{"id":281386,"date":"2011-01-06T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/01\/06\/welcome-to-the-wonderful-world-of-the-mla\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:28:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:28:21","slug":"welcome-to-the-wonderful-world-of-the-mla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/01\/06\/welcome-to-the-wonderful-world-of-the-mla\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Wonderful World of the MLA"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year’s MLA<\/span> convention starts tomorrow, and for once, Open Letter will be exhibiting. (We’re sharing a booth with Counterpath. Number 237 in case you’re going to be there.)<\/p>\n

MLA<\/span> isn’t necessarily the most uplifting of conventions, although as with anything else that’s social, I love the opportunity to meet and talk with people, convince them to teach our books, etc. and etc. And if anything interesting happens, I’ll try and blog about it. (Unlike last year, this time our Ä¢¹½´«Ã½\/Open Letter party won’t get busted by the hotel security. Yeah, we’re rock stars like that.) <\/p>\n

Anyway, as I’ve done in the past, I feel compelled to post about this awesome piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus that he wrote for The Believer<\/em><\/a> back in the day. It’s still relevant, and still effing hilarious. And gives anyone who hasn’t been to MLA<\/span> (which mostly consists of a herd of very nervous grad students interviewing for a scarcity of jobs), a sense of what it’s like. <\/p>\n

Enjoy!<\/p>\n

\n

Mary Pratt, the current president of the MLA<\/span>, introduces the panel: Masao Miyoshi of U.C. San Diego, Ferial Ghazoul of the American University of Cairo, and Gayatri Spivak of Columbia University; the latter, whom Pratt calls \u201cour most conspicuous traveling theorist,\u201d is a guru of what\u2019s called \u201cpostcolonial theory\u201d and current academic megastar and the only one I\u2019ve heard of, although apparently\u2014according to Charlie\u2014all three panelists pack some serious scholarly credentials.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Miyoshi stands up to speak first, and from a distance it looks like he\u2019s actually sporting elbow patches. He hadn\u2019t been sure until that morning, he announces, where exactly he would be speaking, whom he would be addressing, or what he was supposed to be talking about, so please forgive him. He looks a little befuddled but also sure of himself, like a celebrity who has forgotten which clip he brought to show the audience on Letterman.<\/em> With that caveat and apology, what follows is 95 percent unintelligible. What I get out of it is this: The university is veering toward a business style of management. Funds are being redirected away from the humanities and toward the applied sciences. There\u2019s an increasingly corporate-tinged emphasis on the production of useful knowledge\u2014physics, biochemistry\u2014which leads us to ask this question: is humanistic study becoming \u201cirrelevant, inconsequential, or just incomprehensible?\u201d These pockets of sense-making sentences, however, are occluded deep within a whole lot of non-sense-making about the relation between the humanities and something called \u201cenvironmental biojustice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I just can\u2019t concentrate on the substance of his talk, however, because something about his delivery seems off-kilter; I decide it\u2019s just me. After a few minutes, Charlie elbows me and whispers, \u201cI think that his lips are out of sync with his words.\u201d I laugh. Then I realize it\u2019s true: his mouth is actually making the wrong shapes, as though he\u2019s starring in a poorly dubbed kung fu movie. Charlie and I look at each other, struck dumb. Then, to add to the blazing surreality of the moment, Miyoshi refers to the twentieth century\u2019s three<\/em> world wars. \u201cDid he just say three world wars?\u201d Charlie asks. \u201cYes,\u201d I say. Charlie is sweating. He really likes his job and his profession\u2014in a heartrendingly noble and admirable way\u2014and here, at event number one, is his profession at its most cartoonish. I really like Charlie and I have already noticed that most journalists are unnecessarily unkind to academics, so I start sweating, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Finally, Charlie\u2019s face flushes and he turns to me. \u201c_There\u2019s a mike delay!_\u201d he blurts out, maybe a little too loudly. It\u2019s just a mike delay, and both of us are embarrassed that we thought it was something more uncanny or sinister. With that crisis of confidence safely behind us, we return to the largely fruitless attempt to parse Miyoshi\u2019s sentences. Then, midthought, Miyoshi abandons a clause, thanks the audience, and takes his seat. Charlie apologizes for him. \u201cI saw him speak on post-1945 Japanese art once, and he was brilliant. I think he was just a little flustered. He must have written that on the plane here this morning.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure he teaches in San Diego,\u201d I say, looking at the program. Charlie looks crestfallen, like he just watched his dad strike out at the family-reunion softball game. This opening experience has done nothing but confirm practically every negative stereotype about the MLA<\/span>. I can see he\u2019s trying to decide whether there\u2019s a way to save face. He decides to admit that there isn\u2019t. \u201cWell, I guess you can safely ridicule _that._\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If Miyoshi nailed the English-prof-as-space-cadet caricature, the next speaker, Ferial Ghazoul, comes across as the stuffy, supercilious poseur. She speaks as though she has cultivated a robust head cold; exquisitely calibrated sinus pressure steamrolls her vowels, so she holds the middle syllable of \u201cuniversity\u201d for a full two seconds. Her words sound extruded rather than spoken. She gives a fairly standard \u201ctasks of the university\u201d talk: to aid critical reflection, to add to global knowledge, to promote multicultural awareness and cross-pollination, and to be a \u201claboratory exploring the self and the Other in a humanist framework.\u201d Humanities professors should help \u201coppose imperialist hegemony\u201d with a \u201cdynamic strategy of bringing subalterns into alliance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Then, after twenty minutes of talk about what a university is for, she comes to a melodramatic crescendo. There\u2019s a very long pause. She looks out at the thinning crowd and says, \u201cWhat we do not ask ourselves is: what for is a university?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

What for is a university? Aside from the fact that she has just asked that question literally two minutes before in the normal put-the-damn-preposition-at-the-end sort of way, what floors me is that this question and its chief syntactic variant\u2014what is a university for?\u2014are asked at the conference with astonishing frequency. If the MLA<\/span> conference organizers made sloganed T-shirts, the front would read: \u201cMLA Convention, San Diego: \u2018What for are we in 2003?\u2019\u201d And the back: \u201cWhat are we for in 2004?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

And this is the weird thing: they don\u2019t even mean \u201cwhat for is a university<\/em>?\u201d\u2014they mean \u201cwhat for are English professors<\/em>?\u201d There are tons of answers to the first question: to teach students, to examine political configurations and economic policies, to study earthquakes and tsunamis, and of course to help build fighter jets or antigravity rooms or more muscular bionic arms. But what are English professors for? They teach, of course, but they don\u2019t help out with economic policy, they have little to say about natural disasters, and they can\u2019t build futuristic prostheses. And the better the applied sciences get at answering these lurking purpose-questions\u2014\u201cHey, check out this new laser-equipped invisibility frock we just made in the lab\u201d\u2014the more their colleagues over in the English building seem like starry-eyed, impractical romantics, or, less charitably, anachronistic buffoons. Despite her clotted jargon and fustian grammar, Ghazoul is making a serious point: more and more people are wondering what the hell English professors are doing and why they should be allowed to keep doing it, and they need to reformulate their answers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hells yeah. <\/p>\n

Whole article available here.<\/a> Thanks, Gideon. Thanks, Believer.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year’s MLA convention starts tomorrow, and for once, Open Letter will be exhibiting. (We’re sharing a booth with Counterpath. Number 237 in case you’re going to be there.) MLA isn’t necessarily the most uplifting of conventions, although as with anything else that’s social, I love the opportunity to meet and talk with people, convince […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[3166,20216,6156],"class_list":["post-281386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-believer","tag-gideon-lewis-kraus","tag-mla"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346356,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281386\/revisions\/346356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}