Eggheads' Naughty Word Games

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
December 27, 2004
Eggheads' Naughty Word Games
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/books/27paper.html


		
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