of work, and thereby to add still another point of contact in the friendly relations between our two countries.
The U. S. Office of Education Looks at Project English
Authors: Flynt Ralph C. M.
Published: February 2007

It is with considerable pleasure that I meet with you today to discuss the mutual efforts of the community of English scholars, teachers of English and the Office of Education in the enterprise which we have come to call Project English. Just one year ago we were in the throes of attempting to organize this joint effort. As many of you know, this was a period of considerable casting about to determine the directions and magnitude of our effort in this area.
The Case for Latin
Authors: Parker William Riley
Published: February 2007

In the “good old days” in the United States, as in Europe, which supplied the model, anyone who went to a secondary school and college studied Latin as a matter of course. Even in the first years of this century, when a half million students were enrolled in all our public high schools, fully half of them were still studying Latin. Those days are gone, and will never return. To regret their passing is to regret both mass education and mankind's phenomenal increase in scientific knowledge. Moreover, our world has shrunk while America's role in it has grown, and lately our society has recognized the increasing relevance of studying modern foreign languages. What, then, is the future place of Latin in American education? As one who long ago was taught both Latin and Greek, I want to try to answer this question as candidly and as objectively as I can.
Language Institutes and Their Future
Authors: Boyer Mildred V.
Published: February 2007

DURING the summer of 1963, NDEA Title VI supported seventy-nine institutes for teachers of foreign languages. Of this number, it was my pleasure to visit six, in my temporary capacity as one of twenty evaluators cooperating with the MLA, which for the first time was under contract to the Office of Education for evaluating these programs. By now all official reports have been submitted. As an erstwhile evaluator, this writer has no further connection with the Office of Education, and my present relationship to the MLA is merely that of an individual member. Although few of them are original with me, the views expressed here on the over-all future of the institute programs are, therefore, my own. They do not represent those of the Office of Education, nor do they necessarily reflect the MLA's.
The Power of Poetic Vision
Authors: Moe Henry Allen
Published: February 2007

Three weeks ago this evening, Edward R. Murrow, on his televised “Small World” program, asked two distinguished poets if they could cite any instance of a poem directly affecting history. The distingished poets had no answer, I am sorry to say. They had a chance, literally, to tell the world; but, in the language of baseball, they muffed it. Yet there is a wonderfully clear instance of a poem directly affecting history—making history, indeed—and this is the subject of my paper.
Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship
Authors: Frye Northrop
Published: February 2007

I start with the obvious starting point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being in fact the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a logical sequence, a contemporary view of what mathematics is. Other subjects, including English, remain uncoordinated, based on what are at best ad hoc principles. At one end there are the techniques for teaching children to read, which are said to be very efficient when they work, and at the other there are the survey courses of the first year in university, designed to give a student some notion of the chronological order in which the great classics got written. I think it should be possible to work out a curriculum for the intervening stages which will treat literature as a progressive and systematic study, and which will furnish the student with something of tangible and permanent value at whatever stage he drops out of it. It seems to me that, as with mathematics, the first procedure is to make sure that the literary sequence makes sense in itself, regardless of its relations with other subjects, even in elementary school. The relation with other subjects is certainly important and essential, but must come later in consideration.
Teacher Training, the Heart of the Matter
Authors: Hamilton D. Lee
Published: February 2007

It is self-evident that teacher training is the heart of the matter in any consideration of trends in any area of the curriculum. As the anthropologist regards the practices of childrearing as both a segment of the culture and the surest index to its value system of today and tomorrow, so we may look at our procedures of training teachers as a part of our own professional folkways and at the same time a revelation of which things are to be prized now and in the future. But to think of trends is necessarily to think of the historic conflict of change with continuity, and to think of change raises the question, With reference to what? I therefore want to comment on the themes of change versus continuity (better known as inertia), of relevance, and of the preparation of teachers of modern foreign languages.
The Preparation of College Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages
Authors: MacAllister Archibald T.
Published: February 2007

The conferences on which this report is based were financed by a contract between the MLA and the U. S. Office of Education. The Advisory Committee of the FL Program, at its November 1963 meeting, recommended that the report be published in PMLA as a thoughtful consideration of an important problem.
New Dimensions in Cultural Communication
Authors: Battle Lucius D.
Published: February 2007

It would be difficult to place alongside each other two words that have more vague and varied meanings—to most people—than the last two words in the title I have given to these remarks. The words are “cultural” and “communication.” This is not the place—or at any rate, I am not the “professor”—for a seminar in semantics. But I cannot let this opportunity pass without pointing out the problems of nomenclature—of language—with which we must contend. The phrase “educational and cultural affairs” is clearly a case in point. The actual activities covered by this phrase are concrete and specific. But this phrase itself and others like it—cross-cultural relations, cultural interchange, and the like— are imprecise, and therefore largely meaningless to many people.
English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language
Authors: Marckwardt Albert H.
Published: February 2007

In many ways this particular section meeting has become one of the most significant in the annual program of the Modern Language Association. It serves to provide us with a measuring device which we can use to determine the extent to which we are fulfilling our international educational obligations. Considering the speakers who have been invited to address you today, if this afternoon's program has a theme, it might well be characterized as International Responsibility.
The Special Ndea Institute at Bowdoin College for French Teachers of Canadian Descent
Authors: Brault Gerard J.
Published: February 2007

A recent survey estimates that there are. today in the six New England states alone well over a million persons of French-Canadian descent, the overwhelming majority of whom understand and speak French natively. At a time when increased and improved knowledge of modern foreign languages is patently needed, this vast pool of native speakers and potential teachers of French constitutes an increasingly valuable linguistic resource. The Franco-American Institute held at Bowdoin College in the summer of 1961 under the terms of the National Defense Education Act sought to exploit more fully in the national interest this New England French resource. The Institute marked the first time in history that an ethnic group was accorded federal support in its struggle to preserve its linguistic heritage—a sharp divergence from official efforts at intensive Americanization following World War I. It was also the first concerted effort made in this country by language teachers of any nationality to come to grips in a realistic way with the problem of teaching the standard form of a language to a group of persons whose second language is non-standard. The central problem faced by the Institute was the unquestioned right of French-Canadian speech to be recognized as a respectable means of communication. All due respect was accorded to this linguistically-sound fact, but the Institute nevertheless took the position that the national interest demands the teaching of standard French in all U. S. schools today.
Foreign Language Entrance and Degree Requirements for the B.A. Degree in Accredited Colleges and Universities
Authors: Plottel Jeanine Parisier
Published: February 2007

This sixth revision of statistics on foreign language entrance and degree requirements for the B.A. degree shows that out of 899 colleges which grant such a degree, a foreign language is required for entrance by 284 or 31.6%, and for the B.A. by 772 or 85.9%. Since 12 schools not having a foreign language degree requirement have a foreign language entrance requirement, this brings the total number with some sort of language requirement to 784 or 87.2%.
Proficiency Tests in Modern Foreign Languages
Authors: Starr Wilmarth H.
Published: February 2007

Not too many years ago if I had been told that I would be addressing this scholarly assembly on the subject of proficiency testing, I would have denied the thought as being synonymous with impeachment proceedings. I would have asserted with calculated dignity that such a subject was too pedestrian for my interests, I would have stated with just the right touch of scorn that such work was the business of social scientists, psychologists, or educationists, in short, to steal a leaf from Bill Parker's book, I would have been willing to “let George do it” or indeed would likely not have cared if it were not done at all. On the offchance that there are some among you who may still feel that same way, I ask you to let me state the case for a project which I have come to regard not only as having a claim to academic status, but one which I believe is worthy of the interest of all who would hold that testing is a proper function of teaching, and that determination of standards of performance within a subject matter field is a primary business of those who have the skills and teach the subjects which are to be evaluated.
The MLA FL Program in 1960
Authors: Walsh Donald D.
Published: February 2007

You have heard three excellent talks on this, the final session of a three-day meeting that will doubtless seem, to some of you, to have begun three weeks ago. Your arches are fallen, your ears are tired, your lungs are filled with convention hotel air, carefully preserved from one annual meeting to the next, wafted from New York to Chicago to Philadelphia. You have reached the point where, in the memorable words of William Riley Parker, the seats are making more impression on the audience than the speeches. You are ready for a foreign-language funny story, and I happen to have one, which I read in the October number of the Newsletter of the Montana FLTA. Mrs. Smith is complaining to Mr. Jones, the principal of her son's school: “Mr. Jones, my Johnny is an intelligent, conscientious boy. He studies hard and he gets good grades in all his subjects, except one, French. He tries and tries, Mr. Jones, but my Johnny simply can not learn that language!” Mr. Jones: “How fortunate, Mrs. Smith, that your Johnny was not born in France!”
Foreign Language Offerings and Enrollments in Public Secondary Schools, Fall 1958
Authors: Childers J. Wesley
Published: February 2007

This report is the result of the first of a series of investigations on the current status of foreign languages in elementary and secondary schools and in institutions of higher learning in the United States. It is a part of the Statistical Research Project of the Modern Language Association of America under a contract from the United States Office of Education, authorized under the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Subsequent reports will present data for 1959 on foreign languages in the elementary schools, in public and independent secondary schools, and in colleges and universities.
Faith of an Educator
Authors: Nordmeyer Henry W.
Published: February 2007

It is difficult for me to express in so many words what I feel as I am standing here before this august body of scholars and teachers to address you as your president—in this particular year 1961. It is not only the honor as such that is crushing, an honor which in all humility I accepted for the greater glory of my beloved University rather than as a nod to my own modest talents. No, what is really crushing is to be called upon to address you at this particular juncture of world events, described in the words of President Kennedy as “the most dangerous time in the history of the human race,” in the eery light of the fact that “the events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next 10,000 years.” Even one year ago, nobody would have prognosticated in such terms. The German problem, the causa movens of it all, has been with us, and with this society of American humanists, for quite some time. In 1917, it was the noble lot of Kuno Francke to strike the balance of cultural values, and, in 1941, John Walz had a similar task, of incomparably greater magnitude. In 1957, when by H. Carrington Lancaster's presidential forecast of 1939, a third World War might have been upon us, Taylor Starck held this high office. Well, the year 1957 was remarkable enough, setting a milestone also in our affairs in the advent of Sputnik I. But at least we were spared the apocalyptic visions of a thermo-nuclear Armageddon with which we have become but too familiar in this, the year of the Lord 1961.
Foreign Languages and Federal aid to Education
Authors: Brademas John
Published: February 2007

In the last several years, in large part because of the leadership of the Modern Language Association, the American people have come to understand more clearly than ever before the great importance to our country, in terms of national security if for no other reason, and there are other reasons, of developing and maintaining a reservoir of persons skilled in the knowledge of modern foreign languages. Even a man of little political sensitivity could not fail, a few days ago, to have appreciated the immense impact of the few words spoken in Spanish by Mrs. Kennedy during the President's visit to Latin America.
Yeats: 1865–1965
Authors: Witt Marion
Published: February 2007

This yeats Centennial Year will witness the publication of widespread comment and encomium, “as though,” in Yeats's own words, “it were firmly established that the dead delight in anniversaries.” Now, as his first century joins its circle, Yeats is securely one of the “passionate dead,” who are, in his version of Ben Jonson's line, “So rammed with life they can but grow in life with being.” “Under Ben Bulben,” the elegiac poem which ends with Yeats's epitaph, written only a few months before he died in 1939, says of grave diggers

They but thrust their buried menBack in the human mind again.

When the grave diggers had thrust Yeats back in the human mind, T. S. Eliot in a memorial lecture in 1940 called him “the greatest poet of our time—certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.” Few have contradicted this evaluation. The mass of biography, criticism, exegesis in the years since Yeats died has grown so enormously that his poetry has at times seemed to face the fate he thought the human imagination had suffered in the nineteenth century, that of being “laid in a great tomb of criticism.” In his Centennial Year scholars might most profitably concern themselves not with the mounting tomb of criticism but rather with the texts of Yeats's works and the tools for study which the quarter century since his death has produced.
The Teaching of Foreign Languages in the Netherlands
Authors: Breitenstein P. H.
Published: February 2007

For centuries the Netherlands has been a cultural crossroads, where the Germanic and Romance cultures have met and mingled. For centuries, too, the Dutch have been a commercial people, trading and negotiating in lands all across the globe. No wonder, then, that a knowledge of foreign languages is a major goal in Dutch education. Changing times and the new significance of world trade in the economy of the Netherlands, combined with the realization that Dutch is not a world language, have emphasized the importance of foreign languages.
VIII.—The Etymology of the Romance Words for “To Go”
Authors: Rice Carl C.
Published: February 2007

In dem Abschnitt über die romanischen Sprachen welchen die “Année linguistique” Bd. I (1901–1902) enthält, widmet A. Dauzat auch den Etymologieen ein paar kurze und abgerissene Bemerkungen und preist dabei den “scepticisme salutaire” den Gaston Paris in Bezug auf das Problem aller-andare an den Tag gelegt hat (S. 33). Dieser Skeptizismus ist keineswegs heilsam gewesen. Gegen zwei Erkenntnisse, welche, längst vorbereitet, jetzt fast Gemeingut geworden sind, hat sich G. P. bis zuletzt gesträubt und dadurch unter den Seinigen dem Aufkommen neuer phantastisoher Erklärungen Vorschub geleistet. Diese Erkenntnisse sind : dass nur ambulare (mit oder ohne * ambitare als Variante) das Grundwort für jene romanischen Verben sein kann, und ferner dass diese—sogar auch dann wenn für sie ein anderer Ursprung vorauszusetzen wäre — auf ganz regelmässige Weise sich nicht haben entwickeln können. Bei seiner Kritik jener Aufstellung hat G. P. Bedeutung und Gebrauchsumfang der Wörter nicht hinlänglich gewürdigt —dachte er doch selbst, auch für aller, an ein * addare = addere gradum, und hat diesen Gedanken wohl nie ganz aufgegeben (s. z. B. Rom. XXVII, 627). Hinsichtlich des zweiten Punktes ist zu bemerken dass wir über das Wie ? noch sehr verschiedene Ansichten hegen, aber keiner von uns die seinige für unwiderleglich halten dürfte.
IX.—Lessing and Shakespeare
Authors: Meisnest F. W.
Published: February 2007

The object of this paper is to show that Lessing's knowledge of Shakespeare and his influence in introducing and popularizing the great English poet in Germany have been generally overestimated. To forestall any preconceived opinions it may be stated that the position advocated has not been suggested by such works as Franz Mehring's Die Lessing-Legende or Paul Albrecht's Lessings Plagiate, in which the sole purpose of the authors seems to be to pluck the laurel wreath from the head of one whom Herder regarded as the greatest critic of Germany and Macaulay as the first of Europe.
X.—The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and Prose
Authors: Scott Fred Newton
Published: February 2007

It is my purpose in this paper to consider the relations of the two great types of literary expression, poetry and prose, and, if possible, to determine the most vital, fundamental, and essential trait which discriminates one type from the other, more particularly in the primitive stages of their development.

In this investigation certain postulates regarding the nature of literature and of art will be of service in clearing the ground. I shall make four such assumptions, as follows:

First, the difference between these two literary types is a fundamental, not a superficial difference. In the words of Professor Earle, “the distinction between poetry and prose is one which is seated in the nature of things…. it is a profound and essential organic distinction.”
The Knight of the Lion
Authors: Brown Arthur C. L.
Published: February 2007

The following pages are a discussion of the origin of the second half of Chrétien's Ivain; the part of the story, namely, in which the hero wins the title Chevalier au Lion. They are a continuation of a study published in 1903, which dealt chiefly with the first half of the romance. That study, to which frequent reference must necessarily be made, endeavored to show that the Ivain is a partly rationalized fairy mistress story. The kernel of the evidence there presented was a detailed comparison of the Ivain with stories in the Lebor na h-Uidre (LU) and the Book of Leinster (LL), two Irish manuscripts that were actually written before the time of Chrétien de Troyes. The first part of the Ivain was shown to be founded, almost incident for incident, on the well-known Celtic tale, of which the Serglige Conculaind is an ancient example, about a mortal who is invited to fairyland, journeys thither successfully and weds a fairy queen, but disobeys her injunctions, loses her, becomes insane and has to be cured by a magic remedy.
Thomas Kyd and the Ur-Hamlet
Authors: Jack Albert E.
Published: February 2007

For some reason, the dramatist Kyd almost entirely dropped out of public notice during the 17th and 18th centuries. This is the more remarkable when we remember the popular favor which greeted certainly the Spanish Tragedy and perhaps other of his productions during the last decade of the 16th and the first quarter of the 17th century. It was one of the achievements of 19th century scholarship to restore Kyd to his place among the great Elizabethan dramatists. In this restoration, a single paragraph from Nash's prefatory Epistle to Greene's Menaphon has played a conspicuous role. It has now come to be all but universally accepted by scholars that this paragraph refers to Kyd, and in it are found not a few otherwise unknown facts of his literary history. This paragraph also has the distinction of containing the first reference in the English language to Hamlet; and a study of the context has led students to the opinion that, according to Nash, Kyd was the author of the Ur-Hamlet.
XIV.—Forerunners, Congeners, and Derivatives of the Eustace Legend
Authors: Gerould Gordon Hall
Published: February 2007

In any study which involves the consideration of a network of stories, it is chiefly necessary to regard the skeleton upon which the tales in question are built up. Although it is impossible to decide upon the relationship of the various members of a cycle without some consideration of individual incidents and even turns of thought or phrase, it is constantly necessary to check and control the information thus gained by the larger matters of motive and purpose. Individual incidents and all the flesh and blood of a narrative are so easily changed that the skeleton appears stable in comparison. With due regard to the kaleidoscopic changes which are familiar to every student of this field of comparative literature, it furnishes the clue by which the labyrinth of plots must be threaded, if at all.
XI.—The Symmetrical Structure of Dante's Vita Nuova.
Authors: McKenzie Kenneth
Published: February 2007

At the beginning of the Vita Nuova Dante tells us that he proposes to copy into the little book words which he finds written in the book of his memory under the rubric Incipit Vita Nova; thus he brought together lyrics that he had already written, and connected them by a narrative and analysis in prose. The Vita Nuova belongs, then, to the class of writings made up of alternating prose and verse. As in the case of the Convivio, this method of composition was perfectly natural under the circumstances; Dante doubtless intended to do for his own early poems what had been done for certain Troubadours by the compilers of some of the Provençal anthologies, in which a prose biography is interspersed with specimens of the poet's verse. This has been pointed out by Pio Rajna, who further suggests that the analytical divisioni may have been modeled on certain works of St. Thomas. The prose explanations in the Provençal anthologies are called razos, and Dante uses the word ragione with the same meaning. In at least one respect, however, the Vita Nuova differs in form from the other works of this type; for the poems do not simply follow one another chronologically or according to the exigencies of the narrative, but are arranged on a symmetrical plan. The credit for having made this plain belongs to Professor C. E. Norton, who pointed it out in 1859.
XV.—The Relation of the English “Character” to Its Greek Prototype.
Authors: Baldwin Edward Chauncey
Published: February 2007

The writing of “Characters” was at the same time one of the most prolific and the most significant phases of literary activity in the seventeenth century. Though many of these books of “Characters” have been forgotten, the titles of over one hundred and fifty are still remembered—enough certainly to show how popular the fashion of such writing was. Furthermore, its significance becomes apparent when we consider what prose fiction owes to it; for, through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century, the old formal “Character” passed into the novel and become a part of it.
XVII.—Recent Translations of Old English Poetry.
Authors: Garnett James M.
Published: February 2007

The desire was expressed some years ago that we might soon have in English a collection of translations of Old English poetry that might fill the place so well filled in German by Grein's Dichtungen der Angelsachsen. This desire is now in a fair way of accomplishment, and much has been done during the past ten years, the period embraced in this paper. As was naturally to be expected from the work previously done in criticism of both text and subject-matter, Beowulf has attracted more than ever the thoughts and efforts of translators, for we had in 1892 the rhythmical translation of Professor J. Lesslie Hall and the prose version of Professor Earle; in 1895 (reprinted in cheaper form in 1898) the poetical translation of William Morris and A. J. Wyatt, the editor of Beowulf; in 1901 the prose version of Dr. J. R. Clark Hall, author of A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; and only the other day, in 1902, the handy prose version of Professor C. B. Tinker.
XVI.—La Bruyère's Influence upon Addison
Authors: Baldwin Edward Chauncey
Published: February 2007

Character-writing was of Greek origin. It had its beginnings in the “ of Theophrastus, who lived between 370 and 285 B. C. Popularized by Casaubon's Latin translation of 1592, these Ethical Characters furnished a model of which the English writers were prompt to avail themselves. The first of the English writers to be influenced by Theophrastus was Joseph Hall. His Characterisms of Virtues and Vices appeared in 1608, and was translated into French in 1619. In France it contributed, along with Casaubon's translation, to make Character-writing only less popular than in England. Chief among those who felt its influence was Jean de la Bruyère, whose book, Les Caractères De Theophraste, Traduits Du Grec; avec Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce Siècle, was published in 1688. This, in turn, influenced the further development of English Character-writing, particularly in the form that it came to assume in the work of the periodical essayists of the eighteenth century, through which it finally merged into the novel. To point out the nature and extent of this influence of La Bruyère upon the contributors to the Spectator is the purpose of this article.