Recent poststructuralist criticism argues that language cannot be understood merely as a name-giving system and that reading is not a process of deciphering language in order to pass through it to the experience it communicates. If words are part of a larger articulation, then the question of origins, and of originality, must be recast. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses play on, and with, the dilemma of originality and repetition in literary discourse. The Wake involves us in the appeal to a source, and although the origins of knowledge, authority, life, and language may remain unlocatable we continue to search for them. The Wake suggests, too, that discourse binds us to a wheel of repetition. The complex use of cliché in Ulysses draws us even more specifically into the uses of repetition. Stereotype is more than the butt of Joyce's satire: it shares in the whole process of deconstruction that characterizes the text.

SIX amendments to the MLA Constitution have been proposed for consideration by the Delegate Assembly. If the Assembly approves the amendments, they must then be ratified by a vote of the membership, in accordance with Article XIII.3 of the Constitution.

The Executive Council has proposed the first two amendments; a group of members has proposed the other four. The Committee on Amendments has drafted the proposed amendments in language appropriate to the Constitution and has provided explanatory material for several of the amendments.

From his early short stories through his as yet unpublished second novel, Ralph Ellison pursues the theme of the quest for black self-definition by reference to black folklore. “In the folklore,” he says, “we tell what Negro experience really is.” Ellison adapts black folklore to fiction by fitting it into the forms of American and Western myth. As he enlarges the context of black folk tradition, he reduces the importance of its basis in racial oppression and conflict and transforms its social meaning into the metaphysical meanings of the framing myths. Thus black identity becomes indistinguishable from American identity or the human condition, and the effort to define it from within results instead in continued definition by the enslaving society.