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131 CORRESPONDENCE mmsfàmmfamm THE SPIRIT OF ST. CLOUD: A REPORT My first surprise Ui cUmbing off the 727 Whisperjet in MinneapoUs was that the airport felt exactly as hot and muggy as m Washington, D.C., where that morning I had handed over my grant-financed ticket. I was met by Marc Zimmerman, whose name I had heard around the Marxist Literary Group (MLG) for several years, and who cheerfully provided the hour's ride up 194 to the campus of St. Cloud State University. There the first MLG Summer Institute in Cultural Studies, July 19-August 5, 1977, was about to begin. My second surprise was that Marc had to turn around and drive straight back to "The Cities" because of his crushing caseload at "Migrants in Action" m St. Paul. Except for a videotape about his farmworker cüents that he brought up two weeks later, and a fund-raising dance that he helped to promote, his conversation on the drive up was my closest contact with the struggles of working people for the duration of the Institute Ui Marxist theory. But in fairness I add that the MLG had never set itself up as primarily activist, even to the extent of, say (in a sister academic discipUne), the Union of Radical PoUtical Economics (URPE). As an outgrowth of the Marxist Forum that sprang up in the late 60's within the giant Modern Language Association of America (MLA), the MLG had previously sponsored seminars at MLA annual conventions, and, through its newsletter , Mediations, provided at least sporadic communication among a couple of hundred students and professors m the academic humanities. As a collective of twentytwo members centered at UC San Diego put it in introducing a special Marxism issue of the present journal, the MLG is "organized less on the basis of some shared poUtical program than on that of mutual professional concerns and the problems of literary and cultural work," and seeks first of aU "an on-going assessment of the concrete historical problems which face Marxist scholarship and Marxist cultural practice in the United States today" (MR. Fall, 1975). Whatever shortcomings other participants have already identified in Mediations, they seem to agree that the Institute made an enthusiastic, even inspiring beginning toward these ends, worth foUowing up next summer. I think so too. About forty of us, overwhelmingly white, male, and academic, found ourselves unpacking on a hot Sunday in twin-bedded rooms on the top two floors of Sherburne HaU, a modern thirteen-story dorm overlooking the narrow Mississippi River. By confidently ignoring the warning in Mediations that the Institute was not for beginners, I had already aUowed too Uttle time to finish the staggering reading Usts assigned in advance , and from then on it was aU I could do to keep up with the ream of xerography we accumulated day by day. Later it came out that, given the suppression of Marxist theory and practice in the post-war Anglo-American world, participants specializing in French, German, Hispanic and other cultures frankly referred to those of us in that sphere as "pre-theoretical"-as bound by an unselfconscious positivist bias in our conception of reaüty, and naive about recent developments Ui post-structuraUst and semi- 132 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW otic Unguistic theory. In my case, at least, they were right. I adjusted, after years of teaching, to the submissive role of student. Our initial schedule looked reasonable, even leisurely: breakfast in the spotless cafeteria between 7 and 8 (required) attendance at the day's lecture, 9:30-1 \ :45; lunch between 1 2 and 1 ; and later, dinner plus (on ten nights) a film. But in the first days of organizing ourselves, we fiUed in the free time so relentlessly that, according to Stan Aronowitz, we did justice to the influence of old Frederick Winslow Taylor, America's first efficiency expert. The results, Mon. through Sat.: seminar papers or panel discussions , 1 :30-3 and 3:30-5; dinner between 5 and 6; film, 7-9. and film discussion groups, 9-? WhUe this schedule was technicaUy optional, our spirit was such that almost everybody seemed to attend everything, even after resort...

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