In the fall of 1949, The Institute of Languages and Linguistics was established as a new department of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The program of instruction was planned to include intensive and semi-intensive training in languages and a related program in linguistics, cultures and civilizations. The Institute was initially to develop a curriculum leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science in Languages. The plan was to enroll students who had completed two years of liberal arts studies either at Georgetown or at other universities, and who desired to acquire professional competence in languages and a basic orientation in “area” studies.

The subject on which I propose to speak to you tonight is a large one. In a sense it covers almost the whole profession of which this Association is the organ—the teaching and the research in one large segment of the humanities. I shall start with the assumption that we are all teachers. This, I know, is not strictly true. But it is probably true of ninety percent, and of the other ten percent some have been teachers and many are preparing themselves for teaching careers. How many of our members are engaged in research I do not know, but the number interested in research or in its results is large, as any one can see from the size of our annual conventions and the attendance at group and sectional meetings. I shall address myself particularly to the job which we have to do as teachers, and I shall consider the part which research plays in that job. I shall even direct a few remarks at those who are so heretical as to think that the MLA and PMLA are not perfect! In the light of this modest preview I am sure of your unanimous agreement on one point, that I have set myself a sufficiently large task for fifty minutes.

A Passage to India, apparently the last, and certainly the best of E. M. Forster's novels, was published twenty-nine years ago, in, 1924. It was accorded instant recognition, as a fine novel and as a perceptive and sympathetic treatment of the problem of “Anglo-India,” The years that followed saw the book established as a modern classic. It has reached a wide audience in the Everyman, Modern Library, and Penguin editions, and has challenged as well the attention of able critics. But, though the novel has received its just dues in many ways, there remains one aspect—and, I think, a fundamental one—still unexplored. It is acknowledged on all sides that thought is the most important element in Forster's novels; yet the dialectical pattern of A Passage to India has never, to my knowledge, been fully and specifically recognised. This omission has resulted not only in a certain incompleteness in critical accounts of the book, but in not a little confusion and obscurity as well.

Mourning becomes electra began for Eugene O'Neill with a question. In his very first note for the play, he asked himself: “Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?” Three years later, when he started sustained work on Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill had found his answer; he had discovered a modern equivalent for the Greek idea of fate. Since he went on to use this “psychological fate” as a formula for designing plot and characters, a clear definition of it will illuminate both the structure and meaning of Mourning Becomes Electra.

If history does not truly repeat itself, knowledge of it may, sometimes, give current problems a familiar, less formidable look. That is one reason for looking backward to our origins while we, as an Association, consider anew the status of modern language study in America and seek means to amend it. Another reason is that next December we celebrate our seventieth birthday.

Our meeting this morning is a memorable one, not because it is the first time that the Association has assembled on a Sunday morning, but because we are gathered here today to reassert the responsibility of this society of teachers and scholars for leadership in the intellectual life of our country and to accept that responsibility.

Among the variety of contributions which modern anthropological research might be able to offer to members of this Association, I plan to stress only one, that which anthropological studies of whole cultures can make to those whose task it is to cherish and cultivate the arts, and especially literature, in the contemporary world. Just because we, the anthropologists, specialize in primitive, usually quite small, societies and take as our focus communities of a few hundred people with an oral tradition which can be no more elaborate than the memories of those few, we are able to include within our study many aspects of human experience which the scholar dealing with a period or trend within a complex high civilization accepts on authority or takes for granted. Yet, to the extent that the scholar who works with the eighteenth century in England must so take for granted the economic arrangements of agriculture or the methods of child care in the nursery, he or she is cut off from watching the intimate interplay between the way a farm laborer is paid or a child rebuked and the images of sophisticated literature, within which these experiences of the poor or immature may be represented by a chain of transmuted images or an explicit counterpoint which cuts them off from the developed consciousness of the small literate elite who inherited and cultivated the literary tradition of the past. Short of time, and very often short of materials, historians have only recently thought it worth while to consider the “short and simple annals of the poor” or the life of children who were neither the subjects of later literary elaboration by a Samuel Butler or a Proust, nor had even the dubious claims of a Daisy Ashford.

Few men of letters have been personally loved and revered like Hermann Broch. Reducing the sphere of his private wants to an unbelievable minimum, he radiated a warmth and tolerance and sympathy to rare at to be unforgettable. His seeing eye, set in the face of a raven, had a quality of timeless wisdom that neutralised specific curiosity regarding his private past and even his literary development. For such things, so far as they mattered, there would be plenty of time, it seemed, in years to come. Did he not say with a chuckle that he would live to be a hundred? Then came the stunning shock, on a late May morning in 1951: he was dead.

When most successful, the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875–1910) wrote within the aesthetic assumptions of the French Symbolists and Decadents. He followed them in their revolt against reason, which was of course the continuation of a Romantic attitude. Because it tries to avoid logical discourse, his poetry, as well as that of his predecessors, tends to an excessive dependence on the use of sensorial representations. Through images, which in themselves carry no meaning, the Symbolist poet transmits his emotional state and conveys his understanding of nature. It is his task to create a system of coordinates with a complete existence of its own. The third dimension—the one which is to awaken in the reader a response parallel to the poet's experience—is the power of suggestion which supplies the depth in an otherwise two-dimensional world. The suggestive power of an image, when incorporated into a context, can radiate and penetrate the several spheres of meaning necessary in the creation of a symbol. This system of coordinates may become an explication of the significance of natural phenomena—a myth—when it is considered as the relation of its own individuality and the reality to which it refers by indirection.