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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
A common assumption about the humanities used to be that they were always the same: both their subject matter and the ways of studying them were invariable. “The proper study of mankind is man” was an evident enough truth, and when one got down to the study, one found oneself at best working over again “what oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd.”
* An address delivered at the Plenary Meeting of the MLA Standing Committees in New York. 30 March 1967.
page 2 note 1 See Chomsky's recent Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
page 3 note 2 Walter J. Ong, In the Human Grain (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 17–41.
page 3 note 3 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963).
page 3 note 4 Walter J. Ong, The Barbarian Within (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 211–216.
page 4 note 5 CE, xxviii (1967), 339–351.
page 4 note 6 Existence et signification (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1958), p. 143.
page 5 note 7 Walker Gibson, Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966).
