{"id":78938,"date":"1984-02-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1984-02-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-mla-centennial-follies\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:48:16","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:48:16","slug":"the-mla-centennial-follies","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-mla-centennial-follies\/","title":{"rendered":"The MLA centennial follies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2019Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
\nAppear in writing or in judging ill;
\nBut, of the two, less dang\u2019rouse is th\u2019 offence
\nTo tire our patience, than mislead our sense. <\/em>
\n\u2014Alexander Pope, in \u201cAn Essay on Criticism\u201d<\/p>\n

I<\/span>t had been a good many years since fortune had first brought us to enter the labyrinthine purlieus of the Modern Language Association\u2019s annual convention, and memories of our early experience of that event were not so redolent of pleasure\u2014or, for that matter, of intelligence and enlightenment\u2014that we had reason to feel a keen sense of regret over the many meetings we had missed in the interval. It was over thirty years ago, in fact, that our earliest encounters with this holiday-season jamboree of the country\u2019s literary scholars and their apprentices took place, and our occasional return visits to the scenes of their revels over the years had come more and more to assume the character of journeys to a foreign country in which we had once, long ago, thought of taking up residence. Even in that distant era, to be sure, no one had ever claimed that the atmosphere was enchanting or the blandishments irresistible, but the place itself was nonetheless renowned for conducting its affairs with a good deal of confidence, authority, and rigor. If it did not earn a place in one\u2019s affections, there was at least never any question about its identity or purpose. If it was known to be dull and to offer few appeals to the literary mind, this was mainly because its principal industry\u2014scholarship in the then prevailing orthodox mode\u2014did not customarily entail the kind of labor which lent itself to the excitements and perturbations to be found in the neighboring literary landscape.<\/p>\n

Thirty years ago, such perturbations as could be found at an MLA<\/span> convention were likely to have derived from the debate over the New Criticism and its influence on the teaching of literature. This was a highly divisive issue at the time, and a good many academic careers were made (or broken) on the basis of its resolution. The scholars in charge of the MLA<\/span> held out as long as they could against this dreaded incursion into the realm they had long dominated without challenge. Then the day came when, the epigones of the New Criticism having grown too numerous and too powerful to be resisted, the MLA<\/span> threw open its doors to them. Make no mistake about it: the debate over the New Criticism was sometimes fierce, and the issues it raised were anything but trivial. (Cleanth Brooks has lately given us an interesting account of them in an essay entitled, \u201cIn Search of the New Criticism.\u201d<\/a>[1]<\/a>) Yet it is with a certain poignancy and even nostalgia that we look back on that episode today\u2014now that the standards of literary culture shared by both sides of that old debate are, along with the rigor and decorum of the period, so completely gone with the wind.<\/p>\n

Much else, of course, had happened in more recent years\u2014to the MLA<\/span> and its annual convention, to the study of literature in the universities, and to the larger cultural world which exerts a direct influence on both. For one thing, there had been the radical takeover of the MLA<\/span> in 1968, and in more recent years the rising tide of academic feminist studies. It was in the hope of acquiring a closer look at the consequences of these and other developments that we set out to attend the association\u2019s most recent meeting. It seemed a particularly propitious moment to do so. This year\u2019s convention\u2014held, according to custom, during the last week of December\u2014marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the MLA<\/span>. It was therefore to be expected that a special effort would be made to offer the association\u2019s membership something in the way of an exemplary program on this occasion.<\/p>\n

The MLA<\/span> program committee could certainly not be accused of stinting on the sheer number<\/em> of sessions which it served up at this year\u2019s convention. The official Centennial Program, published in November as a special number of PMLA<\/em><\/span>, the association\u2019s journal, listed nearly seven hundred separate sessions, and others were added after the program went to press. (One of the additions was an evening reading by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.) These hundreds of forums were divided between the two Manhattan hotels\u2014the New York Hilton and the Sheraton Center\u2014where the convention was in session for four days and three nights (December twenty-seventh to thirtieth), and even the most dedicated auditor could not hope to attend more than a fraction of them.<\/p>\n

Not that anyone was expected to. A convention of this sort is designed to cater to a great many specialized interests, and the MLA<\/span> long ago gave up anything resembling a rigorous standard in determining what could, or could not, be discussed under its auspices. If the Division on Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature wished to hear a lecture on \u201cObstetrics, Gynecology, and Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth Century,\u201d then the program committee was only too happy to schedule such an event as one of three sessions with the fetching title of \u201cSluts, Slatterns, Soubrettes, and Seductresses.\u201d If the Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature wished to devote a session to \u201cHomosexuality and Biography\u201d and the Gay Caucus for the Modern Languages wished to have one on \u201cLesbian and Gay Theater Today,\u201d then these too were readily added to the program. Likewise the Marxist Literary Group was welcome to organize a session on \u201cThe Future of Marxist Feminism and the Problem of History,\u201d while the Radical Caucus in English and the Modern Languages arranged a discussion of \u201cThe Politics of the New Formalism\u201d and the International Brecht Society devoted its panel to \u201cBrecht and Women\u201d (principal paper: \u201cFemale Heterosexual Sublimation and Resolutions of Mother-Son Incest Bonding in Certain Brecht Plays\u201d). \u201cDoris Lessing and Africa\u201d was the subject chosen by the Doris Lessing Society, while the Division on Film gave its attention to \u201cTheoretical Approaches to Television.\u201d<\/p>\n

The MLA<\/span> program committee, obviously well-practiced in such matters, proved for the most part to be very shrewd in estimating the kind of response that each of the hundreds of topics could be expected to elicit. Thus, the symposium devoted to the theme of \u201cThe Fate of Pleasure,\u201d based (ostensibly) on an essay by the late Lionel Trilling and boasting such academic star-turns as Leo Bersani, Ihab Hassan, and Richard Poirier among the participants, was booked for 10:15 in the morning in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton, where it met with a huge response, whereas the session on \u201cLiterature and Revolution in Central America: Nicaragua and El Salvador\u201d was relegated to much smaller quarters at 7:15 in the evening and did not fill even the modest space allotted to it. Certain topics proved (surprisingly) not to have the drawing power expected of them, however. A session entitled \u201cThe Ghosts of Theology in Contemporary Literary Theory: Deconstruction and the Death of God\u201d was assigned a very large meeting room, but even with its fashionable subject and the redoubtable J. Hillis Miller of Yale University as the chief attraction, it was only sparsely attended at 3:30 in the afternoon. A morning session devoted to the recent work of Raymond Williams, the radical British critic and cultural historian, was, on the other hand, a veritable mob scene, no doubt owing to the participation of Terry Eagleton, the English Marxist critic and theorist, who journeyed from Oxford for the occasion and was greeted by many of those present as little less than the risen messiah.<\/p>\n

Charting a course through this crowded terrain would clearly be no easy matter. The attractions were so many and so various, and the topics\u2014many of them, anyway\u2014so remote from what, as recently as twenty years ago, would have passed muster as legitimate subjects of literary study. Then, too, the remarkable absence of really distinguished senior literary scholars among the speakers on the more traditional literary subjects cast a kind of pall over the proceedings as a whole. It would be invidious to mention the names of the outstanding figures who did not <\/em>participate in the convention\u2019s programs, yet it must be said that their absence was keenly felt. In the intellectual void created by this absence, a great many exotic (not to say grotesque) growths had come to flower.<\/p>\n

Still, our task on this occasion was to listen to what those who now think of themselves as literary scholars actually talk about, and a closer study of the Centennial Program soon revealed that the subjects offered for discussion were not quite as various as they at first had seemed. A great many of them, for example, fell under the general rubric of feminist studies, which have now extended their range to just about every area of literary and cultural research. Thus, on the very first evening of the convention (December twenty-seventh), we were offered sessions on \u201cFallen Women in Victorian Fiction,\u201d \u201cProstitution in English Renaissance Drama,\u201d \u201cThe Power of Subversion: Female Narrative Discourse in Hispanic Literature,” “Female French Poetry: Finding a Feminine Voice,\u201d \u201cThe Poet and the Poem: Race, Sex, and Language in Ingeborg Bachmann,\u201d \u201cFemale Poets of the Italian Cinquecento,\u201d \u201cEllen Glasgow: Feminism and Beyond,\u201d \u201cWoman and Love in Paul Claudel\u2019s Works: A Feminist Outlook,\u201d \u201cWharton\u2019s Women: Victims or Self-Saboteurs?\u201d \u201cThe Relationship of Women\u2019s Studies to the Study of Women and Literature,\u201d and \u201cWomen Making Literary History: The New Generation of Women Writers in the GDR<\/span>,\u201d as well as papers at other sessions on \u201cWomen in Cheever\u201d and \u201cGender and God: The Effect of Sexist Language on Thought.\u201d On subsequent days there were sessions devoted to \u201cFeminist Re-Visions of German Literary History,\u201d \u201cScholarly Approaches to Women\u2019s Writing: Defining Feminist Criticism,\u201d \u201cFeminist Criticism of Shakespeare,\u201d \u201cReading and Sexual Difference,\u201d \u201cThe New Female Writer in Post-Franco Spain,\u201d \u201cIntegrating Women\u2019s Studies into the Foreign Language Classroom: New Problems, New Solutions,\u201d \u201cFeminist Perspectives of Kafka,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

Another large block of meetings was devoted to the theory and practice of radical politics in relation\u2014though sometimes the relation was a little tenuous\u2014to the study of literature and cultural life. We have already mentioned some of these, and one or two others will be discussed below. In the sessions we attended, it was more or less taken for granted that revolution on one or another Marxist model was a good thing. It is doubtful, of course, that everyone attending the MLA<\/span> convention\u2014or even, for that matter, these particular sessions\u2014agreed with the Marxist views they were designed to propagate. Yet to the extent that political ideology was given official sanction in the Centennial Program, that ideology was largely Marxist or feminist or some radical combination of both. No other social or sexual views\u2014except, of course, those deriving from the doctrinaire programs of male homosexuality\u2014found their way into the convention\u2019s program. No one, moreover, seemed to regard all this as a particularly noteworthy phenomenon. In American academic life, this development now seems pretty much taken for granted.<\/p>\n

To aid us in our coverage of the crowded Centennial Program, we invited two colleagues\u2014Samuel Lipman and Bruce Bawer\u2014to attend some of the sessions we could not get to and which they had a special competence to discuss. Their reports appear elsewhere in this issue. What follows, then, are our own notes on the first three days of the convention.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>e began with the official opening session on Tuesday evening, December twenty-seventh\u2014the so-called Centennial Forum devoted to \u201cThe MLA<\/span> and Literary and Linguistic Study and Teaching.\u201d The eight speakers included Ralph Ellison, the distinguished novelist; Geoffrey Marshall, Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Helen H. Vendler of Boston University; and Northrop Frye of the University of Toronto. Yet quite the most illuminating talk was that of Richard Lloyd-Jones of the University of Iowa who spoke on \u201cThe Study and Teaching of Writing.\u201d This was a well-prepared paper\u2014actually the best that we heard at the convention\u2014which traced the impact of such historical developments as the establishment of the land-grant colleges, the G. I. Bill, and the civil rights movement of the Sixties on the teaching of composition to undergraduates. Without polemics or even any evident emotion, it offered many vivid insights into the causes and consequences of the decline in literacy and literary competence among our college students. Professor Lloyd-Jones\u2019s observation, for example, that \u201cthe \u2018Great Society\u2019 eliminated failing grades,\u201d had the kind of historical resonance we hardly expect to encounter on occasions of this sort, and his dour conclusion\u2014that history has forced us now to begin to teach<\/em> writing to our students on an individual basis\u2014almost gave us a sense of hope about a situation so generally accepted as hopeless.<\/p>\n

Professor Vendler, in her address on \u201cThe Study and Teaching of Literature,\u201d left one with a very different impression. Surveying the shifts which had occurred in the study of literature during the century of the MLA<\/span>\u2019s existence, she readily acknowledged that both teachers and students were now more ignorant and ill-equipped to deal with literary study than they used to be, but she found nothing to deplore or lament in this situation. She accepted it with amazing equanimity. The only thing she found worth deploring, in fact, was the reluctance of certain diehards to embrace the now fashionable methodologies of Marxist and deconstructionist literary study. It was a truly odd experience, in this respect, to sit in the audience at the Centennial Forum of the MLA<\/span> and listen to Professor Vendler, a keynote speaker and former president of the association, describe Professor Ren\u00e9 Wellek as \u201can old fogey,\u201d no doubt on the basis of the essay he had just published in The New Criterion<\/em>.<\/a>[2]<\/a> In Professor Vendler\u2019s view, it was silly, if not indeed senile, to proffer such criticism of the current state of literary studies. For after all, she reminded us, the ideas now in fashion are here today and gone tomorrow, and there is no need to choose sides on such questions. She herself, however, seemed quite comfortable with the side she had chosen, no doubt buoyed up in her conviction by an awareness that a great many of the programs at this centennial convention fully supported her views.<\/p>\n

For after all, she reminded us, the ideas now in fashion are here today and gone tomorrow.<\/p>\n

On the following morning, we went directly to the session on Raymond Williams, where, needless to say, there was no question of anyone opposing Marxist methodologies. The first speaker, Pamela McCullum of the University of Calgary, discussed Williams\u2019s theory of tragedy. Although she took Williams to task for, as she put it, a \u201clack of hermeneutic rigor\u201d in his theory, she was nonetheless pleased that he put forward the notion of tragedy as the representation of the failure of revolution, and thus contributed to the achievement of a \u201cde-alienated\u201d society. For her, as for so many Marxists, in a society which had achieved revolution, tragedy would become an obsolete form. We somehow had the impression that Professor McCullum had not devoted much study to societies which had experienced the dealienating delights of Marxist revolution.<\/p>\n

She was followed by Michael Ryan of Miami University in Ohio, whose theme was \u201cScience of Culture or Cultural Politics?\u201d As anyone who has read Professor Ryan\u2019s recent work on Marxism and Deconstruction<\/em><\/a>[3]<\/a> would expect, his was a far more open declaration of political ideology. Calling for the development of political strategies to bring about radical change, he dismissed Williams\u2019s theories as mere \u201csociology.\u201d What was wanted, he insisted, was a greater sense of \u201csocial struggle\u201d in cultural studies. Oddly enough, the concrete examples he cited were all drawn not from literature but from Hollywood films, and it was no surprise, perhaps, that he much preferred the kind of films which had lately been produced in Cuba under the Castro regime. The latter, he avowed, were attempting\u2014among much else, we assume\u2014\u201cto reconstruct male sexuality on more egalitarian lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came Terry Eagleton speaking on \u201cRaymond Williams and Marxism.\u201d In this presentation there was much talk of \u201cbase\u201d and \u201csuperstructure,\u201d and Williams was severely criticized for his failure to ally his theory of \u201ccultural materialism\u201d with what Eagleton was not embarrassed to call \u201cthe class struggle.\u201d Eagleton called upon Williams to come clean in making an open commitment to revolutionary Marxism\u2014\u201cthe richest and most revolutionary heritage\u201d we have, he reminded the audience\u2014and concluded by declaring that the abolition of capitalism and \u201cthe property system\u201d remains a prerequisite to achieving \u201ca new culture.\u201d It was interesting, by the way, that in answer to a question from the audience about the writings of Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, Eagleton refused even to acknowledge the content of the question and instead used the occasion to describe Raymond Williams as \u201cthe last of the Victorian sages\u201d\u2014meaning, of course, that, despite appearances to the contrary and as good as he was, Williams just wasn\u2019t revolutionary enough for him.<\/p>\n

It was something of a relief to leave this discussion and turn to the first of three sessions on \u201cSluts, Slatterns, Soubrettes, and Seductresses,\u201d but alas, Dr. William B. Ober\u2019s lecture on \u201cObstetrics, Gynecology, etc.,\u201d though instructive about medicine, did not really have much to do with the study of literature, and so, after listening for forty minutes or so, we opted for lunch instead.<\/p>\n

In the early afternoon we shifted our attention to the Regency Ballroom at the Sheraton Center where the subject under discussion was \u201cPostmodernism versus Modernism: Different Dialectics for Different Arts:\u201d Most of it was pretty dreary stuff (Susan Rubin Suleiman of Harvard University spoke, for example, about something called \u201cMetatextual Labels and Textual Properties\u201d). But the session proved to be worthwhile, all the same, for the last speaker was the painter and critic Walter Darby Bannard, who gave a brilliant analysis of the postmodern art scene and its relation to the current art market. Yet by introducing the question of \u201cexcellence\u201d in art\u2014his talk was actually called \u201cExcellence and Postexcellence\u201d\u2014Mr. Bannard seemed to leave the audience quite befuddled. Excellence was not a concept they were familiar with\u2014it seemed, as you might say, to lack ontology, and it is doubtful if most of those listening had any idea of what Mr. Bannard was talking about. They were much more comfortable with Professor Suleiman\u2019s \u201cMetatextual Labels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our next stop brought us back to the Hilton, where a ballroom had been reserved for a panel on \u201cBook Reviewing\u2014Pleasures, Problems, Politics,\u201d arranged by the National Book Critics Circle. The panelists were Morris Dickstein of Queens College; Katha Pollitt, literary editor of The Nation<\/em>; and Le Ann Schreiber, an editor on the staff of The New York Times Book Review<\/em>. This was another sparsely attended session; it seemed mainly to attract people who wanted to know how they could break into professional book reviewing. We didn\u2019t stay for the entire session, but we did hear one comment that was illuminating. Joel Conarroe, the moderator, invited the panelists to comment on the distinction between book reviewing and literary scholarship\u2014not an inappropriate question for a session at an MLA<\/span> convention. Or so one would have thought. Yet in Professor Dickstein\u2019s reply\u2014he was the only academic among the panelists, and so the question fell to him\u2014he somehow managed to overlook the fact that scholarly writing was expected to be based on original research. The dread subject of research just never came up. Which, come to think of it, was consistent with every other session of the convention we attended. No doubt it was discussed somewhere<\/em> at the convention, but it kept, as they say, a low profile.<\/p>\n

Much to our regret, we missed the papers given that afternoon by a special delegation of scholars from the Soviet Union. But in the evening we returned for two sessions: one at the Hilton on \u201cNew Approaches to the Canon: Marxism, Deconstructionism, Philosophy,\u201d and the Presidential Address given by Mary Ann Caws at the Sheraton Center. When Professor Caws\u2019s presidential address proved to be all but incomprehensible\u2014a specialist in modern French poetry, she had confected a kind of surrealist fantasy which we could not penetrate\u2014we visited two other sessions at the Sheraton. One was devoted to \u201cSimone de Beauvoir: Her Life, Her Work, Her Influence,\u201d the other to the program on \u201cLiterature and Revolution in Central America.\u201d At the de Beauvoir session, we heard a young woman passionately denounce one of the translators of de Beauvoir\u2019s work\u2014somehow we assumed the translator must have been a man\u2014for misrepresenting her feminist views, yet the speaker herself could not correctly pronounce even the most elementary French words. No one seemed to find this funny.<\/p>\n

At the session on \u201cNew Approaches to the Canon,\u201d the most interesting speaker was the same Michael Ryan we had heard in the morning. Professor Ryan was having a busy day at the literary barricades, and on this occasion it was Joseph Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em> that he had isolated for what he called \u201cpolitical criticism.\u201d In this paper there were dark references to \u201cthe corporatist model of nature,\u201d as well as to racism, sexism, and colonialism. Mention was also made of \u201cthe privileging of the phallus.\u201d (A great many MLA<\/span> panelists, by the way, have now taken to using the word \u201cprivilege\u201d as a verb.) But what really seemed to be on Professor Ryan\u2019s mind was, once again, the movies. When he turned to the film Apocalypse Now<\/em> and began to speak of President Reagan\u2019s views on the Vietnam War, we left. Perhaps it should be noted that Professor Ryan opened his talk by dedicating it to the memory of his mentor, the late Paul de Man of Yale University.<\/p>\n

O<\/span>n Thursday, the twenty-ninth, we were up bright and early for our first session of the new day: \u201cIs There a Contemporary Art-Politics Avant-Garde? Theoretical and Practical Perspectives.\u201d Although booked into a small room at the Hilton and attracting only a handful of people, this turned out to be an important meeting for it gave us a crucial clue to what might be called the sub-text of virtually all the sessions we attended. It was in the course of Philip E. Bishop\u2019s talk on \u201cKristeva and B\u00fcrger: Emancipatory Models for the Avant-Garde\u201d that we heard the avant-garde spoken of \u201cas a perpetual struggle for emancipation,\u201d and the light began to dawn. Then the next speaker\u2014Russell A. Berman of Harvard University, speaking on \u201cDenouncing the Avant-Garde: Neoconservatism and Post-modernism\u201d\u2014linked what he called \u201cthe project of political progress\u201d to \u201cthe project of emancipated subjectivity.\u201d Professor Berman did not seem to know much about neoconservatism\u2014it was our impression that he had read Peter Steinfels\u2019s book, The Neoconservatives<\/em>, and little else\u2014but he was certainly right in suggesting that neoconservatives tend to be opposed to projects of \u201cemancipated subjectivity.\u201d And it was this that many of the speakers at the MLA<\/span> were really talking about: emancipated subjectivity<\/em>. Once grasped, it made everything else wonderfully clear. In preparation for the next session of the morning, we had been re-reading Trilling\u2019s essay \u201cThe Fate of Pleasure,\u201d and one particularly sharp sentence in it now reverberated in our consciousness with a new meaning. \u201cOur high culture,\u201d Trilling wrote, \u201cinvites us to transfer our energies from the bourgeois competition to the spiritual competition.\u201d What else was this \u201cproject of emancipated subjectivity\u201d but this misplaced \u201cspiritual competition\u201d in a new and more virulent guise? And what a fierce competition it was!<\/p>\n

Armed with this newly acquired insight, we marched off to the major event of the morning\u2014the symposium on \u201cThe Fate of Pleasure\u201d in the Grand Ballroom. Foolishly (as it turned out), we had come in the expectation that the participants would be discussing Trilling\u2019s essay, one of the most interesting of his later writings. But this was not in fact the case. Far from it. True, the presiding officer of the proceedings\u2014Kathleen Woodward of the University of Wisconsin\u2014acknowledged that the tide of the symposium was drawn from Trilling\u2019s essay. But she quickly assigned other meanings to the title, and before we quite knew what was happening, there she was talking about the fate not of pleasure but of Roland Barthes\u2019s The Pleasure of the Text<\/em>. Which, to say the least, is something else.<\/p>\n

Leo Bersani, the next speaker, also made short shrift of the Trilling essay, which he dismissed as \u201ctypical of the New York critical essay.\u201d Lionel Trilling interested Professor Bersani a good deal less than Freud, however, for it was the latter who was regarded as the prime villain. Freud\u2019s theory of sexual pleasure, it seems, was intended, as Professor Bersani put it, \u201cto coerce sexual pleasure into discourse,\u201d and Freud\u2019s whole work was characterized as an \u201cevent in the history of textuality.\u201d For this insight\u2014which we may suppose to be crucial to the project of an emancipated subjectivity\u2014Professor Bersani was warmly applauded. This was what the audience in the Grand Ballroom had come to hear, and it was pleased.<\/p>\n

The next speaker\u2014Christopher Butler of Christ Church College, Oxford\u2014rather let the side down, however. He had more silly things to say about contemporary writing than we had ever before heard from a single speaker, and they weren\u2019t even very original, being derived (more or less) from Susan Sontag\u2019s old notion about an \u201cerotics of art.\u201d They certainly had nothing to do with Lionel Trilling or \u201cThe Fate of Pleasure.\u201d It was a bad show. But the revival atmosphere heated up again with the next speaker\u2014Jane Gallop, one of Michael Ryan\u2019s colleagues at Miami University\u2014who delivered one of those hell-fire feminist sermons of a kind that we suppose must be common nowadays on American campuses. By now Trilling was utterly lost from view, and the project of emancipated subjectivity commanded the stage. We left before the end, anxious to procure a seat at the next session on our agenda\u2014\u201cThe Future of Criticism\u201d\u2014which we suspected would also draw a crowd.<\/p>\n

It did, too. And the first paper on the program\u2014Herbert Lindenberger\u2019s thoughtful comparison of the old modes of literary history with the newer (or emancipated) type of literary history\u2014was well worth hearing. Although we found much to disagree with in Professor Lindenberger\u2019s conclusions\u2014he looked with particular pleasure on what he called \u201cthe social concerns of the new literary history\u201d\u2014his paper was nonetheless a remarkably clear and coherent analysis of the subject he had undertaken to elucidate. This was so rare a phenomenon at the MLA<\/span> convention that we were tempted for a moment to regard the paper as more disinterested than in fact it was.<\/p>\n

Then came Professor Edward Said, who had clearly not prepared anything for the occasion and began winging it. As the final speaker on the program was Jonathan Culler, the author of On Deconstruction<\/em>, and we had already planned to attend the session on \u201cDeconstruction and the Death of God\u201d that very afternoon, we permitted ourselves a small, merciful respite and climbed over the many bodies which packed the aisles to regain in our freedom.<\/p>\n

In the event, however, our heart wasn\u2019t in this session on \u201cThe Ghosts of Theology in Contemporary Literary Theory: Deconstructionism and the Fate of God.\u201d Listening to the first three\u2014or was it four?\u2014speakers, we found our sense of humor and our sense of horror getting the best of us. It was one thing for literary critics to speak nonsense about theology and such matters. But here was a professor of religion from Williams College\u2014Mark Taylor\u2014babbling on about Derrida as if he were a combination of Augustine and Aquinas. Suddenly, listening to Professor Taylor, we understood what the title of this session really meant: God was indeed dead, and maybe literature was too, and for Professor Taylor and his fellow panelists Derrida had taken their place. It was an appropriate moment at which to bring our attendance at these dismal sessions to a close.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>here remained only one last duty to perform. We had been invited to one of the grand parties given\u2014was it every evening?\u2014by the MLA<\/span> executive director, English Showaiter, in his vast penthouse suite at the Hilton, and it was to this event that we went forth late on Thursday evening, seeking both information and refreshment. The information was easily enough acquired: attendance at this year\u2019s MLA<\/span> convention was something in the vicinity of nine to ten thousand\u2014approximately one-third of the association membership. For that reason, if for no other, the Centennial convention would long be remembered as a banner year for the MLA<\/span>. It was only then that we began to appreciate an observation that had been made by John H. Fisher at the Centennial Forum on the opening evening of the convention. Until 1948, he said, the MLA<\/span> was a learned society. Since then it had been\u2014is it permitted to say merely<\/em>?\u2014a professional society. And how professional they are did look in the penthouse suite at the Hilton that evening!<\/p>\n

Then, just as we were musing on these matters, we caught sight of something which put the whole thing\u2014the whole protracted project of emancipated subjectivity and its relation to the \u201cemancipated\u201d MLA<\/span> of the Eighties\u2014into place. For there, holding court on a couch in the center of the penthouse\u2019s main salon, was the poet Allen Ginsberg, neatly attired in a tweed jacket and silk tie and volubly entertaining the professoriat with dark prophecies about the Reagan administration. What a perfect denouement to this MLA<\/span> Centennial convention! The poet-prince of more than one generation of r\u00e9volt\u00e9s<\/em>, veteran of how many projects of emancipated subjectivity now institutionalized in the college curriculum, resplendently poised as celebrity and guru at the seat of academic power! It was an image that we would not soon forget.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n
  1. <\/a>See The American Scholar<\/em> for Winter 1983\/84. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font> <\/li>\n
  2. <\/a>See \u201cDestroying Literary Studies\u201d in the December 1983 issue. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font><\/li>\n
  3. <\/a>Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation<\/em> by Michael Ryan. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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