Abstract: Since its release in 2007, the MLA report "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" has stimulated lively debate about the teaching of foreign languages in the United States. In the report, the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages recommends that curricular and governance structures of foreign language programs be transformed to create an educational environment in which students will attain "deep translingual and transcultural competence" (237). The salutary effects of this discussion cannot be underestimated. The release of the report was followed by dialogue sessions at numerous conferences and focus sections in professional journals including the ADFL Bulletin, the German Quarterly, Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching of German, and the Jour nal of Language and Literacy Education. The summer 2008 "Perspectives" column of the Modern Language Journal (MLJ) continued that conversa tion by publishing the reactions of diverse stakeholders to the committee's recommendations. The arguments for a national foreign language policy will be aired in forthcoming MLJ issues. Indeed, a year after the report's

Abstract: During the 2006 MLA convention in Philadelphia, I wandered into a ses sion sponsored by the association at which David Laurence and one or two members of the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion were presenting some of the task force's preliminary findings. Okay, I didn't exactly wander in: I'd heard John Guillory talk about expand ing the idea of scholarship?unlinking it from publication and thinking instead (along the lines of the Boyer Commission, but with more nuance) of the different ways in which our academic work, what we tend to think of as research but which gets "cashed" almost exclusively as publication?at an ADE seminar in the summer of 2004 and knew instantly that his ideas could help loosen some orthodoxies with which we've been living in our profession. Because Guillory's call had very much to do with unseating the scholarly monograph from its supreme position in the academic order, I should say that, having made the connection, I anticipated what the task force had to say. I also vaguely remembered filling out a survey like the one described by members of the task force (but then, as a department chair, I fill out a lot of surveys). Finally, I'd been talking with some of my col leagues in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, with whom I shared the concern that the task force hadn't paid enough attention to the differences between the traditional fields in English and other language departments and other fields, often housed in these departments, whose work wasn't principally hermeneutic and thus not scholarly monograph material. (I'm ^_ ^

Abstract: In April 2007 Tallinn, Estonia, witnessed some events that were almost unimaginable in that orderly and peaceful city. Over the course of two nights, riots broke out, leading to one fatality; a hundred injuries, including those sustained by thirteen police officers; and a thousand arrests. These riots were not about a policy for the future but about a dispute over the past, a dispute between two mnemonic communities over a memorial to what is known in Russia as the Great Fatherland War of 1941–45. One community was the million ethnic Estonians who compose most of the country’s population, the second was the half million ethnic Russians who make up most of the remaining portion. The spark for these riots was the decision by Estonian authorities to move the Bronze Soldier statue from a small park in the center of the city to the Tallinn Military Cemetery on its outskirts. This memorial was erected in 1947 to commemorate the Red Army’s arrival in Tallinn in 1944, and it is something of a sacred site for Russians. In addition to the statue, the old location for the memorial included the graves of thirteen Soviet troops who died in 1944 and 1945. In the months leading up to April 2007, this memorial setting saw an increasing number of commemorative events such as field trips for children from Russian regions of Estonia. On some occasions these children carried red flags and portraits of Stalin, acts viewed by Estonians as pro-

Abstract: Courses in literary theory, once decried for damaging or distorting students’ appreciation of primary works of literature, are now a staple of university course catalogs around the country. Having taught more than my share of such courses, I view them as essential resources not just for English majors or graduate students but for anyone eager to learn about key intellectual trends of the last few decades. Theory can no longer be dismissed as an arcane subspecialty when references to Baudrillard and Derrida crop up in best-selling fiction, Salon.com, and the pages of the Village Voice. And yet the conventional theory course, I’ve come to realize, has certain builtin limits: it tends to obscure rather than illuminate issues of method that are significant in their own right and especially germane for graduate students seeking to define and refine analytic procedures that will guide the writing of their dissertations. A course in critical method thus offers a valuable complement to the standard theory class, yet its function is not just additive but also transformative. Thinking seriously about critical method cannot help but alter our view of literary studies, putting pressure on the overly ambitious claims sometimes advanced in the name of theory. The “introduction to theory” course offered at many institutions conforms to a familiar generic model, grouping course materials according to criteria of philosophical orientation or political affiliation. At the University of Virginia I teach a survey that starts with intellectual background on New Criticism, F. R. Leavis, and Russian formalism before moving

Abstract: Over the past year, I have had the privilege of discussing the MLA re port "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (MLA Ad Hoc Comm. on Foreign Langs.) with col leagues at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (at a workshop orga nized by the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition), as well as at Wesleyan University, at Brown University, and at the AATG sponsored session of the 2007 MLA convention in Chicago. All these events were very well attended, and all sparked wonderful discussions. Interestingly, the meetings drew more colleagues primarily involved with language education than those on the literature-culture side of the two-tier system we described: clearly, those of us who work in teach ing language, which is tantamount to saying those of us who engage our students at the critical juncture when they are trying to decide whether or not to pursue the study of a foreign language and culture, rightly felt that the report acknowledged the critical role we play in the future of our profession.

Abstract: In proposing my title, I intended to reflect on three or so decades in which the interpretive disciplines in the humanities, in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism, with the revival of psychoanalysis and the invention of feminist theory, and with the expanding universe of culture as the play ground of study, did appear to generate paradigms of analysis and under standing that began to move across the border, sometimes with fanfare, sometimes in unmarked vans. There was a sense in the social science and professional republics at our frontiers that the humanities had developed methods (often themselves derived from such disciplines as linguistics and anthropology) that enabled important questions about the nature of the human animal as sign-bearing and sense-making. To my mind, these questions?posed in the structural study of myth, for instance, or in the analysis of the narrative construction of reality?remain important today. A few weeks ago, some students in my introduction-to narrative class, itself a creation of the 1970s, told me it had changed their lives. But I think the more common reaction was expressed recently by one of my colleagues at Yale Law School, who said she no longer looks to the interpretive humanities for inspiration. History, yes, but after that

Abstract: For those of us who were looking to leave the canonical home of literary studies in the late twentieth century, cultural studies was a hitchhiker's dream. Fresh from one crossing?the Atlantic?it promised another one: a journey beyond the then current horizons of literary study. For those who climbed aboard, cultural studies offered a way to make good on the poststructuralist insight that language and other symbolic systems play a constitutive role in the production of meaning; rather suddenly, there were few objects in the world that could not be usefully read as texts. Cultural studies also allowed us to overcome the limitations of a literary study that restricted itself to literary history, author-centered study, and various spe cies of formalism (genre theory, close reading, rhetorical analysis) to de cipher the meaning of the literary work. It demonstrated that discourses of knowledge (like literary studies) could not be separated from effects of power (Foucault). Finally, cultural studies aimed not to abandon literature but rather to inscribe literature into the amorphous but expansive term "culture." Because feminist and British Marxist cultural studies understood culture as a contested terrain (of the high and low, elite and popular, hege monic and emergent, spiritual and material), the term "culture" gave our critical interventions an immanent political valence. Not only would the horizons of literary study expand, but what was done within them would somehow be political.1 If being political is to participate actively in the processes of change, then

Abstract: It was early in the fall semester of 1985, and I was lying in bed reading the New Yorker. During most of the 1980s I ran the Women's Studies Program at Barnard College and taught there. But I also taught on occasion in the graduate school at Columbia, where I had studied French during the high theory days of the 1970s. I had been leafing through the magazine on a Friday night trying to relax, when my eye was caught by a story that began in the following way: "It was easy to find an apartment in New Haven, even though my classes in feminist criticism were starting in just a few days and most of the other grad students had arrived at Yale the week before" (Janowitz 30). Hey, I elbowed my husband, who was reading on the other side of the bed. A story in the New Yorker by a woman writer about feminist criticism. I sat bolt upright in amazement. Then feminist criticism disappeared for a while, until well into the third page of the story, when the narrator, a young woman named Cora, after sup plying some family background for the reader (a dead sister, a father living in New Zealand), mentions that she had been accepted into the Women's Studies Program at Yale. I was newly excited. But not, as it turned out, for long. "I was sitting in class, taking notes as usual," the narrator complains about her seminar in feminist criticism, "when it became apparent that not one word that was being said made the slightest bit of sense" (32). More than twenty years after the fact, it's hard for me to slow down my initial reaction enough to replicate it here. I confess that I had been

Abstract: As a dean of humanities and fine arts at a public university, I see it as part of my job to make the argument that the humanities are at work in the world. In his president's column about the Presidential Forum panels in the Win ter 2007 MLA Newsletter, Michael Holquist referred to "the complex util ity of the humanities" (3). There are risks in making utilitarian arguments about the value and values of the humanities, but there are also risks in not making such arguments, since other disciplines constantly make them, and the fate of the humanities within the university?the valuation of their labor, their market share of student enrollments, the respect for their research?depends on how the humanities are valued by the world outside the academy and how they are valued within the academy by students and colleagues in other fields. I often talk about a 2002 New York Times profile of the only financial reporter to warn of Enron's fatal fiscal problems. The Fortune Magazine reporter Bethany McLean, at first the Cassandra of the business world, attributed her ability to read Enron's books while everyone else sang its fortunes to her liberal arts education, in particular to her double major in English and math. " 'When you come out of a liberal arts background,' she said, 'you want to know why something is the way it is.' In account ing, 'there is no reason why. There is no fundamental truth underlying it.'" McLean credits her liberal arts background with enabling her to see

Abstract: One of the most depressing moments for me at MLA job interviews is when candidates are reassured that, if they get the job, they "won't have to teach comp." The only thing more depressing is when colleagues who are revolted at the very thought of teaching composition complain that their students write poorly. They blame bad student writing on the high schools or on their own campus writing programs and take no responsi bility for the problem themselves.

Abstract: A BERLIN school has unwittingly put itself at the center of an ongoing controversy in Germany about language policy.1 The Hoover School in troduced a German-only rule, not only in the classroom but also for class trips and breaks in the school day. Germany's minister for migration issues, Maria Bohmer, quickly endorsed the policy for other schools, saying that "language is the key to integration."2 Germany's largest immigrant group is Turkish (Berlin is famously, in terms of population, the second largest Turkish city after Istanbul)3 and representatives of the Turkish community did not waste any time in con demning the policy as racist, counterproductive, and ultimately futile. The Federation of Turkish Parents in Germany sharply criticized the forbidding of any language, and a Turkish member of the Green Party, Representative Ozcan Mutlu, spoke of "a break with the constitution" (Kiipper 5). To many, the school's German-only policy smacked of cultural impe rialism, yet the policy became harder to criticize as new details emerged. Over ninety percent of the Hoover School's pupils have a migrant back ground, and classrooms often serve native speakers of up to ten different languages. Furthermore, a committee composed of the administration,

Abstract: The academy enjoys a good crisis. The clash described by Hannah Arendt, between the values of authority and tradition, on the one hand, and the centrifugal forces of the modern, on the other, probably qualifies as an educational crisis—though I think not a corrigible one (Steiner 145). More often the crisis is fathered as much by self-importance as by facts (we have unhappily learned to say) on the ground. In the 1980s and early 1990s, crisis mongering, led by conservatives like Allan Bloom, was everywhere. The canon was dying. The end of Western Civilization, if not of Western civilization, was at hand, apocalypse a day or two away. At the time, I wrote a book that took a less gloomy and, I thought, more historical view (Battleground). Much as I would enjoy attributing the subsequent diminution of crisis mongering to that book, realism suggests that events merely ran their course as things dwindled into normality. Now we have another crisis or the supposition of one, the “tyranny of the monograph,” first named by Lindsay Waters. Notwithstanding some economic realities, I think this crisis, too, is in good part factitious. That does not mean, however, that I suppose all is perfectly well. Rather, I think that forces set in motion long before 1970, the date offered by the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion as the moment when the tyranny of the monograph took hold, have produced a moment of self-recognition. At heart, any tyranny has been that of good intentions paving the way to a traffic jam with its attendant anxiety—and

Abstract: The report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages touches on a number of issues in foreign language teaching today from several per spectives: logistical, paradigmatic, curricular, and administrative. In that report, committee members were at pains not to single out any language in particular, even though the situations for Spanish and for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) differ greatly. Evidently, the report has reso nated with language professionals across the country, because it touches on knotty, core issues that every foreign language department faces but that are rarely discussed outside departmental boundaries. By convening this committee, the Modern Language Association took a key step in approaching three substantive ideological divides: between language and literature, between traditional academic curricula and gov ernment programs, and between the worlds of teaching and research. Each of these divides has its own history, its own advocates, its own critics, and its own inertia, heavily weighted down by the legacy of past practice and discipline-fed mythology. The ad hoc committee's report and its recommendations show a shift of attention and intent on the part of the MLA leadership to reexamine goals and curricula, to assess the impact and implications of global security issues on language and culture teaching, and to realign itself with other professional and advocacy groups for an agenda that is both short-term and long-term, academic and public. The report aims to stimulate experi mentation with new curricular models that go beyond national security

Abstract: A colleague teaching at a public university recently told me of a conversation with her chair as he lamented the large number of fundamentalist students on his campus and in his classes. He informed my stunned colleague, a Christian, that part of their job as professors of English was to move these students away from their faith. On the surface such candor seems to confirm what a great many cultural and religious conservatives believe already: that higher education as it exists in the United States purposefully erodes the fundamental values of those it seeks to educate. Indeed, conservative religious people can view themselves as a threatened minority. According to the First Amendment scholar J. M. Balkin, conservative students increasingly articulate this sense of embattlement in terms of broad First Amendment protections and view their inability to speak in class as a form of censorship (169; qtd. in Sherwood 56). It may well be that this phenomenon is overstated. Nevertheless, I want to avoid the tendency to blame our students for their failures to learn and to feel at home in the academic worlds that we have created. Maybe we should be forthright and admit that we are often uncomfortable with our students’ religion and that we often don’t know what to do with it in the classroom. Having taught at both state universities and faith-based institutions, I can say with some confidence that this discomfort runs across the

Abstract: For one who has spent his entire adult life in academic settings, a trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, seems like an inverted Heart of Darkness: instead of going deeper in toward the horror, the horror, you ascend to space and light. The skies are open above you, and the air, while there's not much of it at six thousand feet, is clean and clear. You find yourself constantly looking up, thinking large thoughts or no thoughts at all. To the west are the Garden of the Gods and the immensity of Pike's Peak. Just to the north is the campus of James Dobson's vast Focus on the Fam ily, a corporate headquarters, gift shop, and museum of its own history. A couple of miles north from there is the New Life Church founded by the now-disgraced and departed Ted Haggard, both mall and amuse ment park, filled with milling youth groups on their way to another large room, another inspiring message delivered by a guy in blue jeans who was lost and now is found. And just over there, at the end of that road that winds toward the Rockies, and below the spot where those tiny figures are gently descending to earth (no matter when you happen to glance up), is the gleaming, geometrical Air Force Academy, where I was invited to lead a seminar?on Heart of Darkness, as it happens?with faculty members from humanities departments. Going up Academy Boulevard was like traveling to some primal nexus of mystic patriotism, military service, and evangelical Christianity. I found

Abstract: I was going to propose a moratorium on the consequences of taking intel lectual risks within and beyond the academy but deem it insufficient for the present task. In its place, I advocate a wanton disregard for arbitrary authority and an active promotion of lust and poetry; the purposeful secre tion of fantasy; and the creation more than the critique of art, even in our