Modern Language Association

I.
An Institutional Perspective

Phyllis Franklin
Executive Director, MLA

From the beginning, members of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) took the languages and literatures of the world as their territory. Wishing, in 1883, to assert in the college curriculum the place of French, English, and German along with Latin and ancient Greek, the MLA’s founders defined their enterprise broadly — excluding only the classical languages. Decades later, a prominent MLA member, A. H. Thorndike, argued that the founders had occupied more territory than they knew what to do with. Nevertheless, Thorndike praised their

unconscious foresight . . . in denominating this the Modern Language Association. [The founders’] information as to the number of modern languages was hazy and quite inadequate. Those that came within their ken were roughly divisible into three groups: English, Germanic, and Romaic. They had little conception of the possibilities of Asia and Africa, and the Pacific Islands, or of the mass production of dialects in our great cities. They could not foresee all of the new and exciting literatures that were to spring into existence in a generation. (Stone 41)

MLA members have not only been inclusive in their view of the languages the Association would embrace; they have also been expansive about what they considered “modern.” They focused initially on medieval texts (early in the century one MLA member said that his generation had been “uncomfortable on this side of Caxton”), but before long MLA members were studying the early Renaissance, then the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Rather quickly they moved into the twentieth century.

Since the sources they needed for their research were scattered all over the world, MLA members have always been scholarly nomads, expecting, as a matter of course, to spend summers and sabbaticals in the places where the languages and literatures they studied and taught could be found. The assumption that modern language scholars would travel to and do research in foreign countries and foreign libraries — with some regularity and for significant periods of time — has made these scholars informal ambassadors as well as frequent participants in many international organizations, conferences, and publications.

Even without portfolio, modern language scholars have through their travels encouraged the international exchange of ideas; scholarship about the languages and literatures of other countries; and translations and interpretations of the literature, criticism, and philosophy of foreign writers. As teachers, they have introduced generations of students in the United States to the languages, ideas, and literatures of foreign authors; they have lectured in foreign colleges and universities about the languages and literatures of the United States and of other countries; and they have promoted the appointment of foreign scholars to the faculties of colleges and universities in the United States.

As a result of their travels and scholarly interests, they have implemented cooperative international projects that serve the needs of scholars and librarians in many countries (e.g., Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, edited by John J. Morrison, Carolyn W. Nelson, and Matthew Seccombe); fostered international commerce in books and journals; and developed college and university library collections of published and unpublished foreign works. Moreover, two modern language scholars who served in the United States House of Representatives — George Perkins Marsh and John Quincy Adams — argued successfully when the bequest from James Smithson was under consideration that a national library should be international in scope (Franklin 359).

Acting individually and within the MLA, modern language scholars have worked tirelessly to interest people in this country in the study of languages. Over the century the MLA has administered many grant projects aimed at improving the teaching of languages and at encouraging public recognition of the need for language study (for example, William Riley Parker’s influential booklet The National Interest and Foreign Languages, which UNESCO published in 1954 and issued in revised form in 1957).

The MLA International Bibliography also took shape as a result of the MLA’s inclusive and expansive tendencies. Begun in 1919 as a bibliography of scholarship by U.S. scholars about English, Romance, American, and Germanic languages and literatures, the first list included 600 items and appeared in 1922 as part of PMLA. In 1955, as a result of international events and changing national priorities, the MLA Executive Council decided to expand the bibliography, both in terms of the nationalities of the scholars whose work would be included and in terms of the languages and literatures the reference work would cover. Initially, the compilers extended the geographic scope of the bibliography to include Eastern European languages and literatures; then, in the late 1960s, they began to cover African, Latin American, and Asian languages and literatures. Now available in print, online, and as a CDROM, the bibliography lists about 45,000 items annually and is used in research libraries in this county and abroad.

The MLA’s book publication program has also encouraged the internationalization of knowledge through reference works (e.g., British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America, compiled by Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe), books for teachers (e.g., Approaches to Teaching World Literature series), and books for graduate students (e.g., An Introduction to Old French, by William W. Kibler, 1984). In 1993, the MLA launched a Texts and Translations series that aims to make available for classroom use inexpensive editions of works in various languages that are out of print or available only in expensive editions. The MLA has thus far issued three titles in French; titles in German, Russian, and Spanish are in preparation. Finally, I note that the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers has been translated into Japanese and that another book about recent developments in scholarship in the United States, Redrawing the Boundaries (edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn), is being translated into Korean.

Other Association activities that encourage the international exchange of ideas include the MLA’s contributions of its publications to foreign libraries, membership in the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures, and the establishment of a fund to pay the cost of Association membership for scholars from countries with currency restrictions. In recent years, we have been happy to welcome to the MLA convention foreign scholars whose travel the United States Information Agency supports.

I began by noting that modern language teachers and scholars took the languages and literatures of the world as their territory. This commitment has not changed, but MLA members now report that the territory may have to be reconceptualized. The old categories of national languages and literatures have begun to give way as important literature in a number of languages — but certainly in English, French, and Spanish — is being written by authors in many different countries.

II.
A Report from the Field

Michael Holquist
Yale University

Phyllis Franklin has provided a history and a description of present day activities of MLA scholars who take “the languages and literatures of the world as their territory.” She concludes by saying that “MLA members now report that the territory may have to be reconceptualized.” As one of those members, I would like to suggest some reasons why such a reconceptualization seems inevitable. What follows should be taken as reflecting the views of only one member of an organization that comprises more than 30,000 scholars. Since I highlight the interdisciplinary and theoretical aspects of work done by literary scholar-teachers in American universities, it is particularly important that this emphasis should not obscure the significance of research pursued by those MLA members in the work of traditional philological disciplines, the need for which is as great now as it ever was.

Three anecdotes:

• In a book increasingly cited across the whole spectrum of the social sciences as an authoritative text on nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson organizes his argument around the ideas of two literary scholars, Walter Benjamin and Eric Auerbach.
• A growing number of trauma centers at research hospitals across the country are convening research groups consisting not only of physicians and psychiatrists but also of sociologists, literary scholars, and historians.
• A leading American psychologist seeking to understand the effects of rapid social change in Eastern Europe organizes his research around concepts deriving from the literary scholars Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky (author not only of the psychological classic Thought and Language, but a study of Hamlet as well).

These instances, selected at random (readers of this paper could themselves supply many others), make clear that the borders between disciplinary languages and the practices they shape are becoming less marked than they were once assumed to be. This blurring of boundaries may be — and from within a given discipline often is — negatively perceived as a crisis. When seen in a more positive light, this new development is sometimes called “cultural studies.” But even when conceived as something that promises answers to the current dilemma, cultural studies has proved difficult to define. As the mountain of books attempting to explain it rises, the phenomenon itself becomes ever more elusive. It might be useful, for the present, at least, to think of cultural studies as a way of referring to the increasing number of works that bring together insights formerly apportioned among the social and human sciences. More to the point, cultural studies might be thought of as nominating new filiations of the kind that the Social Sciences Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies joint committees have sponsored in the last decade, providing models for just how productive such discursive border crossings can be.

The various phenomena figured in the three instances cited above might be visualized as composing something like a Russian stacking doll (matryoshka). The metaphor has a certain historical logic, insofar as it is precisely the collapse of the Soviet Union that has more than anything else given new urgency to the tendencies these examples manifest. If, then, the metaphor of the matryoshka is accepted for the moment, we might say that it has at least three layers. One would comprise the new linkage between the social sciences and the humanities (in the cases cited, between political science, sociology, and psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, history and literary studies). Another is made up of the connections between American and foreign scholars. A third layer consists of a new perception of how politics relates to culture.

What these three layers manifest is a new geology of scholarship: they map a territory different from the one that was previously divided between the social and human sciences. A dramatic way this shift in the tectonics of disciplines makes itself apparent is in the new alignments developing between international studies and humanistic studies. Samuel Huntingdon, director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, has recently made the point in the canonical pages of Foreign Affairs: “World politics is entering a new phase. . . . It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be principally ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (22). This emphasis on culture is one way in which shifts that have already occurred in relations among the disciplines making up area studies have been recognized. As one who trained as a philologist, but who now directs a center for Russian and East European studies, I can describe some of the specific ways in which the developments impelling Huntingdon to make his hypothesis have shaped changes in the congeries of disciplines once stigmatized as “kremlinology.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union is cause for wonder and dismay. But for the small band of specialists who were devoted to the academic study of the Soviet Union, the shock of its disappearance has a particular pathos. The depth of the impact on such scholars may be felt in the words of one of their most prominent members: James H. Billington, a leading historian of Russia, a longtime director of the Kennan Institute, and the current Librarian of Congress, recently told a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that “we are living in the midst of a great historical drama that we did not expect, do not understand, and cannot even name” (31).

The geopolitical shape of what was once the Soviet Union has changed irrevocably. But so has the shape of the academic disciplines devoted to the study of what was once the Soviet Union. The most intimate form that the collapse has assumed for experts in the area is the breakup of their own discursive paradigms. Billington is not engaging in hyperbole when he says we do not even know what to call the historical drama now unfolding. It has not been a revolution (certainly not — even in what is already the former Czechoslovakia — a velvet revolution). Nor has it been a consistently applied reform from above, dictated by a single person or group with a coherent telos. Various metaphors for change have been proposed, such as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, or the medical trope of Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings. But it is still too early in the course of these events to fix them in a useful new metaphor. One other model for recent events has already proved its inutility: whatever else is happening, we are not experiencing “the end of history.”

In this age of what Thomas Kuhn might recognize as a period of unnatural science, an increasingly popular move has been to conceive the current discursive crisis as a shift from something called area studies to something called “cultural studies.” Area studies was — and, although in transition, still is — a way to name a conglomeration of professional specialties (particularly in the social sciences) organized outside the academic departmental structure and centered on specific areas of the world. Russian and East European studies is, then, one of several profession formations (along with Latin American studies, Near East studies, etc.) pursued primarily by economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians. Slavic departments have played an ambiguous or merely service role in such formations, serving mainly as places where social scientists can pick up the languages they need to practice their specialty. The humanities in general, and the study of literature in particular, were always uneasily accommodated in this clustering. During the era of the Cold War, which saw the emergence of area studies in American universities, it was frequently felt that literary scholars had little to contribute to the kind of understanding of the Soviets required during a period of confrontation. The emphasis was on events that were more or less recent, and that could be related to policy issues.

It was always a canard to understand kremlinology as a discipline devoted merely to monitoring the appearance of politburo members as they jockeyed for position on Lenin’s tomb at May Day celebrations in Red Square (or, even worse, to equate it with “counting tanks”). Nevertheless, there was always a certain tension between area specialists, or as they were sometimes more barbarously called, “areal” specialists, and specialists in hard-core academic disciplines. As hapless chairs of Russian and Soviet and East European centers would tell you, the more an economist, say, knew about the specific details of a particular region, the less highly regarded he or she was by theoretically minded colleagues in the indubitably academic confines of micro- or macroeconomics.

On the one hand, then, professionals organized in departments of economics, political science, and so forth were slightly suspicious of area specialists, who were usually clustered in extradepartmental Title VI centers. But in one discipline the suspicion went the other way: area experts were always somewhat dubious about the contribution that specialists housed in departments of literature might make to understanding events in the Soviet Union. Government funding agencies, like the Department of Education, and local centers of area specialists at particular campuses had the sense that there was something “soft,” or, as was sometimes said, “non-strategic,” about literary scholarship; it had, in short, little to contribute to policy studies.

One way you can tell things are changing is in the reevaluation of this judgment that is taking place both in Washington and on campuses across the land: the culture of Eastern Europe, an area that social scientists preoccupied with real-world issues of finance and politics always left to literary scholars, is increasingly being perceived as a subject that has been neglected to the disadvantage even of hard-lining social scientists. In his most recent book, Out of Control, and in an even more recent interview, one of the paladins of the cold war, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is at pains to explain recent political events in terms of ethics and culturally held values, drawing a distinction between Western civilization and the rest of the world (Interview 58).

But how do these developments relate to the work of the MLA? The new respect scholars in the social and human sciences are showing for each other is having an effect beyond the field of area studies. When political scientists such as the two distinguished representatives I have invoked here call for new attention to culture, they are pointing to an aspect of what literary scholars do that is more highly specified in the three examples with which I began. Huntingdon and Brzezinski are suggesting that the fundamental differences between societies can be grasped only by looking at the stories people tell themselves about themselves — and about others — that define them as selves. Certainly Anderson, the social scientist cited in my first anecdote, holds this view: his whole theory of nationalism is based on the premise that the power holding individuals in the embrace of the community of the nation is at bottom narrative. Like Renan, Anderson argues that a first condition for any nation is that it get its history wrong, meaning that the community must, if it is to cohere, see itself as the product of a past that has conduced ineluctably to its present constitution. It must exercise a certain amnesia that is both willed and shared, forgetting the vagaries and contingencies of the actual past so that it might be replaced by a more compelling and teleological tale. It is in this way that the randomness of experience can be given the comforting mantle of necessity.

This account of Anderson’s theory gives no hint of its subtlety, but may suggest why two German philologists should play so important a role in Imagined Communities. Both Auerbach and Benjamin provide elegant hypotheses about the way in which particular literary narratives have the power to model larger assumptions about the nature of time and space in the communities from which they spring. Auerbach wandered across borders all his life, writing about European literature in Turkey, where he became a member of the MLA, ending up in the United States after World War II. And Benjamin committed suicide in an all too lugubrious realization of the metaphor of border crossing when he felt he would be turned back by Spanish customs officials to face the fate of being a Jew in Nazi-occupied France. Both argue that literary texts serve as the most intense and at the same time the most comprehensive expression of the cosmologies of the cultures in which they are enshrined, so that if one wishes to know a given society, its literary texts (even in societies where the category literature does not exist and privileged narratives are myths or orally transmitted wisdom tales) are indispensable documents. Thus, when Anderson defines nationalism as a phenomenon that derives from and creates a new cosmology for its adherents, it is not surprising he should turn to Auerbach and Benjamin, and identify novels and newspapers as sites where the new sensibility is both mirrored, and, more to the point, actively shaped.

Since the official acknowledgment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, there have been a growing number of collaborative efforts involving medical doctors, psychiatrists, sociologists, historians, and literary scholars to understand this long and widely recognized phenomenon. PTSD is “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimulants recalling the event” (Caruth 2–3). The disorder was first noted during World War I, as the number of cases of shell shock reached almost epidemic proportions on some fronts, but only recently has it become increasingly clear that “the pathology consists . . . solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 3, italics in original).

Another way of understanding trauma might be, then, to conceive it as an especially intense form of a problem that in its less pathological manifestations is familiar to all of us as the difficulty of assimilating our past to our present so as to form a coherent identity. Trauma is, in other words, a particularly urgent form of narrative: how to arrange a beginning, middle, and end out of all the chaos and horror of experience. Trauma is a rich area of investigation because in it “the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, but becomes fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time” (Caruth 7).

Trauma studies involve interdisciplinary work by medical researchers, social scientists, historians and literary scholars, all of whom have different reasons for cooperating. Clinicians have discovered that getting a better grasp on narrative theory aids them in understanding — and treating — disorders that are rooted in a person’s getting the story of his or her identity into a livable order. Historians have become involved (there is now a journal devoted to psychohistory) because much of what Freud and others in the clinical community have reported on trauma provides a new perspective on such massively traumatizing events as war or, paradigmatically, the Holocaust. And literary scholars have found a new way to ground the fictions they study in the deepest layers of lived experience, for the skills they have learned in studying complex emplotment in literary works (think of Tristram Shandy or the French roman nouveau) have much to offer their colleagues in other fields who seek to unravel the mysteries of how trauma occludes the ability of patients to tell their own stories to themselves.

The effects of such developments on the internationalization of scholarship are no doubt obvious, but let me cite some of the more pertinent. Not only is much of the theory driving trauma studies derived from a number of different countries (Austria, Israel, France, the United States), but the whole impulse of the movement is directed toward better understanding of events whose scope is ineluctably international: the effects of wars, political repression, as well as different artistic movements in various countries that have evolved new formal means for representing such events in literary texts. The scholar I have quoted so frequently in this section, Cathy Caruth, has a Ph.D. in comparative literature and now teaches English. That she was chosen to edit two issues of American Imago, the official journal of the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis, is paradigmatic, as is the fact that these issues feature scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and a wide range of countries, devoting attention to questions of international concern.

A specific example of how new forces are shaping the boundaries of both nations and disciplines is provided by the work of James Wertsch, an American psycholinguist who has written several studies probing the construction of national identity. Since national identity is a topic that can only be studied comparatively, Wertsch has joined colleagues in a number of other countries: Japan, Sweden, Brazil — and since in particular, his major focus is on Eastern Europe — Russia and Estonia. In his most recent work, he has addressed the problem Billington addresses in his lecture to the American Academy: the recent history of Eastern Europe, especially Russia, where changes are so great and so manifold that they beggar all traditional schemes for investing contingency with an aura of necessity. Wertsch worked with Estonian and Russian colleagues (Peter Tuulviste, of Tartu University, and Mark Rozen, of the Institute for Psychology in Moscow) to interview large numbers of people to gather data on how they contextualize recent events in their lives. The project also involves close attention to how history was taught in the past in Estonian and Russian schools (and how that teaching compares with the teaching of national history in the United States) and how it is now presented in textbooks.

Wertsch’s work has certain affinities with trauma studies, insofar as it concerns the reception of experience that can only be described as traumatic. And he too finds himself necessarily working with not only other scholars trained in his discipline, but also historians and literary scholars, since much of the analysis of his data once again involves questions of organizing narrative — at the personal level of biographies in individual subjects and at the level of history in textbooks that examine connections between the national past and the present. Although Wertsch is not formally part of the network devoted to trauma studies (indeed, because he is not), his work can represent another constellation in the expanding universe where social and human scientists find themselves necessarily thrown together on an international scale.

In all the cases I have cited and in many other instances of collaboration between literary scholars and colleagues from different disciplines and countries, I have not made the obvious point that such scholars are members of the MLA. I hope such examples make clear that while more traditional work continues to be a major component in the work done by those who teach modern languages and literatures, new trends are emerging that make the study of literature and languages more pertinent to research and teaching in several new fields — and, in thunder, vice-versa.

Works Cited

Billington, James H. “The Search for a Modern Russian Identity.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 45.4 (1992): 31–44.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Interview. Brown Journal of Foreign Affairs 1.1 (1993–1994): 51–60.

——. Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Scribner, 1993.

Caruth, Cathy. Introduction. American Imago 48.1 (1991): 1–9.

Franklin, Phyllis. “English Studies: The World of Scholarship in 1883.” PMLA 99 (1984): 356–69.

Huntingdon, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22–49.

Stone, George Winchester. “The Beginning, Development, and Impact of the MLA as a Learned Society 1883–1958.” PMLA 73. 5, pt. 2 (1958): 23–44.