Like the king of England the president of the Modern Language Association reigns but he does not govern. His constitutional duties are negligible: he presides over a few meetings and he appoints a Committee on Resolutions. To those who fear that if the presidential term were extended beyond one year, they might have to listen to two or more addresses by the same incumbent, I bring comfort: nothing in the constitution nor the by-laws requires him to deliver any address whatever. But the president, again like the British monarch, retains one right—the right to be informed. I have sought to be informed during my year in office; and I pay hearty tribute to the Executive Secretary, other members of the Executive Council, members of the staff of the central administrative office, and about one hundred members of the Association who, in response to inquiry, wrote me, most of them at length, giving me their opinions on the structure and present conduct of our society. In many cases these commentaries were joint products of groups of humanists consulted by the writers of the letters. For what I am about to say, however, I only am responsible.

In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.

Los Estudios de crítica textual no suelen ser la materia más apropiada para los artículos como éste—artículos cuyo principal mérito ha de ser, junto con el interés, la brevedad. Claro es que los lectores que se interesaran en estas cuestiones no se contentarían con la descripción externa de los códices, ni con unas pocas observaciones sobre su valor relativo, sino que también esperarían un análisis paleográfico y diplomático, siquiera somero; la justificación de la genealogía propuesta mediante un buen número de ejemplos; la procedencia y vicisitudes bibliográficas de los ejemplares; los datos, en fin, que sobre tal o cual códice nos haya podido dejar algún personaje de nota que lo poseyó en determinado siglo ... Si pudiera satisfacer cumplidamente todas estas cuestiones, apenas creo que podría agotarlas en un volumen, y tampoco intentaré agotarlas en este breve informe. Por otra parte, al tratar de una obra importante, pero poco estudiada e inédita, como ésta que nos ocupa, también será preciso apuntar algo sobre la estructura y fuentes, antes de pasar revista a los manuscritos a través de los cuales ha llegado hasta nosotros.

When the first “Facts of Journal Publishing” appeared in PMLA (December 1954), its circulation statistics were cited as illustrations of the precarious positions of a number of publications in the field of modern languages. William Riley Parker introduced the tabulations with an exhortation to the MLA membership to support journals in their respective disciplines with their subscriptions. “Study the stark figures we have compiled for you,” he advised. “In some cases they are a kind of fever chart in reverse, showing the condition of dying, or very sick, patients. In general they reveal many periodicals in search of a profession. We have been letting George support these old friends of ours, and George has not been very numerous lately.”

In 1963 J. N. Hook, the first Coordinator for Project English in the United States Office of Education, reviewed briefly the growth and current status of Project English for the profession (“Project English: The First Year,” PMLA, lxxviii, September 1963, Part 2, 33–36). In 1964 Erwin R. Steinberg, the second Coordinator, reported at length to the profession on the history and prospects for research in English funded by the Office of Education (“Research on the Teaching of English Under Project English,” PMLA, lxxix, September 1964, Part 2, 50–76). He incorporated into his account summaries of the current status of each Curriculum Study Center, prepared by the Directors of the Centers themselves.

In Contrast to the apologetic and ambiguous prologue of the Libro de buen amor, that preceding the Lazarillo de Tormes shocks us with its forthright arrogance: “Yo por bien tengo que cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas vengan a noticia de muchos y no se entierren en la sepultura del olvido.” The evasive ego of Juan Ruiz—an ego which, as Alfonso Reyes notes, is comic by mediaeval definition and slips with childish glee into one role after another—has been replaced by an explosion of self: “Yo por bien tengo …” The “soy quien soy” of the hero-braggarts of the “comedia” seems to have been combined with the autobiographical complacency of an Alonso de Contreras or a Pedro de Baeza. The result is that the reader, as soon as he becomes aware of the insignificance of the events so pompously announced, tends to read the prologue as a parody. If Lazarillo is an anti-hero, the prologue is appropriately an anti-prologue. The oral bombast of “cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas” sounds almost as if it were designed to hawk the “pliegos sueltos” of a “romance.” Prologues are by definition self-conscious, but in this one self-consciousness is driven to self-caricature.

No person who has served as a state foreign language consultant can long ignore what is surely one of the most pressing and complex problems facing our profession: the preparation of teachers. During the three years when I was a state consultant, I spent about two-thirds of my time visiting schools and working directly with classroom teachers. I remember my first visit to a classroom vividly; I was introduced as, “the inspector from the state department of education,” a phrase indicative of the “high esteem” in which state department personnel were held.

Whatever might have been the court's verdict on Pound as an American, had he come to trial in the late 1940's in Washington, his biographers and literary contemporaries have consistently affirmed not only the propriety of the epithet, but also its ineluctable pertinence. To his long-time friend and literary associate, Wyndham Lewis, his Americanism seemed to be of “primary significance.” “Pound is—was always—is, must always remain, violently American,” Lewis wrote in 1949, seeing in him a composite of the gait of Tom Sawyer, the “manly candour” of Whitman, the “tough guy” of Hemingway, and the “strenuousness” of Theodore Roosevelt. “The universality in his work is conscious but it overlies an ineradicable Americanism,” a friend and biographer, Patricia Hutchins, has recently written—a view akin to Donald Davie's conclusion a year earlier that Pound was “thoroughly aware … of himself as indelibly American.”

A marianne moore poem must be walked round slowly—parts picked up, handled, mused on, laid back—then the whole thing walked round again—and again. The reader may give up on a particular poem, deciding that for the present he cannot decipher it. But the disjecta membra will not give him up so readily. Jigsaw puzzles exasperate some. Half-submerged in consciousness, however, these pieces from Miss Moore's poems breed connecting links.

Publication continues to be one of the more important activities of the scholar-teacher. Through the years, the scholar gains experience as to what is publishable, where it should be placed, and how it can be presented to achieve maximum effect. The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association felt, however, that the advice of some senior scholars and experienced publishers might be of use to younger writers. The following document has passed through several revisions and incorporates the observations of thirty-three able consultants. It is hoped that it will save both scholars and their publishers from unnecessary disappointments.

The publication, in September 1522, of the first edition of Luther's New Testament was an event of European significance. This impressive-looking folio volume was not only the most important work of German literature in the sixteenth century, but also the first and most influential translation, from the Greek, of the New Testament in any of the Germanic countries: the sixteenth-century Dutch, English, Scandinavian, and Swiss versions are all more or less heavily indebted to it. Luther's Septembertestament is the editio princeps of the vernacular Bibles of the Protestant world. In Germany its influence was not restricted to Protestants but included Roman Catholics who read the Bible in the vernacular. Emser's edition of the New Testament of 1527, which was largely a “revision” of Luther's text, was used in Catholic Germany well into the eighteenth century. Other Catholic “translations,” such as those bearing the names of Dietenberger and Eck, also retained Luther's version to a surprising extent. Thus practically all of Germany, both Protestant and Catholic, and all of Protestant Europe were, in varying degree to be sure, under the spell of Luther's epoch-making translation.