The Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association will take place 4-6 November 1976, at the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. The opening General Session, 4 November, 8:00 p.m., will feature poetry readings by Howard Nemerov, Laurence Lieberman, and Felix Stefanile. In addition to the regular meetings of the MMLA sections, the following forums will convene: “American Indian Literature,” “Are Scholarly Journals Obsolete?,” “Contemporary Missouri Poetry,” “Literature and Revolution in the Bicentennial Year,” “Neo-Medievalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” “Principles of Teaching Composition,” “The American Revolution and the French Enlightenment,” “The Fourteenth-Century Mystics,” “The Historical Study of Style,” “What Is a Genre?,” and “Didactic Science Fiction: Sages, Malcontents, and Nuts.” There will be seminars on Colette, Dante, Robert Frost, and creative writing, as well as a series of debates: “Gertrude Stein: Radical Feminist or Aesthetic Snob?,” “Is Fiction Obsolete?,” and “Is Poetry Obsolete?” And there will be a special Bicentennial lecture by Hugh Kenner of Johns Hopkins University.

The theme of education pervades nineteenth-century novels, often particularized in the theme of learning to read and write. Great Expectations reveals the complex metaphorical nature of the terms “reading” and “reader,” deepening our sense of how Pip's moral perceptions are related to his literal education. The novel begins with several scenes in which Pip learns to read and then goes on to show a wide range of characters reading rightly or wrongly, dramatically or narrowly, with self-deception or with charity. Dickens' own reader comes to see that the stages of Pip's expectations correspond to the growth in his powers of interpretation.

Conrad’s knowledge of the Malaysian Archipelago was that of a sensitive expatriate, not of a native. But he balanced his lack of intimate knowledge with profound “suggestions” drawn from his Malaysian experiences. The events in his fiction reveal the historical disarray of a region invaded by colonial powers, and serve as an inclusive metaphor for the discovery by his characters that no life pattern. Eastern or Western, has any final validity. In this sense nearly all the characters, European and Malaysian, are expatriates, not outcasts. They are mocked by the folly of seeking to master the infinite possibilities of human development revealed to them. In The Rescue, for example, Hassim and Lingard, both expatriates, have an ideal vision of successful intercultural commingling before their defeat by the abstractness of this objective. Such “nebulous ideas” or “suggestions” largely account for both the obscurities of Conrad’s style and the greatness of his vision.

In Pendennis Thackeray redefines the meaning of “maturity” in order to suit the unusual needs of Pendennis in his compulsive search for emotional security. The narrator's ability simultaneously to denigrate and to celebrate the sentimental purity of Pen's mother, Helen, is the paradox whose development gives esthetic coherence to an otherwise commonplace story. Both Helen's youthful disappointments and her later possessiveness elicit protective responses from the narrator, although he goes out of his way to make her destructive nature increasingly obvious to the reader and to Pen himself. Moreover, Pen's continued inability to break away from Helen's demands reinforces her insistence on total allegiance from him. The narrator presents his characters' problems within a framework of psychological reality, but solves them only on the level of pseudo-incestuous fantasy. Therefore, final freedom from the terrors of insecurity involves Pen's willing enslavement to the mindlessness of Helen's sentimentality.

The authors of eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies and of their fictional imitations demonstrate the complex functions of imagination as a component of the spiritual life and of its records. Robinson Crusoe and William Cowper’s Memoir (1816) both delineate detailed sequences of emotional and imaginative development as the foundation of religious experience. Crusoe progresses to self-understanding by recognizing and mastering his own fear and anger and developing his capacity for love and by enlarging the resources of his imagination. Cowper asserts that his conversion and the Christian fellowship that followed it dominate his experience, but his account, with dark imagistic undertones, may also be read as revealing the persistence of despair. The unconscious shaping which produces this counter-pattern enriches the memoir’s implication. In novel and autobiography alike, the divergence between what the author asserts and what he suggests, reflecting varying possibilities of the imagination, can generate fruitful literary effects.

The basis of much nineteenth-century American humor was a certain male mask—the easygoing, countrified sloven. Women played a complementary role in society and fiction—the anxious manager of house and culture. Thus, Howells' and Mark Twain's couples often consist of a relaxed, humorous man and a tense woman. There was a tradition of female humor, however, best represented by Kate Sanborn's The Wit of Women (1886). The humor in this anthology has a genteel aplomb quite different from the male mask's incompetence. A few women writers, notably Marietta Holley, invented vernacular female humorists, but Howells created the finest of all in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Penelope, the first humorous female lead in an American novel, is a male impersonator, and her droll, unfashionable sensibility proves more attractive than the “gilded” femininity of beautiful, vapid Irene. Yet Howells rejects Penelope in the end.

Critical difficulties with Great Expectations prompt a psychoanalytic approach and consideration of the literary use of Freudian concepts and of the complex relationship between Dickens and Pip, dreamer and dream. Edmund Wilson stressed biography and the trauma of the blacking warehouse. Freudian theory stresses infantile trauma of the sort the novel’s first scene hints at: the death of brothers and parents. The intensity of Pip’s ambivalence and of his guilt and self-abasement suggests that Pip’s story projects and explores feelings of his creator. Many characters in the novel exhibit or parody Oedipal antagonisms. There are many father figures, deprived children, and allusions to patricide. Magwitch is the “father” Pip craves, the best giver and receiver of both punishment and forgiveness. Joe Gargery does not punish though Pip urges him to. Jaggers insists on neutrality. Magwitch fills Pip with excessive dread; his death, loving Pip and being loved by him, satisfies Pip’s psychic needs.

When read in the contexts of psychology, theology, and Old English poetry, Bede’s Death-Song can be confidently valued as a fine poem, and not merely as venerable wisdom. The design of this eighth-century poem shows substantial correlations with the design of the Epistola Cuthberti, in which it appears. The letter appears to combine eyewitness report with hagiographic conventions. Ambivalence at meeting one’s Judge is expressed both in its narrative and the poem; troubled feelings are balanced by a certain faith. Scriptural echoes reveal Cuthbert’s conscious intention to present the Bede of the letter as an imitator of Christ. Comparison with other Old English poetic treatments of Bede’s theme shows that the poem fully exploits the artistic potential of the vernacular tradition.

Billy Budd concentrates Melville's philosophy of war and lifts it to its highest point of development. The themes of the work extend ideas he had developed since his youth, and its poetic conceptions are the offspring of earlier ones expressive of his thought on “the greatest of evils.” In Billy Budd the philosophy is conveyed entirely by poetic means—conceptual imagery and form; symbolic characters, actions, questions, contrasts, and contradictions; interplay of sight and sound; and pictorial representations of social realities. The work conveys both the abhorrence of war underestimated by those who, in the classical argument about Billy Budd, interpret it as Melville's “testament of acceptance” and the nonironic, even luminous, affirmation of man's latent humanity overlooked by those who read the book as irony, rejection, or darkness alone. In the course of his last artistic exploration Melville discovered that within the most cruel contradictions of the world of war lies the potential for its metamorphosis.

The Northeast Modern Language Association had a very productive year. Membership now numbers 1,000 (roughly), and although the strike caused obvious difficulties for members located in Canada, even that “blank” seems now to have regained constituency. Modern Language Studies, the periodical sponsored by the Association and published at the University of Rhode Island, appeared with predictable regularity—a fall issue, a spring issue—under the editorship of Edna Steeves (for English manuscripts) and Armand Chartier (for modern language manuscripts). Happily, the arrangement will continue an additional two years, at least, for the agreement between the University of Rhode Island and NEMLA has been extended through 1978, including a partial subsidy by that University. A faculty member of NEMLA, for $6.00 ($3.00 for graduate students), has received two issues of MLS and the chance to attend the conference, scheduled this year at the University of Vermont, Burlington. (Membership dues will rise to $10.00 for faculty and $5.00 for students this September.)

The seventy-third annual meeting of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast was held in San Jose, California on 28 and 29 November 1975 with 276 members attending. San Jose State University was the host institution with arrangements for the meeting coordinated by the Local Committee of Scott Rice (Chairman), Catherine Blecki, Esther Pereyra-Suarez, John Pollock, and Joachim Stenzel. The conference was distinguished by an unusually invigorating Presidential Address by Eli Sobel entitled “In Symbol of Hope.” At the banquet, President Sobel also honored R. S. Meyerstein with a resolution recognizing his extraordinary dedication to duty and his special service to PAPC during the previous ten years, when he had served as Secretary-Treasurer.

One major theme in modernism is the desire to wring the neck of rhetoric. The best modern poetry feels compelled both to accept the metonymic mode of discourse and to transcend it to allow for the full play of human consciousness without making consciousness equal interpretation of experience. Both the symbolist mode of Yeats and Eliot and the objectivism of Williams and contemporary poets can be seen as methods for responding to this problem. Symbolism seeks to complement the objective image by reconstituting versions of Idealism’s Absolute Self. The poet achieves a vision of the fullness of human consciousness by meditating on the implications of his own creative act, a process first adumbrated by Flaubert. Williams, on the other hand, particularly in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” brings the full play of consciousness into objective experience by seeking to render the act of mind as a process sharing the palpable physical qualities of things.

The opposition of fictive to nonfictive (i.e., scientific) discourse current during the last 350 years is linked here to the relations between metaphorical and literal discourse. The problem is this: if metaphorical usage is somehow a “misuse” of the literal relation of words to things, what are we to make of the fact that all language is metaphorical? (A) Metaphorical usage retroactively affirms the “dictionary” meanings of its words as if they were literal. (B) Fictive and nonfictive discourses encompass a (literal) heterocosm and a (metaphorical) second world, between which there is a dialectical liaison. (C) Langue stands metaphorically for extra-linguistic reality, but parole may become metaphorical by retroactively affirming its words' meanings within its langue as if they were literal. (D) Fiction is discourse that makes metaphorical statements by defining these as if they were literal, and nonfiction makes literal statements by defining these as functions of metaphorical statements.

Because we conventionally think of marriage in social and moral terms, we tend to regard it as a subject practically indigenous to the novel. Hence a work like Wuthering Heights poses problems for the traditional genre critic, since while this work is concerned with marriage its conventions are not those of the novel. The usual tactic is to call Brontë's work a “romance,” but marriage is not compatible with the “romance” as the term is usually defined. It is thus important to recognize that there are two types of marriage plots in prose fiction: one indigenous to the novel, that might be called “wedlock”; another, indigenous to works like Wuthering Heights, that may be called “hierogamy.” Thus, works like Wuthering Heights should not be classified as “displaced novels” but as examples of an autonomous genre which for the present might be designated “mythic narrative.”

J. Alfred Prufrock’s pathetic admission—“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”—states a central theme of many of T. S. Eliot’s works, which concern the frustrated struggle to achieve satisfactory expression. The poems are varied “raids on the inarticulate” (“East Coker”) by the inarticulate. Their failure of speech leads, in many poems, to the shifting of verbal action to nonhuman agents—a process epitomized by the thunder’s utterance, “da,” in The Waste Land. Given the weaknesses of language, the poems display a baffling world in which neither principles nor particulars can be expressed, so that poetry fails to work and, ultimately, ceases to matter. Among such inadequate words, Eliot concentrates, ironically or devoutly, on the paradox of the Incarnation expressed as the wordless Word. The end of Eliot’s exploration is a vision of a condition of stillness, which poems can point to but never reach.