Incipitque Semper

A compounded debt of gratitude is due Kate Khatib as the vital Editorial Assistant (read: Assistant Editor) of this issue. Early and late, she brought her judgment, fidelity, and attention to detail to the task at hand. We are also grateful to our (perforce anonymous) referees for their manuscript reviews.

Once again, we are also indebted to Myrta Byrum at the Johns Hopkins University Press for helping to guide this issue through production with care, patience, and unfailing good humor.

Ave atque Vale

On March 30th the Department of Romance Languages sponsored an informal tribute to Jacques Derrida, friend and former colleague. The speakers included Lawrence Kritzman (Dartmouth), Stephen Nichols (JHU), Christian Delacampagne (JHU), and Richard Macksey (JHU). Prof. Delacampagne was instrumental in organizing the event.

In this season of keenly-felt losses, a memorial to our cherished colleague, fellow editor, and Vice Chair of Romance Languages, José Monleón [1950–2005], appeared in the September French issue.

Ralph Harper and Gabriel Marcel

On November 13th the annual Ralph Harper Memorial Lecture took the form of a dramatic performance followed by a colloquium. The play, mounted by John Astin and his Johns Hopkins University Theatre, was Gabriel Marcel's The Lantern (Le Fanal, 1935). Although the French philosopher and the American critic and teacher had admired each other's work from afar for many years, they first met during Marcel's visit to Hopkins in 1964. Katharine Rose Hanley, the translator of the one-act play (which is part of the permanent repertoire of the Comédie Française), participated in the colloquium following the performance and an interlude of Marcel's musical compositions. In the discussion of the existential themes, especially that of Marcel's "creative fidelity," binding the work of the two authors, the translator was joined by the director, John Astin, James Harris, M.D., of the JHU Department of Psychiatry, and Richard Macksey, who moderated. The colloquists also engaged in a dialogue with the cast of the play addressing how the interpersonal relationships were dramatized. Professor Hanley, the leading translator of Marcel's extensive dramatic work and the author of a study of his representations of creative fidelity (1987), first met him when she was a philosophy student at Louvain. She has recently published another volume of translations with a valuable introduction and "reflections," Ghostly Mysteries (2004). A new collection of five plays and her commentary will appear this spring.

Benchmarks

Project MUSE, the leading nonprofit provider of online journals in the humanities and social sciences, celebrated its 10th Anniversary with a symposium hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The general topic, inevitably, was the future of scholarship in a world of online publishing. MUSE had its origins in a pioneer collaboration between the Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, supported by seed grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. MUSE, managed by the JHU Press in partnership with 55 publishers, now publishes almost 300 heavily indexed online journals, thereby providing a stable archive of the leading scholarly sources in its fields. (MLN was the first journal digitalized for the project.) MUSE has proven a remarkably successful model for full-text access that has been a boon to libraries and individual scholars.

The Journals Division of the Press has also continued to add new journals in the humanities to its own list. Recent additions in the humanities include two library journals—Library Trends and the award-winning Portals—as well as Shakespeare Bulletin, which joins Shakespeare Quarterly from the Folger Library.

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The JHU Press has published this year an enlarged and updated Second Edition of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman. In addition to extensive revisions of the 1994 edition, the new volume features 48 new entries and subentries. The Online Reference Division of the Press has also included an online option to a currently revised, searchable text of the Guide. The Division is also offering digitalized texts of the Encyclopedia...