Free Republic

Sex and the MLA by: Bethany Stotts, January 11, 2008 Chicago, Ill— It seems like some professors simply can’t get their mind off sexuality and have allowed this fixation to the color their professional work. A teacher of Lesbian Bisexual Gay Transgender Queer (LBGTQ) studies at Santa Clara University, Professor Linda Garber asserts that she had, as an untenured professor, been nervous about teaching sex in class “and I decided, well, maybe for just a few years I could teach sexuality not sex.” She added “It didn’t work that way, partly because you find that it’s so normalized you forget;...

Pleasure Now or Never by: Bethany Stotts, January 07, 2008 Chicago, Ill- At a 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) “Pleasure Now!” panel discussing the dreary emotional malaise permeating many classrooms, professors called for an integration of environmental, spiritual, and pop culture references into the classroom. The panel’s “Pleasure Now!” “manifesto for change” exhorts professors to “reassess the disciplinary habits that our generation has been so vital to articulating.”..... The authors of the manifesto also attribute their pedagogical angst to uniquely capitalist roots. “The corporatization of the university, escalating expectations for productivity, external monitoring of outcomes, scarcity of resources, and...

Politically Incorrect Literature by: Mary Kapp, July 23, 2007 At a time when fewer and fewer English professors can actually answer questions about literature, college students in search of America’s literary tradition are more likely to find it in books such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature than they are, say, at the Modern Language Association annual convention. “Culture is actually more important than politics,” is the philosophy of Elizabeth Kantor, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. At the Eagle Forum Collegiate conference on June 22, Kantor recognized the small political...

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...