I have friends at the convention right now and will be seeing them tomorrow (I live in Philly). I agree with you. When Mr. Geeky got his Ph.D., his family spent a great deal of time after the ceremony going through the program and making fun of the Literature dissertation titles. I'm in a book club and I try to bring some of my training as a literary scholar to bear on what we're reading. It usually goes over quite well. There are a couple of other women in the group who are quite open to more theoretical approaches. I've experienced the ridicule within the academy as well. And there are real discrepancies. Typically, the science faculty get paid 10-20% more than the humanities faculty. That's been true at every institution I've been at. I do think, though, that there are a handful of people studying literature who give it a bad name. You run into them every once in a while. They can't think or speak anything but theory-speak and that's a turnoff for a lot of people--an
Sympathies. People tell me that history is either boring or obvious, so why should I claim it's hard work (any part but maybe the teaching, that is)? And they make fun of our historical conferences or grants funding research almost as gleefully as for the MLA. *sigh*
Amen, sister! These stupid articles come out every single year at the end of December, and they are always completely unrepresentive of the conference and of literary study in general. It's just such bad journalism!
I've only been to MLA once since I landed my job, and I have to say that I found it fairly stressful, even though I wasn't having to go through the whole interview anxiety thing. But so many other people were anxious that the entire atmosphere seemed permeated with it. Do you have this experience, or was I just reliving the horrible three years on the job market and projecting that anxiety on to everyone else?
I too will be at MLA in December next year; but I'll be on a search committee, interviewing candidates--it will be strange to experience MLA from that perspective.
I've never been to MLA--in fact, wanting to avoid what I'd heard of it had something to do with my decision to leave my grad program and seek a pure teaching job--so I can't really speak to whether the inevitable spoofs this time of year have any basis in reality. But I find interesting your comment about how those outside the profession think our only relevant work is that which has an impact on the classroom. When I was working on my PhD, my frustration with the profession was the sense that the only relevant work happened OUTSIDE the classroom: articles published, conferences presented at, etc. Teaching was what you did to enable you to pay the bills so you could do research. That attitude helped to drive me away.
You are certainly correct that the majority of presentations at this and other conferences are focused on mainstream topics and don't call attention to themselves with funny titles. (And it's also true that you could find essays and presentations 40 years ago with titles most "journalists" would find equally silly or abstruse.) You are also correct that most uninformed commentators think literary scholarship ought to be about teaching, since by and large they consider literature a "soft" subject.But you have to admit that some of what Scott McLemee says in that article is also true: some literary scholars go out of their way to get a rise out of people with outlandish topics, and it makes literary scholarship look foolish.
I hear you, Mel. And conversely, as someone who has done academic work in history and politics, it really drives me nuts when journalists go in to places like, for example, the Sudan and pretend to tell us the "facts" of the situation, when very often their reporting shows that they have no freakin' clue about the social or political history of that place.
Maybe academics just need to start calling out journalists on their crap.
The point of these articles isn't journalism, right, but an expression of resentment? Whether the author him- or herself (mostly my sense is that these articles are penned by males) is resentful is less at issue than the sense of the public at large, or at least the public that would read an article on the MLA in the Times. Irrelevant pointy heads and all that. It's the same sort of cultural attack that routinely comes out in their music columns, few of which ever have a good word to say about contemporary music. And they keep bashing the most pointy-headed of all music, serialism, though it's been dead for at least 40 years.
jwb
Journalists, especially those at the NYT, spend much more time pontificating than doing investigations or research. ("Two guys in a bar in Utah" seemed to be the source of everything they got on the way the election was going.) I think they assume that because we also deal with words, that any expertise we claim must be based on ego and fancy. Surely spending years digging through archives doesn't really teach you anything . . . Or maybe Strausbaugh didn't research the MLA enough to know that we do that sometimes. What a deep and ignorant insult to years and years of labor! I was at this MLA and was surrounded, perhaps because I am an 18th-c-ist, by brilliant, responsible, thoughtful scholars. I saw one bad attention-grabbing paper by the kind of person that article mocks, and she was rightfully embarrassed by the questions she received. It is odd to be in a profession that is inherently offensive, though all we do is try to spread knowledge, while evil runs rampant and unchecked i
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