Lessons from the Past? Leigh Dale and Jennifer McDonell Today, how can we not speak of the university? . . . Have I said how one must not speak, today, of the university? Or have I rather spoken as one should not do today, within the University? Only others can answer. Beginning with you. — Jacques Derrida (1983: 3, 20) L et us begin with the frst keyword in our title, lesson, whose frst English meaning the OED traces to the 1580s: “an occurrence from which something can be learned” (from Middle English, from Old French leçon, from Latin lectionem [nominative lectio]), “a reading,” a noun of action from the past participle stem of legere, “to read.” The word’s early derivations richly suggest, as does the complex history of English as a discipline, its entanglement in other narratives and other disciplines. Lesson, from the thirteenth-century word for “a reading aloud from the Bible,” can also refer to a portion of scripture read in divine service — hence, to religion and English literature, as Alison Wood’s essay discusses — and reading aloud (recitation and memoriza- tion). This is opposed to the more recent practice of silently reading long, complex texts in the vernacular for the purposes of academic study, which must be, as Catherine Robson’s work has brilliantly dem- onstrated, part of the reframing of the story of education in the second half of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. Today a lesson can refer not simply to reading but to the form in which knowledge is disseminated: a lecture, session, class, or seminar. In this context the word is likely to evoke mixed affects and emotions, even recalling the experiences of rebuke, in the sense of an event that serves as a warning: let that be a lesson to you. Lessons from the past, then, carry a potentially heavy responsibility. Modern Language Quarterly 75:2 (June 2014) DOI 10.1215/00267929-2416563 © 2014 by University of Washington Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-pdf/75/2/119/442711/MLQ752_01DMcDonell_FF.pdf by guest on 20 May 2020