Work in Progress

A scholar who set out to count the number of times the word the occurred in Shakespeare would be chagrined to learn when he finished the job that someone else had had the same idea, counted faster. To spare scholars such disappointments, James M. Osborn, a young Yale research associate, this week undertook to tell them what their fellow scholars were doing. With an assistant (Robert G. Sawyer), he compiled a comprehensive list of studies being made by researchers in the humanities throughout the world. His list, Work in Progress (not to be confused with the famed working title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake), was produced by the international Modern Humanities Research Association and will be revised and published annually. Work in Progress lists 5,577 studies. (A sample compilation last year listed less than half as many.)

Favorite subjects of research are Shakespeare (102 studies), Milton (46), Chaucer (44), Balzac (40), Goethe (39) and Spenser (33). U. S. writers in whom scholars are most interested are Whitman (16), Melville, Emerson and Poe (14 each). Compiler Osborn found many duplications, e.g.: Two scholars, at Southern Methodist and Ohio State Universities, are compiling bibliographies of Poet Archibald MacLeish's works.

Some odd current research topics:

>The Proverb Concerning the Bird that Fouls Its Own Nest.

>History of the Word "Humour."

>Political Slang.

>The Forth-Putting Woman in Middle English Romance.

>The Business Man in American Fiction, 1865-1900.

>A Vocabulary Study of the Congressional Record Since 1900.

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