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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Politics, Social Change, and the Conflict of Generations

The Panama Canal Policy of the United States

The American Alternative in Church-State Relations

Upton Sinclair and Hollywood

Duerrenmatt's "The Tunnel": A Criticism in Dialog

The New Style in Film and Drama

VERSE

The Girls in Steno

Ceremony

To My Father

Two Scientists

The Oldest Living Resident of Cherokee County

The White Manor

N. Y. State Scholarship Examination

Reunion

Coins in My Violin Case

The Forms of Water

The Quietest Place

The Assassin's View

Abstract

in this issue. . .

THIS JANUARY 1970 we begin not simply a new year but a new decade--one that we are bound to hope will grow less violent and more certain of purpose as it moves along. Perhaps the editor has seen too many decades, or perhaps it is the world that has seen too many, but we cannot remember a sense of exacerbation or self-distrust or sheer frustration more intense and bitter than the one now prevailing. Birth-pangs of a better world, shall we hope? Why in times like these men of good will can be brought to accept a position of responsibility is a baffling question; they are not so much installed in office as thrown into the arena. But since there have never been and doubtless never will be any millenary solutions, despite the demands and protests of the a-historical young, it is well for us that men of good will continue to accept ungrateful office and to take up the world's business one exasperating problem at a time.

THE WORLD'S and, more particularly, our country's problems are very much with us in a January issue that ranges from a study of politics, social change, and the conflict of generations through our relationship to the Republic of Panama and the Canal Zone to the alternatives facing us in church-state relations, with special reference to a case now pending in the Supreme Court. We turn aside with something like relief for a backward glance at Upton Sinclair's battle with Hollywood--a settled problem, that one--and then forward to the poignant issue of life versus death in a study of Duerrenmatt's story "The Tunnel" and finally to an examination of ambiguities and realities in the new film and drama. Our authors are ALLAN LARSON of Loyola University, Chicago; DUNCAN CAMERON of the law firm of Appleton, Rice & Perrin, New York and Washington; STANLEY FEINGOLD of The City College of the University of New York; PETER SODERBERGH of the University of Pittsburgh; BETTY KINNETT of Hampton, Virginia; and ALAN CASTY of Monica City College and the University of California in Los Angeles.

SEVEN years ago this January we published Allan Larson's timely article--no less timely today--on the problem of arms control and disarmament. Now we are hearing from him again and in that area of generational conflict and social change to which we have devoted much anxious, even exasperated thought of late. Since his first appearance in the QUARTERLY Professor Larson has completed his Ph. D. in political science at Northwestern University, where he was a Norman Wait Harris Fellow, and is currently an associate professor of political science at Loyola University of Chicago. He has published articles in The Educational Forum, Social Studies, Social Education, and The Delphian Quarterly, and a chapter on "Great Britain in World Affairs" in Patterns for Modern Living: Political Patterns published by The Delphian Society in 1966. He is at work on a book dealing with European political systems.

His LONG-STANDING interest in the Panama Canal, writes Duncan Cameron, goes back to a doctoral dissertation on the Canal and to a brief residence in Panama. The present study is the "result of meetings of a study group formed by the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York to consider the United States' relations with Panama." Mr. Cameron, who holds the A. B. and the LL. B. from Harvard University and the Ph.D. from Columbia University, was formerly a deputy assistant general counsel of the Agency for International Development and is presently associated with the New York law firm of Appleton, Rice & Perrin as their resident Washington partner.

AMERICAN political thought is the primary field of Stanley Feingold, who views the relations of church and state as a too often neglected area. The present essay is part of a large-scale analysis of American political thought. Now an associate professor of political science at City College of the University of New York, Professor Feingold has also taught at Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles as well as on educational television (Channel 13) in New York. During the spring of 1968, under the auspices of the U. S. Information Agency, he lectured throughout Japan to audiences of college professors, students, and newspaper editors on the forthcoming American presidential election.

HAZY recollections of Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign filtered back into the editorial memory during the reading of Peter Soderbergh' s entertaining account of the war with Hollywood. Depression years! They no longer seem so bad in the light of today's problems. Professor Soderbergh holds degrees from Amherst College and Harvard University and the Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin. He is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he instructs in the departments of Secondary Education, Theatre Arts, and Foundations of Education. He is a member of the Society of Cinema Studies. His articles have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, North Carolina Historical Review, Discourse, University of Dayton Review, Mississippi Quarterly, The Centennial Review, and many other scholarly journals.

THERE are words in Duerrenmatt's story about a train plunging deeper and deeper into a tunnel without end which have haunted us from our first reading of Betty Kinnett' s "Criticism in Dialog"; since the train is lighted and the tunnel is not, the passengers mostly ignore what they cannot see: But outside, on the other side of the window, the tunnel was still there. From this ultimate problem it is a relief to tum away and consider the pleasant now-ness of Betty Kinnett, housewife and writer, of Hampton, Virginia, with a mathematician husband in the Civil Service, a son at Wabash College, and a younger son in preparatory school at Christchurch, Virginia. Mrs. Kinnett has the A. B. cum laude in English literature and the A. M., both from Oberlin College. She has taught at Hanover College in Indiana, has worked for a Chicago publishing company and for the Civil Service in Washington, D.C., and has done some newspaper work. She has published a short story in Iota and is now at work on a novel.

AS RECENTLY as January 1968 Alan Casty brought us up to date on British rebels and their films. He has now made a broader and more searching study of the modern film with particular reference to influence and interrelationships between film and drama. Mr. Casty still teaches English at Monica City College and film history and aesthetics at U. C. L.A. This past summer The Museum of Modem Art brought out his book The Films of Robert Rossen and late in this year Harper and Row will publish his book of film theory and aesthetics for the general audience, The Dramatic Art of the Film. In March Prentice-Hall will publish his The Way It Is: A Collection for Understanding and Response, which he tells us is "an anthology with an interesting combination of various kinds of visual materials and linear materials (words) to further reading improvement."

AMONG our Poets, ALASTAIR MacDONALD of Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland, continues the series of his poems begun in our most recent (October 1969) issue . . . EMILIE GLEN, our Greenwich Village poet-in-residence, reappears following a year's absence with her engaging version of a strolling Paganini-poet . . . MICHAEL PAUL NOVAK of Saint Mary College, Xavier, Kansas, revisits us after an absence prolonged since October 1966 (he tells us that he won a Kansas City Star award this past year for his poetry and read his work on the University of Washington's radio station in Seattle) . . . and from halfway across the world comes EDITH SHIFFERT of Kyoto Junior College, Kyoto, Japan, with another poetic mingling of Occident and Orient.

TURNING to the newcomers, we welcome VIRGINIA ELSON, who took the A. M. degree at Columbia University, taught an honors course at Kenmore, New York, traveled through Europe on sabbatical leave in 1967-68 preparing slide-tape programs for use in advanced high school courses in English and humanities, and this year is living on the edge of South Pond, Steuben County, New York, "as an experiment in many things and ways." Her poems have appeared in Epos, Folio, Eikon, Small Pond, and Best in Poetry 1969. . . . Proceeding, as is our wont, in alphabetical order, we introduce MURIEL B. INGHAM, holder of the A. M. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California in Riverside and teacher of medieval literature and Latin at San Diego State College. She has published her poetry in various "little" magazines, won first prize in 1956 for a book of poetry at the Southwest Writers Conference in Corpus Christi, Texas, and has written or is at work on scholarly articles dealing with medieval literature. . . . STEPHEN SHU NING LIU is an assistant professor of English at Northern Montana College, Havre, Montana. Born in Chungking, China, he came to this country in 1952 as a student and since that time has taken his A. B. at Wayland Baptist College in Texas and his A. M. at the University of Texas and has done further graduate study at the University of Tennessee. His poems have appeared in The Quicksilver Anthology of College Poetry (Los Angeles), The Western Humanities Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. Still other poems will appear shortly in The Muse, The Prairie Poet, and the Michigan Quarterly Review . . . . In DONAL MAHONEY we welcome a fellow editor. He is with Clarentian Publications in Chicago, has had poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Wisconsin Review, Meridian, Quartet, The Goddard Journal, Chicagoland, New City, Foxfire, Outlet, Encore, and (of all delightful titles, he says) the Road Apple Review. He reviews fiction for Book Week and is working on a first book of poems, The Narrowback. . . . CARL MITCHAM, currently a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Colorado, with "wife and three kids," has published scholarly articles in Cross Currents and Classical Philology and poetry and fiction in a number of the little magazines, including arx, Worksheet Directory, and Poetry Newsletter. . . . We must claim NIKKI PATRICK as peculiarly our own, since she is a native of Pittsburg, has been enrolled at Kansas State College of Pittsburg since 1964 (her freshman year on a scholarship essay competition of the Kansas Peace Officers Association), and has been employed on our city newspaper, the Pittsburg Headlight-Sun, as news writer and proofreader. Thirty of her poems have appeared in such journals as Kauri, the Mendocino Robin, Scrivener's Magazine, Outcast, Folio, the Kansas City Times, and others. She is presently writing a novel and completing her master's degree in English. . . . LEONARD UBERMAN, our alphabetical last, was trained to be a musician, majoring in French horn and composition at the Dalcroze Music School in New York, and for several years he played professionally with the Westchester Symphony and other musical organizations. At present he is employed in the production department of the American Book Company and is employing his leisure time in the translation of Housman's A Shropshire Lad into German. His poems have appeared in Bitterroot, The Antioch Review, Quartet, and Poetry Newsletter.

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