By 1900, composition as a university subject was already a century old. Writing instruction and the writing of regular “themes” were part of the university curriculum in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, with goals and methods perhaps best represented in Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Newman's A Practical System of Rhetoric (1827), Parker's Aids to English Composition (1844), Boyd's Elements of Rhetoric and Literary Criticism (1844), and Quackenbos's Advanced Course of Rhetoric and English Composition (1855). Composition courses, usually required, are among the most distinguishing features of the North American version of university education. They represent a distinctively democratic ideal, that writing belongs to everyone, and a contract between the institution and the public—a bargain that, over time, made English departments large and central to the American university and to the American idea of an undergraduate education.

I begin with some local history. the first modern foreign language proposed for inclusion in Yale College was French. In 1778, the chevalier de la Luzerne, French minister plenipotentiary to the American colonies during the Revolutionary Wars, offered “to found a professorship at New-Haven College, the object of which was to be to teach the French language, and the history of France.” This was a moment of relative enlightenment at Yale—during the presidency of Ezra Stiles, a remarkable polymath, a great Hebraist who was also an astronomer and experimental scientist, and indeed taught all the subjects in the curriculum, and who welcomed the proposed addition of French. But enlightenment did not stretch so far. “The trustees of this college refused the generous offer, alleging that such an establishment would tend to introduce popery into the state” (Nancrède 10). Despite student demand, the trustees did not relent until 1825: French and then German became required subjects of study (though no professorship in French existed until the 1860s).

The story of the english curriculum in the united States during the twentieth century is broadly familiar. Philology, central in 1900 at least at the graduate level, has lost its dominance and now occupies a marginal position—even though organizations and journals with anachronistic names and titles still preserve the memory of a time when philology ruled. Courses in the history of the English language have been dropped as requirements or have vanished entirely. The requirement that students in undergraduate and graduate programs know languages, both ancient and modern, other than English has eroded. Germanic philology now seems little more than a fossilized remnant for the occasional, intrepid specialist. Even Anglo-Saxon has been pushed to the edges.

In december 1826, a young bostonian on a grand tour of Europe received a letter from his father, offering the following advice: “Such are the relations now existing between this country and Spanish America that a knowledge of the Spanish is quite as important as French. If you neglect either of these languages, you may be sure of not obtaining the station which you have in view.” The son received the letter in Paris, heeded his father's advice, and headed straight for Madrid. Some four months later he would write back from the capital of Spain, “I have not seen a city in Europe which has pleased my fancy so much, as a place of residence” (Helman 340).

Recently a prominent scholar of british literature was being courted for an endowed chair at my university. At dinner he turned to me and asked, “And what do you do here?” I replied that my speciality was African American literature. He responded, “Oh, is there a constituency for that here?”

One of the most striking recent trends in american education is the increasing collaboration between universities and high schools. Spurred by deepening national concern over the schools, universities are making a far greater commitment than ever before to the preparation of secondary teachers (Amer. Council on Educ.; Franklin, Laurence, and Welles; Franklin). This long-overdue development marks a dramatic change in outlook since the days when I began university teaching in 1963.

On the occasion of the millennium it seems appropriate to reflect yet once more on the subject of the canon, if only to set the canon debate of the 1980s in relation to the longue durée of Western writing. There is a lesson in the fact that the turn of the millennium evoked a pervasive sense of anticlimax. History follows another and more elusive rhythm than the cycles of the calendar or the expectations of short-lived human beings. In retrospect, the debates of the 1980s greatly overestimated the stakes and possible consequences of “opening the canon,” not because there were no stakes or consequences, but because the concept of the canon belonged to the order of a mythical time, the order of millennial expectations. If it was never true that the canon was irrevocably closed to the revision and reordering of its supposed monuments, this is not to say that the tendency of verbal artifacts to solidify into monuments does not need to be resisted and that the struggle to prevent the schools from becoming the agents of this monumentalization must sometimes take the form of mythical antagonism.

It is notoriously the case that there is no satisfactory English equivalent for the German Literaturwissenschaft or the Russian literaturovedenie. On the cusp of a new millennium, we are a profession that cannot say its name. This onomastic homelessness is reflected in the spate of recent books that mention borders in their titles, such as the MLA's own Redrawing the Boundaries, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, or Giovanna Franci's Remapping the Boundaries. The suggestion in each is that the comfortable boundaries of our old disciplinary territory have eroded: we have somehow lost our place. If our profession were a person, it would be an orphan in exile. This condition is also legible in the current broad interest in the history of our profession's formation. There is increasing—and increasingly urgent—concern to know who we are and how we got here.

Second language acquisition research (sla) is the systematic exploration of the conditions that make the acquisition of a foreign language possible, both in natural and in instructional settings. Its objects of study are the biological, linguistic, psychological, and emotional makeup of language learners and the educational, social, and institutional context of learning and teaching. Whereas language as a linguistic system is studied through the metalanguage of linguistics (phonology, syntax, and semantics), language learning, as psycholinguistic process and sociolinguistic discourse, is researched through the metadiscourse of applied linguistics: psycho- and sociolinguistics, anthropological and educational linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and composition and literacy studies. These fields illuminate what it means to learn to speak, read, write, and interact in a foreign language, what it means to appropriate for oneself the national idiom of communities that share a history and a culture that are different from one's own. SLA provides the applied linguistic metadiscourse for the practice of language learning and teaching.

The questionnaire ruffled me a bit. “did your field exist in 1900?” My field? There's the rub. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Voltaire writes in the last sentence of Candide. Not my garden: our garden. Our field, the study of literature as a heightened form of language, came into existence by 500 BC in a few languages. In the modern languages, our field arrived a little later, let's say by the fourteenth century. And today our field, with all its knolls and swales, remains one, embracing many, rewarding all.