These lists include only the names of those persons who had accepted appointment at press time. For prior years, consult the May 1984 issue and previous Directory issues of PMLA. Except where noted, all members of committees and commissions are appointed by the Executive Council.

Most studies of working-class culture are based on a content-oriented approach to class. While such a mode of interpretation is useful to an understanding of working-class expression, it often fails to come to terms with the nature of class as a relation. Although hardly a manifesto, this essay argues for a theoretically nuanced reading of class that takes up the challenge of abstraction in a working-class representation. In a series of examples drawn from fiction, poetry, and film, the argument shows the myth of the disappearance of the working class to be a symptom of current problems in representational aesthetics.

Listed here are the 2000 division and discussion group executive committees and some committees of the American Literature Section (see also the Directory of Useful Addresses). The years after the names of division and discussion group executive committee members are the final years of their terms. Unless otherwise noted, the member whose final year is 2001 serves as the 2000 chair, the member whose final year is 2002 serves as the 2000 secretary and 2001 chair, and the member whose final year is 2003 serves as the 2001 secretary and 2002 chair.

MLA divisions encompass the primary scholarly and professional concerns of the association, with each of the eighty-two divisions representing a major area of membership interest. Since membership in divisions is maintained as part of all members' records for the purpose of sending them special-interest materials, joining a division indicates an active involvement in the field and a desire to promote its scholarly and professional concerns. Membership in one division does not, of course, exclude a member from attending any or all meetings arranged by other divisions at the MLA Annual Convention.

Classical texts were extensively translated into the vernacular in Italy during the period when Italian poetry began, and the “mentality” of translation is traceable in this early verse. Vernacularization is gendered female, especially in the conventions of lyric poetry. As exemplified in some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poems and their prose commentaries, “vulgarization” is often presented as a discourse to women, who are conceived as a superior rather than an inferior audience. Instead of demeaning the Latin original, this kind of vulgarization paradoxically ennobles both the learned or scientific content and the young language in which it is written. This peculiar moment of Italian literary history contrasts with concurrent translation in France, with the subsequent abandonment of vulgarization under the influence of Petrarch, and with modern notions of the politics of translation.