PMLA welcomes essays of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature. As the publication of a large and heterogeneous association, the journal is receptive to a variety of topics, whether general or specific, and to all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives. The ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind; addresses a significant problem; draws out clearly the implications of its findings; and engages the attention of its audience through a concise, readable presentation. Manuscripts in languages other than English are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000-1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended to the Editorial Board. Articles of fewer than 2,500 words or more than 9,000 words are not considered for publication. The word count includes notes but excludes works-cited lists and translations, which should accompany foreign language quotations. The MLA urges its contributors to be sensitive to the social implications of language and to seek wording free of discriminatory overtones.

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The theories and methodologies feature of this issue of PMLA contains a cluster of essays devoted to the subject of reading. At a time when many states in the United States are in the throes of a major public-education reform designed to prepare better-educated, more literate citizens for tomorrow's world, we collected these essays in the belief that scholars belonging to the MLA might be interested in reflecting on this effort in the light of their research. Hence our title, “Learning to Read,” and our appeal to our contributors to consider what they, with their scholarly expertise and pedagogical experience, might contribute to the charged debates about the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI)— debates that remind us of the high stakes involved in training good readers. We hope that PMLA readers will agree with us that the question of how the architects of the Common Core have defined the uses and measures of literacy education affects much of the MLA membership—professors, adjuncts, and graduate instructors alike.

For some years now, test results have indicated that American schoolchildren read more poorly than many of their peers abroad (Heitin). A distinctive feature of the Common Core (the shorthand title for an extraordinary effort to align educational requirements and standards nationwide) lies in its effort to devise a graduated progression in the standards for the English language arts (ELA) that is anchored in the skills of close reading. Given that the changes in teaching objectives defined and prescribed by the standards might transform the way children in America learn to make sense of the written word, it is only natural that our professional body would respond. The decisive, and some might say aggressive, manner in which the architects of the Common Core have recast the fundamentals of the ELA has provoked strong reactions, not only among K-12 teachers but also in higher education. Concerns were voiced early on in sessions at MLA conventions starting in 2013, and those conversations have continued on MLA Commons (e.g., Ferguson).

This text was written as a talk for a particular occasion, the Presidential Address on 9 January 2015 during the MLA Annual Convention in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have not removed the traces of this occasion from the text because they are integral to its argument about sites of memory. I hope my readers will imagine themselves as auditors gathered in a large room in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, built on the edge of a waterway called Burrard Inlet (fig. 1). That waterway, which is represented in several of the images that accompany this text, had—and still has—a different name in the languages of the indigenous peoples who have inhabited the Vancouver area since before it became part of an American hemisphere. Names, in languages that are ancient but also modern, are a key topic in the reflections that follow.

I'm grateful to you for the gift of your time. Though my talk explores a view of historical time as a multidirectional and multidimensional phenomenon, I'm aware that our shared time in this room goes in one direction in the simple sense that we'll all be older when this session ends, and probably even more hungry, thirsty, and tired than we are now. I've found that the MLA convention sometimes feels like a memory marathon, with special testings of the brain muscles that allow us to recognize faces and recall the first and last names of acquaintances, and even of good friends, whom we haven't seen for a while. Such experiences of remembering and forgetting contributed to my decision to focus on the MLA itself as one of the two sites of memory I want to explore with you this evening. The other site I want to think about is Vancouver, the place where we are now: a modern city built on a site where humans have been living for the last eight to ten millennia (Carlson 12-16).

Questions of divine intercession and the human transmission of God's word were central to Enlightenment debates about what we would now call media. De foe's neglected Essay upon Literature begins as an argument for the divine origins of writing, but its focus on writing as God's git to humans gives way to a new kind of history, concerned with the development of human communications (oral tradition, writing systems, the invention of printing, and so on). By identifying histories of mediation, like Defoe's, as a distinct genre, we see new links between texts by such wildly diverse authors as Edward Stillingleet, William Temple, William Warburton, Adam Smith, and the Marquis de Con dorcet. Defoe's attempt to articulate an emergent area of intellectual inquiry and his understanding of literature as writing in general rather than as a subcategory of writing challenge us to think through our own generic classiications and hierarchies in the digital age.

The nature of Joseph Conrad's critique of imperialism, given his novels' pervasive racism, persists as a source of debate. his essay argues that three of his imperial novels, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory, take aim at an emerging system of imperialism organized around the modern, investorowned corporation. his system, referred to here as “absentee capitalism,” was replacing the nineteenthcentury British system of relatively small, familybased irms. he novels idealize the familyowned irm as having a presence of material value, meaning, and afect that contrasts with the wasted value let in the wake of absentee capitalism's invisible and everchanging network of social relations. According to this interpretation, Victory, which has been marginalized in Conrad studies, takes on renewed import for its insight into the relation among imperialism, romance, and modernism in Conrad's oeuvre.

Sherman Alexie's widely taught short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistight in Heaven (1993) ofers a largely unrecognized critique of the apocalyptic temporalities of United States militarism. War planners in the United States have frequently looked to the unrealized, potential holocausts of the future for a justiication of violence in the present. Alexie's collection—like much contemporary literature by Indian writers—unsettles this military logic by revealing how First Nations in North America and peoples around the world live with the consequences of a militarism that continually envisages impending antiAmerican violence as a means of justifying violence by the state. Alexie's writing provides a way of replacing the violent, futureoriented temporality of United States militarism with a “slow” temporality that acknowledges the un folding consequences of the past. Ultimately, this essay suggests a method for rereading “ethnic studies” literature with a view toward the interventions these texts make in mainstream United States culture.

When Gloria Anzaldúa died in 2004, she gave birth to an enormous archive; indeed, she let far more unpublished writings than works published in her lifetime. What's more, Anzaldúa was a compulsive reviser, and her archive includes ten to twenty unique drats of some works, along with doodles, ticket stubs, and other ephemera. his collection of material decenters what we previously thought constituted her literary corpus, knocking the presumed author of Borderlands / La Frontera of her axis. he process of siting through these materials changed my thinking about authority, textuality, identity, and many other things. My obsession with this archive has led me to reexamine the ways in which we produce, reproduce, and coproduce knowledge in archival work. In this essay, I show how recognizing the multiple material actants at work in this archive transforms conventional thought about archives, in general, and Anzaldúan studies, in particular.

While the graphic novel has gained a measure of respectability in the United States, the medium of which it is a part has not. Even in the claim that comics are “not just for kids anymore,” adult comics readers are still stereotyped as immature. his paradoxical situation calls for a new assessment of the midcentury moment when comics were attacked and threatened with censorship and of the igure of Fredric Wertham, a famous anticomics crusader who is still hated in comics culture today. Far from being symptoms of immaturity, as they are sometimes described, attacks on Wertham are evidence of the longterm efects of illegitimacy on the experiences of comics readers and creators. Subject even now to regulatory discourses of maturity, contemporary comics are best understood not as a literature reaching adulthood but as the basis of a vital literacy still struggling with a long history of marginalization.

Despite their widespread attention to the conluence of queer sexualities and “decadence” in in- de- siècle writing, queer theorists have yet to overcome the two concepts' persistently destructive conlation. his essay explores the latent positive ainities of queerness and decadence in Walter Pater's Renaissance, which links them through what I call queer detachment. A balance of engagement with and withdrawal from history, this critical perspective anticipates queer theory's methodologies as well as other queer modernist productions. Examining Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood's chronicle of decadent Weimar Germany, I demonstrate how queer detachment becomes an increasingly politicized method of literary and social world making, a means of reengaging the politics and aesthetics of queer history. hese works, and others like them, encourage scholars to realize decadence's positivity, to conceptualize a queer theory that refuses to acquiesce to residual historical narratives and philosophical systems—without, for all that, refusing their value entirely.

Although the common core state standards initiative was adopted with little controversy in forty-eight states, it soon became the target of attacks both on the right, for the mistaken perception that public education was being taken over by the federal government, and on the left, in response to the institution of an all-too-real draconian testing regime that served the needs more of the testing companies and other corporate agents than of students or teachers. Despite these attacks, it seems likely that the initiative will prevail in most states, perhaps both for better and for worse. My position is that real national standards—not simply state standards— are a desirable goal for the United States today, and long overdue. The “local control” of public education by states and school districts has been, let us admit, the greatest flaw of the K-12 system and a powerful obstruction to the reform of that system. On the other hand, I agree with many (Bryant; Hacker and Dreifus; Ravitch) who see the Common Core as a misguided effort at reform, fatally undermined by the use of punitive, high-stakes testing as the driver of implementation (Loveless). Opting for this strategy, the promoters of the Common Core unfortunately imposed a top-down procedure just where it is least appropriate. Testing, by its very nature, ought to arise from the classroom, the scene of a unique relation between teacher and students. This is not to deny that universal testing is possible and even necessary but rather to acknowledge that the more distant tests are from the scene of teaching, the more limited their informational value.

The Tenth and final “anchor standard for reading” in the common core state standards defines as “college and career ready” a student who can “[r]ead and comprehend literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (35). I want to remark on just one aspect of this worthy if blandly unremarkable goal. The distinction between “literary” and “informational” texts has the sanction of common sense, but, like many commonsense notions, it cloaks some knotty issues. For the authors of the standards, “literacy” requires mastering two different if closely related sets of reading skills. One lays the groundwork for “understanding and enjoying complex works of literature,” while the other is needed “to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally” (3). Pedagogically, one is the job of the “English language arts teacher,” the other the responsibility of “teachers of history/social studies, science, and technical subjects” (8).

The axiom that literature cannot be read in the same way as other forms of writing is by no means universally held, but it has long governed the teaching of reading in high school and college classrooms. In ways that humanists can find heartening, the Common Core standards valorize the traits that reading literature both requires and strengthens: habits of attention and intellectual rigor; the refinement of sensibility and emotional response; the ability to analyze, to synthesize, to discriminate, to evaluate. Such virtues travel well, too. The authors of the standards recognize that students who have mastered literary reading skills are better equipped to meet the challenges posed by texts in other disciplines.

Launched in 2010 and adopted by forty-three states and the District of Columbia, the Common Core State Standards read like a Well Wrought Urn for kids—a New Critical primer for a new generation. From kindergarten through grade 12, close reading is the backbone of literary curricula. With each passing year, students perform close readings of increasing complexity—and with what feels like increasing adherence to New Critical doctrine. According to the Common Core reading standards, fifth graders must be able to “determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.” They must also be able to explain “how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem” (12). By eighth grade, students must be able to “provide an objective summary of the text” and “compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style” (36). And by eleventh or twelfth grade, they must “cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain” (38). Students meeting these standards, we are told, can “readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex literature” (3). In their textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which popularized close reading across North American universities, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren announced a similar goal: “to present to the student, in proper context and after proper preparation, some of the basic critical problems—with the aim, not of making technical critics, but merely of making competent readers of poetry” (xiv).

According to what educational psychologists call the “simple view of reading,” learning to read requires two sets of skills: decoding (translating “graphic shapes into linguistic form”) and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough 128). The possession of these best predicts success in reading, even beyond such factors as students' gender and socioeconomic status (Kendeou, Savage, and van den Broek; Juel). For humanists who thrive on the complexity of reading, the simple view may look not just simple but crude. But it looks so only if it is supposed to account for every aspect of learning to read rather than for the skills that explain the most variance in students' performance. Understood in the latter sense, it helps teachers know where to focus their efforts in teaching reading. It provides three predictions about why students might have trouble: problems with decoding, problems with understanding, or both. In this light, the model's reductiveness is less a weakness than an achievement in clarifying preconditions for literacy.

London, June 2014. I'm queuing outside a downtown church behind a six-foot-tall man whose neck juts into my view every time the lights change at the corner. He's craning for a white van whose walls are lined with hardcovers and paperbacks. Its sponsor, the Quaker Homeless Action Committee, helps readers who are sleeping rough reclaim a right that many citizens take for granted: book borrowing.

Recent statistics on african american readers outline distinct trends that are difficult to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, standardized tests of high school reading proficiency show that African Americans are falling further behind students in every other racial and ethnic group. The National Assessment of Educational Progress “report card” on reading claims that “Black twelfth-graders scored lower in 2013 than in 1992,” when the assessment began, while “the White-Black score gap widened” over that period (“Top Stories”). On the other hand, the Pew Research Center, in a survey published in 2014, reveals that a notably high percentage of African American adults are book readers. Pew's statistics show that when it comes to having read at least one book in the past year, there are more black readers than white or Hispanic readers (81% versus 76% and 67%, respectively) and that African Americans have read more e-books, audiobooks, and books in print than any other group (“E-Reading”).

As a former dean ina college made up of students from more than 150 countries, most of whom were the first in their family to continue their education past high school, I do not find it difficult to celebrate the pluribus that makes up the United States. In this role, I was reminded too that America has registered important successes in its quest to offer a democratic education, an education available to all and providing every student an equal opportunity to make the most of his or her abilities.

Concerns about declining competence in elementary education are hardly new. In 1385 John of trevisa complained that new teaching methods were disadvantaging children “in alle þe gramere scoles of Engelond” (“in all the grammar schools of England”) since they once learned Latin and French but now “conneb na more Frensche ban can hir lift heele” (“know no more French than does their left heel” [Higden 2:161]). This concern was clearly widespread because William Langland also complains, at roughly the same time, that “naught oon among an hundred” (“not one among a hundred”) can read “a lettre” (“a letter”) of French (15.371-75). According to Langland, not only did schools no longer produce well-educated adults (“noon… kan versifie fair ne formaliche enditen” [“none can versify well nor write according to the rules” (15.372-73)]), but they were failing in even the most basic literacy training (grammar itself, he said, now “bigileth [perplexes] all children” [15.371]). The decline was so real—or the panic so great— that it seemed Johnny already couldn't read in 1357 (schoolchildren chanted basic prayers in Latin “without knowing how to construe or understand them” [“absque eo … construere sciant vel intellegere”], and “when they are grown up they do not understand what they… read every day” [“in etate adulta, cotidiana que … legunt non intelligant” (Leach 316-17; see also Zieman 73)]).

This essay will read over the shoulder of Henry James as he reads a “boy's book” by Robert Louis stevenson, with the Design of using that seemingly unlikely encounter to think about children, books, and learning to read. An attentive reader of Stevenson's books for children and adults, James shared an affection and admiration for the man and the works with many of his contemporaries. The two became friendly after communicating in the pages of Longman's Magazine in 1884, beginning with James's essay “The Art of Fiction.” Often overlooked in discussions of this much cited essay is, first, the venue, a magazine that would become largely devoted to boys' adventure serials, and, second, the weight that James gives there to the recently published Treasure Island (1883), which he treats as exemplary in that it “succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts.” He contrasted it to Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie, which “deplorably” failed in its effort to depict “the development of the moral consciousness of a child” (61), as much as James thought that particular “country” worthy of the art of fiction (62). The reader will “say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before” him, and, as to childhood, James asserts expert personal knowledge. After all, he writes, “I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition” (62).