MLA’s Alternate Reality

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | January 1, 2025 | Graham Hillard

[karpov]

Proposition: Human flourishing will not be advanced at the upcoming meeting of the Modern Language Association, which begins next Thursday in New Orleans. Evidence: The conference program includes among its listed sessions the following gibberish, gossip, and complaint:

“Contemporary Astrological Media of Minoritarian Self-Making”; “The Queer Conspiracy of Illegibility”; “Against Resilience: Laziness as Refusal”; “How to Be a Woman Though Male: On Uncertainty and Trans Pedagogy”; “Embracing the Low Road? Hating ‘Men’ in Manifestos”; “The (In)Visibility of Claudia Rankine’s and Donald Glovers’s Public Responses to the 2015 Charleston Shooting”; “‘Just a Young Boy in the Hood’: Imaginative Cartographies of the Ends in UK Rap’s Live Performances”; “Third Space: Queering America in Early American Literature.” Lest the reader assume I am merely cherry-picking embarrassing session titles, he or she is invited to consider the following:

Among the conference’s events are one session and one presentation dedicated to the American master and Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway, while three sessions and four presentations are concerned with “whiteness.” Of the nine sessions or presentations that take Shakespeare as their topic, at least five pair the Bard with an obnoxious progressive preoccupation (e.g., “Disability and Homonationalism in Shakespeare’s Pericles”). Though the Fireside Poets dominated American letters for a century, program searches for Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell turn up exactly nothing. So, as far as I can tell, does a search for Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson’s only rival for the title of Greatest American Poet.

[ConservativeMind]

I have my old MLA Handbook in storage.

I liked it, but won’t follow the new stupid stuff they want, today.

[SaveFerris]

(“How to Be a Woman Though Male: On Uncertainty and Trans Pedagogy”)

Ah, the Democrats. Again.

Democrat Joe Biden and Democrat Barack Hussein Obama approve!!

[GOPJ]

Yawn

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“Yawn”

True. But these insane people are (or will become) teachers, professors, librarians, writers of dictionaries, corporate HR people. They are nothing but termites undermining the very foundations of our society.

[Skooz]

MLA is a lost cause.

I notated all my term papers Turabian style just for spite.

[hinckley buzzard]

MLA has been an intellectual black hole as long as I can remember. This is par for the course.

[GOPJ]

You’re right on that...