Editor's Note

Editor's Note With this issue the RMMLA Bulletin has become the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, a title probably as cumbersome as the old one but one that reflects more accurately, we hope, the character of what the journal contains. Members of the Association have written to ask about the implications of the new name—in particular if it meant that the Review would continue to publish only scholarly papers or if other kinds of writing would now be considered as well. "Scholarly" is a difficult term to pin down, but construed as that kind of writing that is of interest to scholars it can apply to a much broader range of discourse than represented by most of the submissions we have received over the past year. Little except scholarly work of a particularly circumscribed nature—usually determined by the section meetings at the convention—has come to us, and if calling the journal a review instead of a bulletin will encourage people to submit work they would not otherwise have thought to send us, then the different name will have been more than justified. To answer the various inquiries all at once, then : yes, we will continue to publish the best scholarly articles we can come by, but we hope to be able to persuade contributors that much is contained in that term—criticism, biography, history, book and film and even music reviews, the personal essay—anything, in other words, appealing to a readership of professional literary people, whose province, theoretically, all knowledge is. This is not a statement of editorial policy but rather a sanguine description of what we would like to invite from the membership. The editors are interested in encouraging and publishing good writing, on a variety of topics (mindful always, of course, of this particular readership's common interest in letters), and beyond that they hope simply to let the policy find its own length and breadth. This first issue of the Review coincides with the rather handsome renovation of the RMMLA headquarters, the cost for which was absorbed by our host institution, the University of Utah. The members of the Secretariat would like to extend a much-belated public thanks to Academic Vice-President Pete D. Gardner and last year's Acting Dean of the College of Humanities Ruth E. Jones for their support, which at one point, when the Association's own budget was perilously low, took the form of substantial cash allocations. We would like also to thank the new Dean of the College, Malcolm O. Sillars, for his continued support, and the chairmen of the Departments of English and Foreign Languages, Milton Voigt and Robert E. Helbling, for providing office space and the furniture to fill it. And finally we wish to thank last year's President of RMMLA, Richard J. Cummings, who gently, tactfully, and skillfully oversaw the transfer of the Association to its new home, interceded in all the right places, and provided constant guidance and reassurance to the new executive secretary and the new editor, who took over their jobs in the middle of a year and were often bemused. F.F. ...