I suppose it’s almost always popular to criticize official organizations–whether the church, the state, or the MLA (Modern Language Association). At its best, the impulse to criticize gives rise to necessary judgments and corrections, as I believe to be the case, for example, with Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. I’ve grown accustomed, then, to snarky comments about the MLA, which no doubt calls for as much correction as any organization of similar size and status. As many readers will already know, the MLA is the official organization in the U.S. of scholars dedicated to the study of language, literature, and culture from the Middle Ages to the present–scholars of ancient languages, literatures, and cultures have their own organizations, though many MLA members are expert in ancient languages, and vice-versa. Whatever room there might be in the MLA for improvement, I find its yearly conference to be an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking occasion. Years ago, when I decided to give up my career as a secondary-school teacher and pursue a Ph.D. in English, I had a highly charged dream that included the titles of conference panels scrolling up a computer screen. This image of one opportunity for intellectual engagement after another in constant motion stands pretty well for what the yearly MLA conference provides.
Perhaps I should mention that I write these words, sitting at my mother’s house in southern Indiana, having just come from the 2006 MLA conference in Philadelphia, so I’m still rather aglow with excitement about the proceedings. The conference provides only enough time to attend a small fraction of the panels and papers presented; nevertheless, I was able to hear about, among other things, continuity and disjunction in literary periodization, the relationship between Leibnitzian monadology and contemporary nightclud culture, the missing person in contemporary literary theory, the hard edge of Yeatsian selfhood, the meanings of Pound’s pro-Fascist broadcasts and their relationships to his poetry, problems of early modern historiography, and the relationship between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the politics of its own day as well as ours. My own panel, chaired by John P. Walter, on “Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy at Twenty-Five,” provided some stilumating discussion that let me know that I’m going to have to keep working hard just to keep up with the past as well as the future. It was perhaps fitting that the final paper of the final panel that I attended was delivered by J. Hillis Miller, on the crossroads between philosophy and literary study. Hillis Miller was some years ago the professor of a very influential undergraduate professor of mine, Steven C. Scheer, so I feel a kind of kinship with him. His rich and resonant voice reminds me a bit of Charles Kurault. Some readers will no doubt recall Charles Kurault’s “On the Road” series some years ago. With Hillis Miller we were on on the road of deconstruction, philosophy of the human lifeworld, and points beyond.
As if all this was not enough, yesterday the woman–Mary Szybist–whose husband I am went on the road up to Terre Haute to visit some friends of ours, Traci Kyle (a brilliant and deeply accomplished high school teacher) and her husband Richard House (who teaches English at Rose-Hulman College). In the course of our conversation, Richard, who is a maven of contemporary experimental fiction and high theory, told us about the panels he attended at the recent MLA conference, as well as his own panel, on the fiction of Richard Powers. He convinced me that I must begin reading Powers, which I shall soon do. I’m always working to catch up, struggling to stay one step ahead of the encroachments of my own ignorance.
At the end of the panel that he put together, Charles Altieri said that, having heard the papers delivered, he is confident about the state of our literary studies. I can only concur.