Rounding the Century

Abstract

young Edward Gibbon, fresh from his Calvinist cure in Lausanne, published his first book, Essai sur l'etude de la literature, in 1761. He had early learned, as he remarks near the end of his life, to be sententious. Thus he began the apprentice work with the observation: des Empires est celle de la misere des hommes. L'Histoire des Sciences est celle de leur grandeur et de leur bonheur. history of scholarly journals, a modest subset of the history of institutions, seems to fall somewhere between that of Empires and that of Sciences (or Knowledge), reflecting both the splendeurs and the miseres of academic ambition. One of the peculiarities of scholarly journals, however, is the compulsion to celebrate anniversaries. True to this tradition, the of M L N celebrated the centennial of its founding by convening, on October 24-25, 1986, a symposium dedicated to The Institutions of Criticism. This rite of passage and celebration was the product, like the proverbial elephant, of a committee-in the present instance composed of the key editors of the journal's individual and virtually autonomous issues. (That the current General Editor and his immediate predecessor were the putative organizers of the event was merely a function of their occupying successively that almost invisible eminence.) of each issue nominated one of the five principal speakers. While the planning committee met for a number of very institutional lunches, as a group it prescribed little