Incipitque Semper

After an interregnum, we are happy to welcome a new editorial assistant to the masthead with this issue: Ivan Grabovac. His timely dedication has been deeply appreciated. We are also grateful to Matthew Roller, William D. Scott, Michael Sprinker, and Henry Sussman for their generosity in lending editorial advice.

Gregory L. Lucente

A memorial will appear in the Italian issue to our friend and former editorial colleague, Gregory Lucente, whose sudden death earlier this year was a loss to the profession and to all those who knew him. He was a member of the Department of Romance Languages at Hopkins from 1979 to 1988, whence he moved to the University of Michigan as Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. Two of his books of criticism were published by the Johns Hopkins University Press: The Narrative of Realism and Myth: Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese (1981) and Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino (1986), which received the Presidential Book Award of the AAIS for 1987. A writer of fiction as well as a critic of fiction, he published a novel, Over the Mountain, in 1996. He served actively for a decade on the Editorial Board of MLN, where his continuing counsel, contributions, and wit will be sorely missed.

Civility and Civilization

The Departments of Hispanic and Italian Studies, Classics, and History at the Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with the Office of Culture Affairs at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, have launched The Civility Project, a cluster of activities—involving both the University and the city of Baltimore—that will center this spring on an international symposium, “Reassessing Civility: Forms and Values at the Turn of the Century.” The organizers, Pier Massimo Forni and Giulia Sissa, identify the project’s paramount goals: “To assess the relevance of notions such as civility, manners, and politeness for American society today and to foster scholarly research on civility.” They add the following remarks about the project’s theme:

In the past several years, an increasing discourse on values, civic virtues, morality, civility, integrity, courtesy, and manners has come to the fore in the public arena. In many cases newspaper articles and radio and television stories have discussed the perceived decline of civility in rather superficial terms. This seems to be an auspicious time for a serious reassessment of civility—one aimed at providing strong intellectual moorings to the current debate. It is primarily important to identify ways in which the humanities can be brought to the core of such debate.

The symposium will take place at Hopkins on March 26–28, 1998. In formal presentations and round-tables, scholars from a wide range of disciplines will present their most recent work to an audience including fellow scholars, college administrators, and students. Anthropology, history, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies will be among the represented fields of research.

The first full day of sessions (March 27) will be devoted to tracing the historical and theoretical boundaries of the topic. A seminal point of interest will be the notion of the “civilizing process” as it was articulated in Norbert Elias’s monumental study. Other powerful interpretive models of civilized life and social rituals, such as those of Freud, Mauss, and Goffman, will be at the core of this theoretical segment. On the second full day of sessions (March 28), the intellectual models outlined on the first day will be tested with reference to specific fields of human social interaction. (The programs of the Civility Project will run concurrently with a year-long series on “The Manners of Healing: Communication and Civil Exchange” sponsored at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions by the Office of Cultural Affairs [fax: 410-614-2828].)

Additional information about the symposium may be obtained by addressing Professor Sissa at the Classics Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 (e-mail: sissa@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu).

La Planche Colloquium

An international committee honoring the theoretical premises and psychiatric practice of Jean Laplanche has announced that its Fourth International Colloquium will take place on August 1–3, 1998, in Gramado (Hotel Serrano), Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The topic to be developed...