In which Matthew is a tourist

In what follows, fifth-year graduate student Matthew [so much for relative anonymity, see the comments section on this entry: oh, Internet] reflects on his experience "visiting" the Modern Language Association convention that recently took place in San Francisco. This is a somewhat extended version of Matthew’s less colorful (read: edited) account which can be found on his English Department's blog.

***

MLA members are the custodians of language, and language is at the heart of virtually all disciplines (at least the humanistic ones).
– Rosemary Feal, MLA Executive Director

The thirty thousand scholars of language and literature who form the Modern Language Association convene annually in late December. In a different city every year, we critique each other's research, we compare notes on teaching, we evaluate the current state of humanities education, and we perform the secret Illuminati rituals that determine how writers must properly cite A Publication on CD-ROM, Diskette, or Magnetic Tape (5.9.5). And we hold the preliminary interviews for the majority of academic jobs available in the humanities. Or we attend them.

Graduate students' futures are set in motion at this conference. Which is why, well before entering the job market as interviewees, some Cal graduate students attended this year's San Francisco MLA as tourists: to adjust ahead of time to the gravitational pull of a conference so massive. To see and not be seen, and to learn tips and tricks about the profession. (My space is limited here, so I'll present some abridged reflections on Sunday December 28, the second day of the conference).

I've attended the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress a couple of times, so I thought I knew what to expect from a large, interdisciplinary conference: an overload of ultraspecialized sessions, some deeply gratifying, but many in which my fellow murmuring graduate medievalists report on their dissertation progress and strive to be just barely more interesting, or louder, than the pattern on the carpet (kidding, guys, kidding).

But MLA is exponentially bigger in attendance and in import. The carpet pattern at the Hilton, as intense as it was (seriously), was no competition for the sessions I saw. In "Public Shakespeares," after Bryn Mawr's Katherine A. Rowe deftly analyzed three virtual Globe theaters on Second Life (one with a paid "acting company"), Harvard's Marjorie Garber presented her talk on "Shakespeare's Brand." With clever insights on branding in Sonnet 111 and in twenty-first-century advertising, Garber argued that American education in Shakespeare, which had once been representative of broad literacy, now threatens to overshadow and replace broad literacy. The National Endowment for the Arts, according to Garber, supports Shakespeare programs to the exclusion of other literature; its new Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, whose logo features the Bard's bust before a rippling American flag, appeared immediately after the White House cut back much of its funding for contemporary American poets, many of whom were protesting war efforts. (Politics nibbles at the edges of MLA, causing a productive unease that I, used to the isolation of medievalism, had not yet experienced. Some protestors at a separate event near the Hilton leaked into our lobby and marched silently, slowly, holding signs that asked what we, custodians of language and the humanities, are doing to prevent inhumanity).

"Liturgy, Literacy, and the Literary: Katherine Zieman's Singing the New Song" came next for me. Well-respected medievalists gathered at this session to present responses to Cal English alum Zieman's 2008 debut book. Andrew Galloway (another Cal English alum) discussed, via Zieman, the importance of "unanalyzable utterances" in understanding the words of the medieval liturgy, and cautioned literary scholars that too much attention to the meaning of words can eclipse the use of words. Then our own Steven Justice, shrugging off his narrower pre-planned topic, embarked on a relentless and at times unforgiving evaluation of Zieman's arguments, including examples of "unnecessary scaffolding" in her language which, when removed, would truly reveal the groundbreaking impact of the book. After the session, Zieman stood up, and was given only ten minutes (!) to respond to the respondents: extempore, Zieman summoned up a poised and very effective countercounterpoint. Go Bears indeed. The direct, aggressive (though never disrespectful) debate was representative of the kind of "big league" mentality that I loved about MLA.

I followed Zieman to "After Chaucer: A Roundtable," where she and five other medievalists discussed educators' overemphasis on Chaucer -- similar to Garber's Shakespearean complaint -- and how it has frustrated the study of less brand-recognizable literature from the period. Minot State University's Michelle M. Sauer called it the "Chaucer Conspiracy," citing countless examples of MLA job listings in the last ten years that have made it very difficult for any non-Chaucerian medievalist on the market to get hired.

At MLA, job anxiety weighed heavily on the sessions, the talkbacks, the informal conversations, straight through to Executive Director Rosemary Feal's convention blog: "Between the decline of available positions this year and the erosion of full-time tenure-track positions in the academic workforce overall, we are facing a situation that demands our advocacy and action." The California Report on NPR has done a feature on the subject.

After "After Chaucer" I considered, despairingly perusing the MLA publishers' fair, how I might strongarm old Geoffrey's brand name into my dissertation on sixteenth-century biblical drama. In one of the booths, I ran into a fellow tourist. We compared observations about the on-the-market grads we'd seen. We'd greeted and wished good luck to friends of ours; nearly all were visibly shaken, and many had looked us directly in the face with no recognition. One grad had passed me repeatedly on the street: he was not attending sessions, only walking around and around the nearby blocks. "I'm pacing," he said, and then, "I need this. I really need this." My fellow tourist and I parted in search of booze and comfort, off to the Cash Bar gatherings most appropriate to our fields of study. At the Old English Cash Bar, the fabulous Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe assured me that a Ph.D. from Cal, even in this market, was a powerful thing. And that helped.

But after the Cash Bar I was still sober in all senses of the word as I shuffled into "Publish and Flourish: A Roundtable on Academic Publishing for Graduate Students," hosted by the MLA Graduate Student Caucus. The Caucus had invited six professors to advise nervous grads like myself, I thought, on when and how to publish, and how it would affect our job searches.

And the Caucus leader seemed as surprised as I was when Stanford's Franco Moretti immediately attacked graduate-level publication in general, not only as an unacceptable distraction from dissertation work, but as symptomatic of our recent fall from a sense of "professionalism" still current only decades ago, when it was a "profoundly serious, deep, even religious commitment to a subject." We now focus on small publications and other "external signs" of professionalism, Moretti lamented, because the profession itself has "lost its fire. It's boring. It's not about the ideas anymore." Cal's Charles Altieri objected to Moretti's full prohibition of grad publication, but also rejected the implicit premise of the session, that any scholar (grad or not) should see academic discourse as a means of résumé-padding: "You submit [your article] when you have something to say. That's the time when you should try to publish something... Once you believe in it." And he offered some advice on how best to do it when the time comes, but paused to remark that the session, and sessions like it, tend to "create, rather than allay, anxiety," creating an illusion of standardized, general rules for a profession that should focus on the insight of individuals.

In other words, in response to the Caucus's questions about publishing and the job search, the roundtable rightly chastised them (us) for even asking. Where are our scholarly ethics, when our job anxiety drives us to publish only with the intent of "getting published," when we reduce our work to one more strategic marketing move? The speakers after Moretti and Altieri had similarly direct approaches, particularly CUNY's Ashley Dawson, who encouraged graduate students to organize to demand better support, and Williams's candid Christian Thorne, who appeared to be on the verge of tears as he begged aspiring graduate students to respect our profession and to stop clogging academic journals with hurried attempts at career-building when, as he put it, "ninety-five percent" of the academic writing out there is already "bad."

I'd heard an MLA anecdote between sessions that day, and after "Publish and Flourish" I looked back on it as an accidental parable. A very accomplished (but here nameless) professor, whose contributions to academic discourse most certainly qualify for exception from Thorne's "ninety-five percent," sat down with me in the lobby, and told me about his own experience at MLA as a graduate student. If my math is right, the story takes place before Feal's "decades-long decrease in the percentage of jobs on the tenure track in the academic workforce in general," a period roughly coterminous, I now realize, with the dimming of the profession's "fire," at least according to Moretti.

The anecdote: some long-past MLA had thrown this nameless professor into a state of shock too, and I imagine the Cash Bars didn't help, because at the interview for his "dream job," he found himself hopelessly hungover. He had been advised: "Remember, if someone asks you a question you're unprepared for, don't be afraid to take the time to pause and think." And an aggressive interviewer did ask a tough question, so he paused to think. "But the only thought that came to mind," the professor told me, "was, hey, the pattern on that carpet is really interesting..."

When the interviewer repeated the question moments later, he realized he'd fallen asleep. He did not get the job.

But the MLA lesson here (other than "don't go drinking the night before your interview" or "MLA carpet patterns can be hypnotic") is the professorial career that followed the anecdote: it was not built on anxious, generalized rules, or on conspiracy theories, but only on a solid corpus of solid work. His anecdote was a human story of a human mistake, and it reminds me that in order to study the humanities you have to be human: not a functional set of what Moretti calls "external" signs. Only humans, with room for failure and not paralyzed by fear, can maintain the kind of productive, active debate like the professors of the Zieman session did. I do not wish to belittle job panic, only to draw attention to the negative effects that it can have on the work we do, by skewing our attitudes about our work. We cannot address the situation with CV-padding and small fixes, but only by, as Feal put it, direct "advocacy and action" (if you're looking for a place to start, click here). But in the meantime, for me, the time for tips and tricks and tourism is over: it is time to get to work, and if I get my dream job in the process, all the better.