For all those humanity-type people

This choice calls for confidence, perhaps more than some of us feel right now. And that brings me back, perhaps too abruptly, to the thing that most deeply defines and concerns us: language. Advanced expertise in reading, writing, speaking, comprehending, exploring, explaining language—this is our work. We know about this, about language used well, badly, honestly, manipulatively, in the name of self-interest, self-realization, collective identities, common goods, in struggles for revelation or in numbing repetitive distraction. We are aware of the immense social, moral, political, and psychological stakes that the public use of language carries. We know the rewards of complex texts, where depth of understanding is created by layering, texture, rhythm, and nuance, by the soaring of the imagination on an image or a phrase, by violence and unease where histories of struggle and discord leave their marks. We know the difficulty and value of learning to operate in multiple languages, not just in the everyday, but in deep contact with texts and psychic and symbolic worlds other than one’s own. We know about the vast archives in dozens of languages, ancient and modern, that will be lost forever if we don’t continue to produce expert, committed readers of them. It is important to recognize and honor these achievements among ourselves and assert them in the public eye. We can’t cede to spin doctors the profound realization that language creates reality and history. We can’t cede to security experts the imperative for developing multilingual expertise. Perhaps these are things we scholars of language and literature need to keep in our own minds and the minds of our fellow citizens as we navigate these troubling times.

MARY LOUISE PRATT--The author is Silver Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University and 2003 President of the Modern Language Association. A version of the article was originally presented at the 2003 ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar West in Snowbird, Utah.