Abstract: PROFESSION 2002 72 There are many ways to understand how the MLA is organized, one of which is to see it as a professional society that has since the 1960s been a union between two groups who teach and study different languages and literatures: those who are in English departments and those who are in foreign language departments. Each of these two groups has its own organization of departmental chairs. These are the ADE, founded in 1962, and the ADFL, founded in 1969. Each has its own director, executive committee, and publication. I begin with this sometimes overlooked feature of MLA structure, because it is a convenient way to diagram a split in our profession that goes much deeper than the impressive organization chart that marks the division between those who teach English and those who teach foreign languages. Members of the ADE are more often than not, on their campuses, the moving force in the textual humanities, with all the implications of that fact, not just as cultural capital but for tenured slots, salaries, graduate stipends, and funds for development (i.e., money!). The ADFL has more members, but on their local campuses ADFL members are haunted by a number of problems peculiar to their calling. Some have seen dramatically shrinking enrollments in their language courses and a growth in the number of literature courses they teach in English translation. Without the boom in Spanish, the statistics for numbers of students taking language courses look rather depressing. Formerly independent departments are increasingly giving way to larger and more homogenized units. These have been formed by combining erstwhile de

Abstract: Anne Carson is an internationally renowned poet and classical scholar who lives and teaches in Montreal. Like many of us, she spends a lot of her time reading bilingual texts, and she's picked up a professional tic. When she finds a text puzzling, she automatically moves her eyes to the left-hand page, searching for the original, for clarification. The reflex kicks in even when the words are not translated. The writing might be awkward or opaque, but looking left yields no results?there is no original. It is, says Carson, like looking for "the place before the zero" ("Translation"). To live in Montreal is often to live in a world of right-hand pages, of mixed and confused expression. English is infiltrated by French, French tries in vain to resist incursions from English. Translation is called upon to play the role of regulator, to keep languages separate. But when two languages intermingle, as they do in Montreal, translation is put to the test.1 It is neither the proficient dispatching that runs multilingual organi zations or countries nor a benevolent act of hospitality toward a guest from a distant land. Translation is a relentless transaction. It is the condi tion of living in a city with a double history, a city somewhere between Paris and New York, between Quebec City and Toronto, between Iqaluit and Miami, where, on the sidewalks, you hear teenagers start their sen tences in one language and finish in another, where graffiti send out truly mixed messages.

Abstract: Despite an abundance of doctoral programs in literary studies, despite the economic downturn of the last year and the resulting pressures on higher education, not all English departments are shrinking their doctoral pro grams; some, in fact, are creating new ones. One area where growth is tak ing place is professional communication, which, as a focus of scholarly inquiry at the graduate level, seems to provide a vehicle for departments currently without doctoral programs to engage in new and important work. These new programs are not an unmitigated blessing; they bring with them challenges, benefits, and costs, even before implementation. Still, the processes involved in attempting to create them and situate them in specific campus cultures can bring unanticipated rewards to departments. We speak from experiences at three land-grant schools. Utah State Uni versity has a professional communication doctoral proposal in place, need ing only final approval by the Utah State Board of Regents. Clemson University has an interdisciplinary professional communication proposal going to the provost and the Council on Higher Education for South Car olina. North Dakota State University is in an early planning stage but needs to advance a proposal during the 2002-03 school year before the

Abstract: All reference bibliographies are "little systems," to quote Tennyson?exercises in classification. They require circumscribing a subject by defining what will be included and excluded. The categories used not only must accommodate every work falling within the scope of the bibliography but also must anticipate how people will consult it. The MLA International Bibliography's new composi tion and rhetoric section represents an interesting case study of the influences and expectations that shape such classification systems. This essay explores briefly the principles that helped shape the new section and that reflect how composition studies has come to define itself over the past twenty-eight years. The classification system for the new composition and rhetoric section was devised on 30 November 1999, in the conference room of the old MLA headquarters on Astor Place in New York City. Those present were Terence Ford, then editor of the MLA International Bibliography, Phyllis Franklin; Gail Hawisher; Jacqueline Jones Royster; James Sosnoski; Todd Taylor; and 1.1 marked the moment because it seemed typical of what would hap pen if you put a group of composition teachers into a conference room for two days. After a mil day of discussing different ways of viewing the field, someone suggested that each of us make a list of essential categories that a bibliography of composition and rhetoric should include. The lists were remarkably similar. When we had finished discussing them, we reached

Abstract: 158 The MLA’s commitment to teaching has found new expression in the MLA International Bibliography, thanks to the MLA Executive Council and the grant the MLA received in 1998 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand the scope of the bibliography.1 I would like to report on that project from my perspective as part of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Teaching of Language, working with Diane Birckbichler, Heidi Byrnes, and Dale Lange. The committee was established by the Executive Council (and paralleled by equivalent committees for the teaching of composition and literature), and it was charged with figuring out how to integrate fuller coverage of second language acquisition (SLA) and the teaching of foreign languages into the bibliography. Our work was anything but straightforward, for in many ways it had to reverse a long-standing MLA policy. The traditional information in the “Guide for Users” of the MLA International Bibliography did, after all, state, “Works limited to pedagogy, even as it relates to the teaching of language, literature, and composition, are excluded” (ix). The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the Conference on College Composition and Communication both had various historical stakes and traditions of bibliography, as they had evolved as professional organizations with the primary responsibility for issues surrounding the teaching of foreign languages and composition, respectively, while the teaching of litTeaching and the MLA International Bibliography

Abstract: Bilingual games are fan, and you're invited to play, whether or not you have much of a second language yet. Don't let even embarrassing mistakes stop you. Most of us make them, and they're part of the fan. Mistakes can get a rise of laughter (a sun-risa)1 or give the pleasure of a found poem; always, they mark the risk and the thrill of using language. Bilingualism, you can already tell, is serious fun, because democracy depends on a tragicomic taste for mismatches among codes and people, and part of the game is to develop that taste for ambivalence. Taste can, of course, be trained, and the aes thetic education of hearts and minds that promotes democracy is the kind that appreciates free play, including some antics. If you had asked Abraham Lincoln, he would have said that democracy depends on a taste for mirth along with mission. "During the Civil War people complained about Lin coln's fanny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke."2 He knew that jokes interrupt the single-minded zeal that makes no room for differences and that expanding our sense of humor can make us better citizens?seriously, folks. When imperfectly learned languages play jokes with you by unhinging meaning from intention, don't writhe with embarrassment. Most of the time, you're not even the butt of the joke but only a participant observer who can join the laughter and also learn the (philosophical, political, aesthetic) lesson: Languages, including your own, play hit-and-miss games with the world. This lesson was the centerpiece of the modern university,

Abstract: In recent years, many have noted the shadow of business cast on the world of higher education. Conversations linger on fears of tighter funding and emergent corporate-style accountability. People talk of the information economy, distance education, and for-profit colleges working change on the landscape of traditional colleges and universities (Duderstadt; Levine; Selingo). Dread and anticipation mix in the halls of the academy, and one onlooker writing for Technology Review evokes the potential for friction when he remarks, "the convergence of technology and entrepreneurship is what ignites creative destruction. That convergence is about to set the eco nomics of tomorrow's higher education aflame" (Shrage 91). Amid consid erations of the transforming academy, sensational images of for-profit education crop up. Gordon C. Winston characterizes the mood as one that wonders whether for-profit education evokes Godzilla "about to trample higher education" or just triggers "the overwrought voice of Chicken Lit de" (12). In this context where some fear, resist, or deny change, we need a discourse that makes the for-profit sector more concrete and visible to aca demics. What, for example, is the range and quality of professional oppor tunities for English PhDs in the for-profit sector, and what are the implications of for-profit education for English studies?

Abstract: It occurred to me teaching graduate students eighteenth-century literature toward the end of the past semester that I was never likely to come this way again I was never to teach Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope or Henry Fielding or Fanny Burney again, writers I had devoted decades to reading and studying for classroom presentation The major effort I had expended in that career, as evidenced by cartons of teaching materials, left me vulnerable to nostalgic reminiscences, though not doubting that my moving on to other teaching areas (media studies and production, specifically) would be both re warding in the sense of connecting with students and reinvigorating for my remaining academic years The eighteenth century, after all, had become in creasingly an area of the esoteric and of generally out-of-fashion elegant writing; it had become historically obscure and was crucially dependent on dwindling numbers of skeptical enrollees Presumably, it could be spared: it had become peripheral to the education even of English majors; it had be come intensely scholarly; it had become unmodern But it was also the home base of Samuel Johnson, and he cannot so easily be spared Parting from Dr Johnson, of course, does not mean abandoning the man or his literature It does, however, clearly mean giving up the special kind of articulation of ideas that occurs only in the classroom and during periods of preparation for that experience Johnson elicits feedback When approached from a proper perspective, he speaks beyond historic circumstances directly to an audience born two hundred years after his death; yet he is entirely of his time And not only that: more so than most of his contemporaries, he is

Abstract: 164 The occasion of this paper, the change in scope of the MLA Bibliography to include more fully the teaching of language, rhetoric, and literature, is very welcome and surely to be celebrated by members of our profession. But as I have been asked to represent the teachers of literature in responding to this occasion, I feel compelled to mix my celebratory refrain with a note of caution addressed to teachers in my field. This caveat lector arises from my own lack of expertise in the subject about which I am asked to comment, a lack that is fairly representative of the teachers of literature. If the study and teaching of literature describes what I and so many other members of the MLA do, very few of us study or write about the teaching of literature as such, about pedagogy. For that reason it seems to me that the MLA bibliography for the teaching of literature is likely to be, at least for the time being, different from its other two teaching bibliographies, about which it must be said that they address teaching as the primary focus of their fields—the teaching of writing and of language acquisition. The bibliography of scholarship on the teaching of literature is, by contrast, likely to consist of scholarship produced, as it were, with the left hand, as Milton famously said of his prose polemics. Literary scholars consider themselves to be expert in writing about literature or teaching literature but not necessarily in writing about the teaching of literature. The latter field is likely to be thin, in both senses—less productive of scholarship than the fields of rhetoric and language and less conceptually developed.