The Mahabharata, composed in sanskrit, is generally described as an epic. Other sanskrit texts refer to it occasionally as a kavya, or poem, and more often as an itihasa, which literally means “thus indeed it was,” suggesting an element of history. As with many early epics, it carries a consciousness of history but does not claim historicity. It evokes a past society of clans and narrates the events that bound them together or tore them asunder, focusing on the actions of those regarded as heroes.

From (Pseudo-)Aristotle's reflections on wine, poetry, and heroes in problems, book 30, to modern psychoanalytic theory and depression, melancholy has claimed the attention of artists and thinkers throughout the history of Western culture. According to Jennifer Radden's historical analysis, melancholy was “a central cultural idea, focusing, explaining, and organizing the way people saw the world and one another and framing social, medical, and epistemological norms” (vii). It takes a number of forms: for ancient Greek physicians it was a somatic malady, an overwrought contemplativeness and moroseness rooted in the body's humors; for Aristotle it was this, too, but was also a fount of artistic inspiration; for the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino it was the source of poetic and prophetic powers, a requisite for heightened intellect. Melancholy was, in short, a principle of relation between the interior and exterior realms and as such possessed a weighty hermeneutic charge as a lens through which to experience and read the world. In recent years, scholars in literary and cultural studies have begun to explore the perspectives that melancholy offers for understanding such broad topics as the formation of literary subjectivities and cultural constructions of gender. The persistent presence of melancholy in medieval and early modern literature, following Radden's observation, advocates for its many possibilities as an interpretive tool to shape diverse literary positionalities and socioepistemological modes of being.

In Profession 2005, Louis Menand complained that the same theoretical paradigm has dominated the humanities during the last few decades and that new ones are sorely needed: “What [humanities departments] need to do is hunt down the disciplines whose subject matter they covet and bring them into their own realm” (14). Biocultures may be one of the new paradigms he was looking for, both theoretically and practically.

Why do people go to war? Readers of herodotus who seek to uncover the cause of the Greco-Persian wars often find themselves baffled or confused, since he refuses to ascribe responsibility to any one factor or privilege one explanation over another. In this respect, he continues a tradition famously inaugurated by Homer, who takes an oblique stance on the cause of the Trojan War by commencing his Iliad in the tenth year of the conflict with the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon. Writing after Herodotus, Thucydides also makes a particular war his subject but refrains from offering simple or uniform reasons; admittedly, he says that the power of Athens and the fear that it inspired in Sparta are responsible for the Peloponnesian War, but he arrives at this inference by way of an extraordinary introduction that encompasses factors as diverse as migration, piracy, and geology. For his part, Herodotus ostensibly singles out Croesus, the king of Lydia, as the first to undertake “criminal acts of aggression against the Greeks” (5; bk. 1, ch. 5), but the implication of the Histories and its many details is that no one person or thing can be held responsible for war and no one cause leads to it. If the origins of conflict cannot be reduced to a single person or thing or cause, that may be why so many individuals in Herodotus are unable to justify the need for war or account for its regularity.

The term bildungsroman has long been one of the most problematic entries in the lexicon of literary studies. Although it is often used innocuously, to refer to almost any novel that focuses on the development of a young protagonist, matters look rather different in the more secluded world of academic German departments. Here, the Bildungsroman is the object of fierce debates that illustrate how even such arcane fields as classificatory genre studies tenuously float on ideological undercurrents.

I am pleased to report on the association's activities in 2008. Highlights of the year's work include the release of a major report on the academic workforce; the completion of a project on undergraduate learning, supported by the Teagle Foundation; and the publication of the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. At the annual convention, hundreds of participants joined in a variety of sessions related to the theme of the Presidential Forum, “The Way We Teach Now.” Association finances and membership enjoyed a healthy year.

Oftentimes, honorable listeners, when stepping before you at this time and place I have not found it altogether easy to choose a theme that without leading too deeply into science and literature would nevertheless move beyond the outer chambers of knowledge and that might furthermore attract a mixed audience without merely touching on commonplaces. Today, before we proceed to the joyous principal occasion for our festive gathering, I wish to speak about the most exquisite of all the many types of novel; you will permit me to call it by a name that has to my knowledge never been used before—namely, the Bildungsroman.a Some of you have so far been content to refer to it as the family novel [Familienroman]—a name that in no way touches on the essence of the question at hand.

My recent book the war complex required rethinking the legacy of World War II. Called “the good war” in common parlance, World War II remains a potent and emotion-laden memory. But when it was over, fifty to eighty million people (estimates vary widely) had died—soldiers but also, and in greater numbers, civilians. Hitler's forces had murdered many innocents, and Japan had unleashed slaughter in China and Southeast Asia and bombed Pearl Harbor. But the Allies, the good guys in the tale, had killed roughly 600,000 German civilians and 400,000 Japanese (Sebald 3). So if World War II was necessary and justified, it was nonetheless terrible and even rotten.

The delegate assembly met on 29 December 2008 at the Hilton San Francisco Hotel. First Vice President Catherine Porter presided. The assembly was called to order at 1:18 p.m. The chair made some preliminary announcements about the conduct of the meeting, called for a demonstration of the electronic voting system to be used during the meeting, and announced the quorum for the meeting, which was 79 delegates, because 157 delegates had signed in for the meeting at the beginning. [Note: Of the 268 delegates, 176 (65.7%) attended all or part of the meeting (see the list that follows for the names of the delegates in attendance).]

The council met on 24–25 October 2008 at the MLA office in New York. President Gerald Graff presided. The officers present were First Vice President Catherine Porter, Second Vice President Sidonie Smith, and Executive Director Rosemary G. Feal. The Executive Council members present were Carlos J. Alonso, Charles Altieri, Sara Scott Armengot, Dorian F. Bell, Anne Ruggles Gere, Jane Harper, Francis Abiola Irele, Mary N. Layoun, George Levine, Paula Rabinowitz, Hortense J. Spillers, Lynne Tatlock, Priscilla Wald, and Alexandra K. Wettlaufer. The MLA staff members present were Director of Operations Terrence Callaghan (24 Oct. only), Director of Bibliographic Information Services and Editor of the MLA International Bibliography Barbara Chen, Director of Programs and ADFL Nelly Furman, Managing Editor of MLA Publications and Director of Publishing Operations Judy Goulding, Director of Financial Operations Amilde Hadden, Director of Convention Programs Maribeth T. Kraus, Director of Research and ADE David Laurence, Director of Book Publications David G. Nicholls, and Assistant to the Executive Director and Coordinator of Governance Carol Zuses.

A la guerra me lleva
mi necesidad;
si tuviera dineros
no fuera en verdad.
My poverty takes me off to war;
if I had money, believe me, I wouldn�t go.

War is everywhere and nowhere in don quijote. It consumes don quijote's thoughts but seldom appears in the guise he expects. War animates the protagonist's most elaborate, potent fantasy of self-aggrandizement and social climbing, in which he lends his strong arm to a king to help him fight his wars and is rewarded with the king's daughter (Cervantes, Don Quijote 211–15). Yet as Don Quijote sets about trying to make his name through daring feats, actual war seems both elusive and overwhelming. Instead, Cervantes gives us a series of fantasies that ironize the conventional representation of heroism in a romance key, registering the anachronism of the single knight in a world marked by the collective allegiances of epic. At the same time, through a series of burlesque battles, the text reflects on the incommensurability of humanist pieties about war and its actual experience. Finally, in its engagement with problems of religious and ethnic difference, Don Quijote registers the contrast between war as it might be and the conflicts Spain actually experienced both within and beyond its borders.

PMLA invites members of the association to submit letters, printed and double-spaced, that comment on articles in previous issues or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. The editor reserves the right to reject or edit Forum contributions and offers the PMLA authors discussed in published letters an opportunity to reply. Submissions of more than one thousand words are not considered. The journal omits titles before persons' names and discourages endnotes and works-cited lists in the Forum. Letters should be addressed to PMLA Forum, Modern Language Association, 26 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10004-1789.

What obligations does literary scholarship have to its society, culture, and laws? The question arises in Tanya Erzen's “Religious Literacy in the Faith-Based Prison” (123.3 [2008]: 659–64). The problems with this account of Florida's Lawtey Correctional Institution and its religious-right rehabilitation program begin with the essay's title. One would take “religious literacy” to mean something like “competence in religious history and/or religious doctrine,” but in this essay it does not: for here “religious literacy” is a euphemism for total immersion in and complete acceptance of the Southern Baptist belief system. The author calls such brainwashing “religious self-knowledge” (660), though it seems aimed at the obliteration of any vestiges of selfhood. Even the phrase “faith-based prison” is a smokescreen: “faith,” a term that in our highly religious and religiously diverse culture has generally positive associations, here conceals the ugly truth that the only faith that counts at Lawtey is fundamentalist Christianity.

Although the european eighteenth century was long called the “age of Voltaire” (at least in textbooks), it was also an age of war. Courts and cities were undergoing a progressive pacification, as Norbert Elias has argued, but elsewhere the “civilizing process” was more bellicose. To finance the expansionist wars of Louis XIV, whose reign ended in 1715, and those of Louis XV, including the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years' War (1756–63), the French state expended two-thirds of its revenues on war (Meyer 57). Despite the Anglomania that marked progressive intellectual and literary circles in France around mid-century, between 1689 and 1815 France and England were officially at war for sixty-two years, not including minor conflicts. Against this backdrop, the image of Voltaire is that of an unflagging pacifist. Standing for all wars, the fictional war between the Abares and the Bulgares in which the naive hero of Voltaire's Candide finds himself caught up is described by the text's narrator, in a bitingly ironic oxymoron, as “a heroic slaughter” (114). War for Voltaire represented yet another instance of infamous unreason, odious intolerance, and despicable evil. It was the collective, generalized form of the l'infâme (“the despicable”), against which he publicly and tirelessly railed. The phrase écrasez l'infâme (“crush the despicable”), appended to his letters beginning in the early 1760s, signified the Enlightenment project of rooting out error, superstition, and intolerance by means of reasoned argument, common sense, and often a healthy dose of sharp irony. Quickly becoming a battle cry, penned in condensed, symbolic form as “ÉCRLINF,” the phrase had preserved all its caustic energy when, a century later, Friedrich Nietzsche inserted it throughout his Ecco Homo. Voltaire's attempts to stamp out this evil took local forms, such as the highly public letter-writing campaigns he mounted to spark indignation and obtain justice for the victims of intolerance, as in the causes célèbres involving the protestant Calas and Sirven families, the young chevalier de La Barre, and Lally-Tollendal.