Posted on 12/30/2004 3:11:32 AM PST by jalisco555
Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 120th of which begins today in Philadelphia.
Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from "Victorian Buggery" to "Bambi on Top" and the tragically hip "Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to K. D. Lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies."
The convention has become a holiday ritual for journalists, as routine as articles on the banning of Christmas crèches in public places, and every year a goodly number of those scholars tempt journalists to write articles, like this one, noting some of the wackier-sounding papers presented.
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association barely registered on the public consciousness for its first century. Professors attended to doze through papers about Chaucer and Emerson, schmooze one another and lobby for posts at more prestigious campuses. But in the 1980's the conference became the site of annual skirmishes between old-school traditionalists and the increasing powerful new breed of postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists and queer-theory advocates.
The traditionalists insisted on subjecting literature to close textual and historical analysis; the newcomers seemed more intent on retrofitting classic works into currently trendy political theories on race, gender and sexuality.
By the 1990's those skirmishes had helped start the so-called culture wars, and the association had been so overrun by theory that the Old Guard formed their own anti-M.L.A., the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which held its 10th annual conference in November in New Orleans.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly academic journal, has said that this intramural battle of eggheads first went public at the 1989 Modern Language Association convention, when The New York Times noted a paper titled "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." Though downright demure compared to some papers at subsequent conferences, it sparked a public scandal and became a totem, some scholars believe, in the neoconservatives' attacks against the "campus radicals."
Basking in this unaccustomed level of public notice, Modern Language Association scholars brought increasingly attention-grabbing papers to the convention through the 1990's, "queering" the "canon," some said, and championing the "postcolonial," proposing wild theories about everything from comic books to hip-hop to television and movies. Last year, perhaps hoping to put a stop to the trend, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced its first Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative M.L.A. Paper Titles (a k a the Provokies) but this year the Chronicle decided to drop the awards. Scott McLemee, a senior Chronical writer, explained that "crafting titles to get them written about and attacked in the press used to be exciting.
"Now it's become a reflex, and their hearts aren't really in it anymore."
However, from this year's several thousand entries, the Provokies may still have a long, robust life.
After two solid decades "queered" remains a major preoccupation, evidenced by titles like "She's Just Like Alvy Singer! Kissing Jessica Stein and the Postethnic Jewish Lesbian," "The Lesbian Mammy," "Queering World War II," "t.A.T.u. You! The Global Politics of Faux Lesbian Pop" (t.A.T.u., meaning tattoo) is a Russian female pop group), and "A Place for Giggling Field Hands: Queer Power and Social Equality in the Mid-20th-Century Plantation Myth." Then there's the race/sexuality/avant-gardist trifecta of "Feeling Around in the Dark: Black Queer Experimental Poetry."
Tragic hipness, multicultural agendizing and an almost abject embrace of low/popular culture converge in titles like " 'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude,' " an entire session dedicated to papers on Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," "Urban Expressionism: Theater, Ritual, and the Hip-Hop Generation's Black Arts Movement," "Utopia in the Borderlands; or, Long Live El Vez the King" (El Vez is a Latino Elvis impersonator), and "A Pynch in Time: The Postmodernity of Prenational Philadelphia in Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and Mark Knopfler's 'Sailing to Philadelphia' " (Mr. Knopfler is a rocker best known for wanting his MTV). The clunkiness of all this suggests that eggheads are still nerds, but it that some of them are terribly self-conscious about it now.
Clearly they still have a lot of sex on their minds (and time on their hands), judging from titles that range from the painful-sounding "Wandering Genitalia in Late Medieval German Literature and Culture" to the salacious "(Post) Feminist (Porno) Graphics, à la Française" to the achingly 90's "The Cyberjunkie and Cyberporn Princess: Reflections on the Virtual Reality of a Subjectless Asian American Critique." This is the type of theory the Berkeley professor Frederick Crews famously satirized in his 2001 Modern Language Association parody "Postmodern Pooh."
And there's much, much more. What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America's college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago. There is, in fact, something achingly 90's about the whole affair. The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop. Citing Professor Crews's book in The Partisan Review last year, Sanford Pinsker said: "In my better moods, I try to convince myself that 'Postmodern Pooh' marks the end of the arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies into a laughingstock; in my darker moments, however, I fear that there are other, even more outrageous would-be celebrities hoping to cash in on whatever post-postmodernism turns out to be."
Or, as Mr. McLemee put it: "The circus is looking pretty threadbare, and the ones trying to do the freak show aspect of it are looking silly now." And yes, many believe that the press is encouraging them by continuing to pay attention.
Ping.
What a queer gathering.
There's more to the MLA than these papers, as I'm sure you know.
They essentially set the standard for student's modern English study, grammar, language and what is accepted as standard written English in schools and standardized testing today. Even Catholic schools adhere to the MLA standards.
The MLA cannot be dismissed lightly, imho. They must be watched carefully.
Another knight in the service against post-structuralism, I see. All the best to you, sir! Fight the good fight.
When I was in school in the mid-90s, many of my professors were Friends of Dorothy. It's nice to see nothing has changed.
I still would like to see that "Queering World War II" paper. It should be good for a few laughs.
As much as anything else the MLA is a job fair, and there are a lot more applicants than there are academic jobs, especially the plum tenure-track jobs. Sometimes I wonder if these bizarre papers are all done by grad students just trying to get noticed and stand out from the pack.
Maybe the "Giggling Field Hands" read that paper and that's why they're giggling.
I certainly agree with your main point. English departments are having a hard time recruiting majors because studying English isn't about reading great literature anymore, it's about anti-Americanism and impenetrable theory. No serious person of a scholarly bent wants to go near it. A shame, but they are making themselves slowly irrelevant. I suspect the tide is slowly turning on our favor, though.
Modern/Post-Modern liberalism in a nutshell. Every organization/institution that has been 'queered' by the genital-centric reductionists is in the same position. That includes everything from our military to our educational system to our government.
It seems so appropriate for this to be held in the city of brotherly love.....
We have a family member who's attending. And finding that out the hard way. Again.
Academia can be a very cruel place, particularly if you are a woman. No for-profit business could treat it's people so shabbily and hope to survive.
"It seems so appropriate for this to be held in the city of brotherly love....."
A pilot friend of mine says the correct term is the city of brotherly loath.
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