The Jewish Seder, the Catholic Mass, and the American Thanksgiving draw people together to honor the past, in such a way that participants have the sense of being present at a sacred event. In live performances of heroic narrative, the poets also dissolve the screen separating the world of myth from the world of every day, by impersonating the hero and by having characters address words simultaneously to an audience inside the poem and the audience outside. The audience and the hero of song meet face to face through the medium of the feast. The dinner table, which joins the listeners with their heroic past, stretches back through all the generations of previous listeners and ahead through all the generations of future listeners. Those present at any given performance join with their ancestors and descendants in affirming the values of their culture that hold them together as a group.

We are looking for papers on how the feast is used to dissolve spacial and temporal boundaries or to preserve memory and civilized values. Send abstracts to Mary DeForest, crypto@ecentral.com or to the Department of Modern Languages, University of Colorado at Denver, Campus Box 178, PO Box 173364, Denver, Colorado 80217-3364, by October 15, 2000.